• Eunmi Mun Assistant Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on non-merit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on data from a single organization or industry, most previous studies suffer from limited generalizability and cannot properly account for the large variation in the implementation of merit-based reward systems across organizations, let alone identify the origins of the variation. We attempt to overcome the limitations by constructing large-scale linked employer-employee

Eunmi Mun is an assistant professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research investigates organizational responses to social demands for gender equality and the effectiveness of organizational practices to address gender equality. She has published papers on corporate responses to the Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law, the impact of corporate social responsibility on gender diversity in Japanese firms, and parental leave policies in Japan. She is currently working on a comparative project to document firm-level gender inequality profiles across countries.