Meritocracy and Gender in Education Discourse: Language Matters

This paper is an attempt to provide an answer to the question: to what extend the word "meritocracy" is justified and correct for all modern societies especially post-Soviet countries. The focus of our attention is on the meritocracy in education discourse in the post-Soviet space namely in Ukraine, which some scholars view as a phantom and others as objective reality. Russian and Ukrainian research works on elite and meritocracy as academic issues are deficient regarding quantitative and, what is more important, qualitative indicators of the total historiography of post-Soviet space on the whole. Regarding methodological approach Kim German (2010) claims that they are divided into two camps rooted in the classical sociology: meritocratic (normative-value) and authoritative (status-functional). Over the last decades in post Soviet Union studies, there appeared a number of areas which investigate the formation and functioning of political, regional, entrepreneurial, academic and cultural sub-meritocratic elites. The goal is to contribute to a better understanding of merit-based education systems and gender disparities at universities.