Champion Voices is our new thought leadership series bringing the personal experiences and reflections of our Champions to the forefront. Every two weeks, we will hear from a different Champion through a short article exploring a topic that matters to them. From what first sparked their interest to the lessons learned along the way, we will move beyond the policy papers to shine a light on the authentic experiences, challenges, and motivations that shape their work. In this third edition, Aniela Unguresan, Founder of the EDGE Certified Foundation, explores why true meritocracy requires fairness, and fairness requires equal opportunity, sharing what it takes to build workplaces where talent can genuinely thrive.
In my early days as founder of the EDGE Certified Foundation, I was told more than once that fairness was about values, performance was about numbers, and the two did not really intersect. I did not believe it then. Seventeen years and more than 1,000 EDGE Certifications later, I believe it even less.
In recent years, however, this perceived tension between values and performance has gained ground. The idea that efforts to advance gender balance, fairness and inclusion undermine meritocratic principles is increasingly present in public and organizational debate. My position is clear: a workplace that claims to reward merit while distributing opportunity unevenly is not practising meritocracy. It is perpetuating habitual patterns in how talent is defined, where organizations look for it, how it is rewarded, and which working environments allow it to thrive.
Put simply, there can be no meritocracy without fairness, and no fairness without equal opportunity.
Gender balance, diversity, fairness and inclusion in the workplace sit at the intersection of business and society. Investment in these areas contributes to shared prosperity. From an economic perspective, gender-balanced, fair and inclusive organizations are more agile, more resilient and better equipped for sustainable success. From a societal perspective, the goal is to ensure that people are equally valued and respected for the different contributions they can make.
Progress, however, requires long-term commitment, rigour and discipline. It also requires us to recognize a fundamental reality: in a world whose population is broadly gender-balanced, talent, ambition and the potential to make a positive impact are widely distributed, but opportunity is not.
That long-term commitment is easier to sustain when organizations focus on tangible and measurable drivers of workplace fairness. Through our work with EDGE Certification, we have learned that people are more likely to feel valued and included when they have meaningful opportunities to grow, receive transparent feedback that helps them improve, and are paid equally for equivalent work.
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is making this task more complex. AI is reshaping how talent is recruited, assessed, rewarded and developed, while many workplaces still struggle to value both the wisdom accumulated through decades of experience and the potential and enthusiasm of those entering the workforce for the first time. Workplace diversity must now account not only for employees' identities, professional backgrounds and lived experiences, but also for the growing interaction between people, AI agents, automated systems and robotics.
Like many in the International Gender Champions community, I am watching the rapid adoption of algorithmic and AI-enabled decision-making with both enthusiasm and concern. Used responsibly, these tools can help reveal inequities, broaden access to opportunity and support more consistent decisions. But without robust regulation and governance, they will not automatically correct structural bias. They can encode and reproduce it at scale, making existing inequalities harder to detect and more difficult to remedy.
This is why the focus of the work we do with EDGE Certification is expanding to the development of robust standards for governing AI, algorithmic and automated decision-making systems in employment and talent management, grounded in the principles of workplace fairness and equality.
At the United Nations General Assembly in 2025, Nataša Pirc Musar, President of Slovenia, reminded world leaders that the barrier has never been a shortage of capable women, but a failure to open the doors through which talent can advance.
That is the work before us: to open those doors deliberately, to ensure that technology does not close them again, and to build institutions in which talent can be recognized, developed and rewarded wherever it is found. This is how fairness makes meritocracy possible, and how meritocracy strengthens our organizations and the societies they serve.