Preconceito, meritocracia e crenças legitimadoras entre profissionais de tecnologia da informação: estudo experimental sobre raça e origem regional

Abstract

The Information Technology scenario has been increasingly lacking in qualified professionals, while the demand for these professionals is growing, supply is decreasing. This year, the Brazilian deficit will be 161 thousand IT professionals. When it comes to new technologies, 94% of Brazilian companies report needing additional senior and strategic people. In addition, manage IT staff is not an easy task: these professionals are willing to step out of their comfort zone. The lack of these professionals comes from a series of factors, among them the brain drain, which is when the most specialized professionals leave the country in search of better opportunities. All this and more the wisdom that the IT field is supposed to meritocratic in a broadly prejudiced society, our work sought to detect, by means of a real field scientific experiment, how, in fact, the IT area is meritocratic. After consulting 208 IT professionals from the Southeast and Northeast regions of Brazil, through a questionnaire that consisted of questions that assessed a video with people of different regional origins and varied races, with and without the influence of legitimating status beliefs, in some cases racial prejudice was noted, especially when the black people comes from peolple of another state. People from the richest state always tend to better evaluate their countrymen, perhaps not out of prejudice, but because of Social Identity, which makes us better evaluate the members of our own group. However, evaluators from the Northeast, a poor region, do not always better evaluate their countrymen. Status-legitimating beliefs did not cause significant difference in assessments.