“Network, network, network” is the advice given to many job-seekers and for good reason. It is thought, for example, that over 60% of jobs are never advertised and instead exist within what is euphemistically referred to as the “hidden labor market.” Additionally, many sociologists have observed the crucial role that social ties play in the procurement of work, with some estimating that over half of all jobs within the U.S. are acquired through one’s relatives and friends. On reflection, many individuals will recognize that many of their own economic opportunities have stemmed from the social networks that they are placed within, and perhaps just as many of us have been blocked from progression, at one time or another, due to a lack of social connection, informal sponsorship, and the kind of social capital that can be converted into meaningful employment, income, and wealth.
One notable and frequently contested mechanism through which the opportunities tethered to one’s social network can be converted is nepotism. As I have argued elsewhere, when individuals engage in nepotism, they are best understood as engaging in a practice that involves distributing jobs or educational places to people within their social network where these social ties positively influence the decision in question. Although philosophical discourse has largely overlooked the problem of nepotism, the most persuasive objections to it, in my view, focus on the unfairness of such practices, whether they corrupt particular institutions or whether they undermine economic efficiency. In this piece, however, I wish to draw attention to a particular effect that nepotistic practices have: namely, the way that they are likely to reinforce broader patterns of inequality between socially salient groups. This is to say that, where inequalities exist between individuals on the basis of their gender, race, religion, class, or sexual orientation, nepotism risks sustaining and exacerbating these inequalities.
To see why, consider how social networks themselves are formed and exactly who is likely to inhabit them. Sociologists have long observed that people tend to form friendships, professional relationships, and communities with people who are socially similar to themselves. Indeed, educational background, class, race, religion, geography, gender, and sexual orientation all exert a powerful influence over the kinds of social networks we inhabit. This tendency is often referred to as homophily and is aptly captured by the metaphor, “birds of a feather flock together.” Once we combine this fact about social networks with nepotistic forms of opportunity allocation, a deeper problem emerges. If valuable opportunities are frequently distributed on the basis of social connection, and these connections are themselves shaped by socially salient patterns of association, then nepotism risks exacerbating inequality between these groups over time. Advantages do not merely accumulate for particular individuals but compound at the intersection of their social network, race, gender, class, and so on.
The point here is not simply that privileged families help their privileged relatives. It is that nepotistic forms of selection may transform existing social inequalities into self-reinforcing mechanisms of exclusion. Where nepotism is prevalent, access to advantageous positions increasingly depends upon entry into narrow and often socially homogeneous networks. As a result, those excluded from such networks may find themselves locked out of opportunities long before any formal competition even begins. Even where a nepotistically selected candidate is reasonably competent, or where no obvious procedural rule has been violated, the broader consequences of converting network advantage into socioeconomic opportunity may still be objectionable. The cumulative effect of such practices exacerbates the relationship between one’s social background and life prospects in ways that undermine both the fair distribution of opportunities and individuals’ standing as equals within the groups to which they belong.
A useful framework for making this more precise draws on the philosopher Joseph Fishkin’s notion of a “bottleneck”: those critical junctures in educational and professional life through which individuals must pass to access a wide range of advantageous positions. The problem with bottlenecks is that they concentrate opportunity and amplify the effects of prior inequality. When a single narrow gate determines access to a broad range of goods, those who arrive at that gate already advantaged are disproportionately likely to pass through it. But Fishkin’s framework can be extended beyond the assessment of formal educational and occupational gates to the informal social structures through which access to those gates is mediated.
Nepotism, on this view, both exploits and intensifies what I call social bottlenecks: those narrow and exclusionary networks that individuals must enter if they are to attain certain positions. Because individuals tend to form close relationships with others of similar educational, class, ethnic, religious, and gender backgrounds, these networks often reproduce existing hierarchies and offer few entry points for outsiders. As such, nepotism does not merely compound advantage over time for specific individuals but deepens inequality between socially salient groups by sustaining patterns of informal exclusion that operate largely beneath the surface of public scrutiny. Unlike a university admissions policy or a formal hiring criterion, no one announces their intention to favor those within their network. The exclusion simply happens, quietly and consistently, as a structural by-product of practices that are often experienced by those who engage in them as natural—or even virtuous—expressions of loyalty and care.
It is worth pausing here to forestall a potential misunderstanding. Given much of what I have said, one might be tempted to describe the phenomena identified as a form of indirect discrimination: that given homophilic social tendencies, nepotism is objectionable in the same way that a height requirement might be when it disproportionately excludes women from certain roles. But describing nepotism as a kind of wrongful discrimination would, in my view, be a mistake. In paradigmatic cases of indirect discrimination, a seemingly neutral criterion is applied uniformly and is later shown to disproportionately burden members of a protected group. Nepotism, by contrast, privileges particular relationships, and any group-level disparity is a derivative of background network structures as opposed to being constitutive of the selection criterion itself. The objection to nepotism in homophilic social settings marked by background inequality is not, strictly speaking, that it discriminates in a way that should trigger antidiscrimination laws or norms. It is that it structurally entrenches inequality in a way that is typically invisible, rarely challenged, and frequently overlooked in our public conversations about fairness.
How, then, should we respond? The diagnosis points in at least three directions, each with real merits and real difficulties.
The first response considers whether individuals ought to be held accountable for participating in such practices. Here, there is an important distinction to draw between individual and institutional duties of justice. In societies such as our own, we may find it compelling that justice requires certain conduct of individuals (in this case, not to engage in objectionable nepotism) but nevertheless reject the view that it would be okay for the state to coercively prohibit nepotism irrespective of the institution in which it occurs. In essence, legal coercion is not always the right response. A morally unjustifiable exercise of liberty does not automatically justify a coercive response to it, and there are good reasons to be cautious about extending legal prohibition into domains where enforcement would require intrusive monitoring of hiring decisions and personal relationships.
But the absence of a legal remedy does not entail the absence of a moral one. When done correctly, moral criticism can engage individuals as the authors of their practices, presenting reasons they are called upon to recognize and act on, rather than simply imposing costs designed to compel compliance and which may compromise the abilities of individuals to author the associative or occupational dimensions of their lives. To criticize someone for engaging in nepotism that predictably deepens structural exclusion need not amount to demanding that they sacrifice their relationships or loyalties entirely. The demand here is that those engaging in nepotism take seriously the comparable interests of those their choices affect and revise their practices accordingly where reasonable alternatives exist.
The second direction concerns how we talk about networking itself. The near-universal advice to “network” treats the conversion of social ties into professional opportunity not only as acceptable but as a kind of social intelligence and economic savvy. Yet, if the argument above is right, then encouraging people to maximize the professional returns on socially homogeneous networks is, in contexts already shaped by inequality, to encourage the perpetuation of structural injustice by other means. Part of what an egalitarian response to this problem would require is a shift in the norms and expectations through which individuals deliberate about selection or social inclusion and justify their choices to others. This is not merely a matter of persuading individuals that nepotism is morally concerning—many already sense that something is amiss. It is more fundamentally a matter of changing what people take others to expect and endorse. Why, after all, would some be motivated to refrain from participating in such practices and put themselves at a relative disadvantage to those who benefit from and endorse the leveraging of social ties? Social norms are often embedded in taken-for-granted scripts that can make recourse to one’s network feel like the natural or default mode of selection. Dislodging that assumption requires deliberation, publicity, and the gradual revision of justificatory habits. This might happen, for instance, through professional bodies publicly discussing the ethics of nepotism, media campaigns, greater procedural transparency, or (perhaps less plausibly) economic incentives. Since such a response requires shifting individuals’ normative and empirical expectations through norm change, we must, however, still be wary of more coercive kinds of social pressure that would produce the ills associated with formal prohibition.
A third response involves structural reform: creating opportunities for cross-group association in schools, universities, workplaces, and civic institutions so as to disrupt the homophilic patterns that make nepotism so consequential. This is, in principle, the most systemic response and could involve mentorship schemes that pair people across social divides, the creation of public events or spaces that aim at associative integration, or certain varieties of affirmative action. But it also warrants some honest skepticism. Simply creating integrative spaces does not guarantee that meaningful social ties will be formed at all, let alone ones that carry the same professional weight as those within long-established, socially homogeneous networks. Integration may reduce the segregation that makes nepotism exclusionary in the aggregate, but it does not by itself alter the underlying tendency to favor those who are socially proximate. That said, structural reform of this kind is a long-term project whose success is likely contingent on whether individuals internalize the relevant dispositions and norms.
What none of these approaches fully dissolves is the deeper tension at the heart of the problem. Unlike racist or sexist hiring, nepotism is not always impermissible, even if it should give us some reason for pause. In small family businesses or collaborative ventures, the same basic practice—channeling opportunities towards those within one’s social network—can reflect something morally legitimate about how we relate to people we care about and the projects we wish to coauthor with them. The specific problem that I draw attention to here is not relational favoritism as such but what happens when it is practiced at scale, in contexts shaped by homophily and existing inequality, where the cumulative effect is to reproduce social stratification through the ordinary, unremarkable exercise of kinship, loyalty, and affection. The ethical stakes here are considerably higher than the philosophical literature currently acknowledges. So long as we continue to treat networking as an unqualified virtue and nepotism as a private matter of loyalty or patronage, we risk overlooking one of the more insidious ways in which background injustice perpetuates itself through the favoring of people who happen to be like us.
