2.1. The Nature of Economic Agents’ Epistemic Lives

Liza Herzog observes that “questions about knowledge often need to be considered both from the giving and the receiving end” (Reference Herzog2018: 111). The insight that individuals can be wronged as givers and receivers sets Herzog apart from other scholars discussed so far. She argues that employees can be wronged by “not receiving knowledge that is necessary for them to act … as rational and moral agents capable of taking responsibility for what they do” (Reference Herzog2018: 129, italics in original). This knowledge includes the organisation’s broader purpose and how the employees’ specific roles contribute to achieving that purpose.

While I find much value in Herzog (Reference Herzog2018), I believe that the capacity to receive knowledge in organisational contexts can be unjust in ways that extend beyond her analysis. Furthermore (and I will argue for this below), being wronged as a receiver may impact one’s capacity to provide knowledge.

Let us consider what happens when an individual joins a company. They typically undergo training and onboarding, during which they are primarily recipients of knowledge. Additionally, mentoring sessions (Hunt & Michael, Reference Hunt and Michael1983; Noe, Reference Noe1988; Scandura, Reference Scandura1992), performance appraisals (DeNisi & Murphy, Reference DeNisi and Murphy2017; Hancock, Hioe & Schaninger, Reference Hancock, Hioe and Schaninger2018), and daily back-and-forths with colleagues, managers, suppliers, customers, and government officials illustrate how business professionals frequently alternate between the roles of givers and receivers of knowledge. Our everyday experiences confirm that business interactions can and do take the form of epistemic exchange.

Although this point may seem trivial, it has been largely overlooked in epistemic injustice scholarship within business ethics.Footnote ⁹ To reinforce the significance of this seemingly obvious point, I turn to Erwan Lamy’s (Reference Lamy2023) “sender-recipient model.” It involves individuals who may occupy both sender and recipient roles at any given time. According to this model, a sender produces information “conveying a message containing this information to a recipient” (Reference Lamy2023: 4).Footnote ¹⁰ Management scholars have also emphasised the importance of “knowledge sharing” (tacit and explicit knowledge) and the need for organisations to optimise knowledge search, dissemination, and acquisition practices (Dalkir, Reference Dalkir2023b). Moreover, Dalkir’s review of the empirical evidence finds that “people still first turn[] to people”—not impersonal sources such as company databases, the internet, or knowledge management systems—when seeking information, making decisions, and solving problems (Reference Dalkir2023b: 119–20).

Similarly, while Hayek (Reference Hayek1945) presents a different argument, his work is premised on the idea that knowledge in society is dispersed and exchanged among market participants (typically through the pricing mechanism). Recall the kind of knowledge his “man on the spot” possesses:

Now, let us extend this picture further. How does the real estate agent learn about temporary opportunities? How does the arbitrageur gain knowledge about fluctuations in commodity prices? How do entrepreneurs or employees identify underutilised resources and invent solutions that maximise efficiency without compromising effectiveness? I submit that the “man on the spot” possesses valuable, localised knowledge because he exists within a network of epistemic agents, many of whom share and receive fragments of context-relevant information.

Say I am right that our epistemic lives in organisations and markets involve both giving and receiving knowledge. Then, we must recognise that epistemic injustice can occur in both capacities. Yet, as we have seen, scholarship in business ethics has overwhelmingly focused on speaker-directed epistemic injustice. Thus, given my arguments in Section 1 and Section 2.1, I propose that hearer-directed epistemic injustice—being unjustly wronged in one’s capacity to receive knowledge—deserves focused attention. Due to space constraints, I limit my discussion to one particular form: hearer-directed testimonial injustice. Footnote ¹¹

2.2. Hearer-Directed Testimonial Injustice

In this subsection, I extend Fricker’s (Reference Fricker2007) theory to introduce the concept of hearer-directed testimonial injustice. I then illustrate two manifestations of this injustice: oversimplification and omission. While these are not the only ways hearer-directed testimonial injustice may occur, they serve as preliminary examples to illustrate how it operates.Footnote ¹²

Consider a hypothetical case involving Mrs. X, a marketing manager, who has recently hired ten interns from the same highly selective undergraduate institution. As part of their onboarding, she conducts training sessions. Following one such session, a quiet intern, John, who is Caucasian, approaches Mrs. X to clarify how to analyse the brand’s monthly sales using Excel. She explains it again, using the same level of complexity as in the session. Mrs. X subconsciously thinks, “If John does not get it this time, I will try a simpler way.” Mrs. X, satisfied that John has understood, gives John advanced analytical Excel tools to explore. Later, Maria, another quiet intern but a Hispanic (not Caucasian), asks in the same way as John, for the same clarification on brand analysis. However, Mrs. X oversimplifies the concepts and terminology to facilitate Maria’s understanding. Mrs. X is (perhaps subconsciously) moved by something like the following: “Maria needs as simple an explanation as possible because women of colour are just not made to understand Excel and sales analysis.” Despite Maria grasping the analysis, Mrs. X provides Maria with only basic tools rather than the more challenging ones John received.

In this hypothetical, Maria is wronged in her capacity qua knower, specifically, qua receiver of knowledge. Mrs. X has equal evidence regarding Maria and John’s capacities: both are from the same prestigious institution, are quiet, and are recent hires undergoing the same onboarding process. Absent other evidence, Mrs. X harbours negative identity prejudices about Maria (and perhaps positive identity prejudices about John) that lead her to discount Maria’s credibility as a receiver of knowledge. This constitutes a hearer-directed testimonial injustice by oversimplification.

Now consider a variation of this case. Imagine that two months into the internship, Mrs. X provides performance evaluations to all interns. She offers both constructive and positive feedback to the men but only positive feedback to the women. Her (subconscious) reason is that young women lack self-confidence and are too emotional to handle criticism productively. As a result, she omits crucial feedback from their performance reviews. This omission constitutes a hearer-directed testimonial injustice by omission.

These hypotheticals are simple, I admit. However, they are intended as intuition pumps for forms of testimonial injustice not currently captured by scholarship, namely, when the epistemic wrong flows from the speaker to the hearer. Despite their absence in the scholarship we examined, these cases can be explained by the theory underpinning (what I have termed) speaker-directed testimonial injustice. First, hearer-directed testimonial injustice is grounded in negative identity-prejudicial credibility deficits.Footnote ¹³ At the root of central cases is the speaker’s negative prejudices associated with the hearer’s identity, resulting in the speaker deflating the hearer’s credibility. Second, central cases will be systemic, tracking the victim diachronically and in multiple spheres of her life. Finally, adapting Fricker’s theory (Reference Fricker2007: 22), hearer-directed testimonial injustice’s footholds are in the “ethical poison in the judgement” of the speaker. Like other cases of epistemic injustice, the speaker will be both ethically and epistemically culpable.

The primary harm of hearer-directed testimonial injustice is the epistemic injustice itself—being wronged specifically in one’s capacity as a knower. There is, however, a subtle difference between the two types of injustice. In speaker-directed testimonial injustice, a speaker is wronged in their capacity as one who knows, perceived by the hearer as unable to impart knowledge. In contrast, the primary harm of hearer-directed testimonial injustice comes from being wronged as one who can know, perceived by the speaker as unable to receive information. Hearer-directed testimonial injustice victims will face secondary harms similar to those suffered by speaker-directed epistemic injustice victims, affecting them practically (e.g., lost career opportunities, lower self-esteem) and epistemically (e.g., lost opportunities to gain knowledge, lower levels of knowledge and intellectual capacities, diminished confidence in one’s intellect).Footnote ¹⁴

2.3. Objections and Replies

Before proceeding, let us walk through some objections to the arguments I have presented so far. First, a possible objection to the argument in Section 2.1 is that the literature may already engage with hearer-directed testimonial injustice. One might cite work like Mussell’s (discussed in Section 1), which may be seen as gesturing toward a hearer-directed view.Footnote ¹⁵ Mussell calls for “an alternative conceptualisation of the fiduciary—an arrangement in which the trustee and beneficiary are situated in a more active and consultative relationship” (Reference Mussell2021: 568, italics in original). On one reading, “consultation” implies a genuine epistemic exchange, where beneficiaries both provide and receive economic knowledge within the fiduciary relationship. Elsewhere, Mussell notes that many shareholders lack awareness of where their pensions are invested because they have been “repeatedly disengaged from that information, precluded from consultation” (Reference Mussell2021: 564). In such cases, beneficiaries and shareholders are not only denied the chance to speak but also denied critical financial knowledge, even when that knowledge directly affects their futures.

I agree with my objector that “consultation” might be understood as both listening to what beneficiaries want and “speaking to” them by providing relevant information. On this interpretation, a view like Mussell’s may imply that trustees and financial advisors should be virtuous listeners and speakers. However, this may not accurately reflect the ordinary use of “consultation,” especially in light of the broader context in which Mussell and others present their arguments. To consult is “to have regard to,” “to ask the advice or opinion of,” “to refer to,” or “to deliberate together” (Merriam-Webster, 2025a, b). The first three definitions suggest a narrower reading, focused on trustees seeking input from beneficiaries rather than instructing or speaking to them. The fourth, “deliberating together,” supports a broader interpretation—one in which beneficiaries and trustees engage in mutual epistemic exchange, potentially requiring trustees to share information with beneficiaries. Yet, since Mussell does not clearly define what constitutes “an active and consultative relationship,” her view remains open to multiple readings and does not decisively treat hearer-directed epistemic injustice. Hence, my claim in Section 2.1 is justified.

There are compelling reasons to treat hearer-directed epistemic injustice as a distinct category meriting independent analysis. Shifting attention in this direction reveals novel epistemic failures—oversimplification and omission—that might otherwise go unexamined. It also enables direct evaluation of the virtuous speaker’s role in mentorship, knowledge sharing, leadership, and organisational learning (the focus of Section 4). That is, we must distinguish between contexts where the primary epistemic activity is providing information, those contexts focused on receiving information, and those that involve both knowledge provision and reception. Without such distinctions, we risk obscuring the relationship between different forms of epistemic injustice (more on this in Sections 3–4). These theoretical distinctions have practical implications: conflating providing, receiving, and exchanging information can hinder the development of targeted recommendations addressing specific epistemic injustices in organisational life.

Let us now turn to a second possible objection. One concern that warrants further attention is the use of stereotypes as heuristic aids. I align with Fricker (Reference Fricker2007: 32) in thinking that while stereotypes are not foolproof, they remain helpful for making credibility judgements in our practical lives. Consider the usefulness of oversimplifying your English when directing a group of people who obviously look and act like foreigners who do not speak English well to the nearest tourist attraction. This seems intuitively morally permissible and would not count as a case of hearer-directed testimonial injustice by oversimplification. As I have said earlier, we are interested primarily in negative identity prejudicial stereotypes. This type of stereotype is a:

While I do not have the space here to detail when oversimplification constitutes injustice, cases that are not the result of negative identity prejudicial stereotypes, as defined (such as in the case of foreigners), will be benign.Footnote ¹⁶

A third objector argues that the concepts I am proposing may lead to a runaway concept, resulting in the classification of too many wrongs as cases of injustice.Footnote ¹⁷ For instance, my objector, arguing by reductio, might put forward “manager injustice” to describe when a talented woman is denied a managerial position and wronged in her capacity as a manager. In response, I note that if this objection is correct, then not just I, but most of the aforementioned authors in philosophy (Fricker and those in n. 2) and business ethics (De Bruin, Mussell, Herzog, Wilmot, etc.) are subject to the same critique. While partners-in-guilt responses to objections highlight the broader implications of such an objection, they are ultimately unsatisfying.

Thus, consider an alternative response: epistemic injustice is far more problematic than the other supposed forms of injustice to which my objector points. One’s capacity as a knower—whether as a giver or receiver of knowledge—is central to human flourishing insofar as the capacity is “one side of that many-sided capacity so significant in human beings: namely, the capacity for reason” (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007: 44). Our nature as rational, social animals marks us out as the kind of being that reasons with other people. Epistemic injustice is a wrong because the victim of the injustice is not seen and not treated as one who does, can, or could know by other rational creatures in their epistemic community. By contrast, being a manager is not central to human life. The same would go for “footballer injustice” or “chef injustice” or any other situation in which someone is denied a role based on their identity. While these instances may involve some injustice, the wrong done to people for whom becoming a manager is central to their flourishing is not general enough to warrant a distinct category of injustice.

Finally, my central claim is conceptual and should not be mistaken for an existence proof of the phenomenon. It is conceptually possible for hearer-directed testimonial injustice to occur in organisations alongside speaker-directed epistemic injustice. Determining whether these kinds of injustice exist requires empirical validation, which is a challenging task. We might have some indication that hearer-directed testimonial injustice occurs in organisations. The literature on “mansplaining” (Briggs, Gardner, & Ryan, Reference Briggs, Gardner and Ryan2023; Santoro, Markus, Santoro, & Markus, Reference Santoro, Markus, Santoro and Markus2024; Smith, Schweitzer, Lauch, & Bird, Reference Smith, Schweitzer, Lauch and Bird2024) seems to capture what I have in mind by hearer-directed testimonial injustice by oversimplification, with various negative harms to individuals that are similar to those I discuss.

In this research, mansplaining involves one or all of the following dimensions: unsolicited advice, explaining a topic the hearer knows well, a condescending tone of voice, questioning the hearer’s knowledge or expertise, arrogant or confident mannerisms when speaking, and providing an incorrect explanation to the hearer (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Schweitzer, Lauch and Bird2024: 1792). Some of the harms of this behaviour include increased stereotype threat (Santoro et al., Reference Santoro, Markus, Santoro and Markus2024), decreased organisational commitment, lower job satisfaction, higher turnover intentions, increased emotional exhaustion, and higher psychological distress (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Schweitzer, Lauch and Bird2024: 1804). While this research is a promising start toward empirically testing for potential hearer-directed testimonial injustice in business today and its possible harms, the research does not clarify whether the mansplaining occurs because of actual or perceived negative identity prejudices that result in credibility deficits, which is key to understanding whether a given instance is an epistemic injustice or not.

In the next section, I analyse a historical case that exemplifies the conceptual and practical significance of my theory.Footnote ¹⁸ Since my case is from the mid-twentieth century, further contemporary evidence would be valuable to confirm the presence of hearer-directed testimonial injustice in modern organisations.

3.1. Background and Methodological Considerations

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race recounts the true stories of three black women: Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. These three “human computers” worked at the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationFootnote ¹⁹ (NASA; Shetterly, Reference Shetterly2016a) before the invention of digital computers, performing complex mathematical calculations essential for aeronautical engineering and space exploration. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the narrative highlights the systemic racial and gender oppression these women faced, including verbal abuse, unequal pay, and limited career advancement opportunities. As a result of these first-order injustices of racism and sexism, they were also subject to epistemic injustice, a second-order injustice.Footnote ²⁰

The biography provides an excellent case study for examining epistemic injustice in action. I employ extensive quotations from the text as they best illustrate both the technical complexities of the work and the intricacies of employee interactions. Shetterly describes NASA as a “temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought” (Reference Shetterly2016a: 99). While it was a government agency, it functioned similarly to modern for-profit organisations, sharing many of their characteristic features such as hierarchies, the division of labour, competition, team cooperation, bureaucracy, and a distinct vision and goal. Like many high-skilled jobs today, employees at NASA depended on knowledge sharing and acquisition practices, mentorship, on-site and off-site training, and performance evaluations to succeed. As noted in my introduction, the global learning and development market exceeds $400 billion as of 2024, underscoring the continued significance of ethical considerations in this context. Given the scale of investment in employee development, an in-depth case study analysis of the ethical dimensions of knowledge practices remains highly relevant for contemporary business ethicists and practitioners.Footnote ²¹

3.2. Epistemic Injustice at NASA

By way of setting up the injustice, one has to appreciate that the astronauts (all of whom were men) and the engineers (most of whom were men) placed more trust in human computers (i.e., the mathematicians) than their early mechanical counterparts:

Still, the men did not fully trust the women mathematicians’ work.

Katherine Johnson—Shetterly’s primary protagonist—was a human computer in NASA’s Flight Research Division. She was initially tasked with analysing data from flight simulations and later became a long-standing member of the space team, conducting trajectory analysis of orbital spaceflights. Yet, she experienced hearer-directed testimonial injustice by omission. Despite her demonstrated intelligence, she was not permitted to attend meetings critical to her work. Relevant information was withheld orally, in writing, or by blacking typed documents with permanent markers. She was an “outsider” during NASA’s transition from air to space technology:

Johnson’s exclusion was not incidental—it was systemic. She was intellectually curious, disciplined, and passionate, seeking only to expand her technical understanding. Yet, despite her initiative, she was barred from the very meetings so crucial to her organisational and intellectual advancement. “Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” she asked (Reference Shetterly2016a: 157). She received a disheartening response: “Girls don’t go to the meetings” (Reference Shetterly2016a: 157). There was no law against it besides the social law: “it was just the way things had always been done” (Reference Shetterly2016a: 157).

The underlying reasons for her exclusion were not a deficiency in epistemic skill or competence, but rather prejudices concerning her being both black and a woman. She lacked credibility not as a speaker, but as a hearer, not to be trusted with sensitive NASA information or to perform advanced mathematical analyses of the physics behind the US space mission. Employing the framework I outlined in Section 2.2, the injustice she suffered wronged her epistemically, as well as practically, making it harder for her to excel at work and potentially prompting her to question her computational abilities.

A similar pattern of testimonial injustice—this time, speaker-directed—emerged when Johnson’s expertise was dismissed. Astronauts, engineers, and leadership failed to take her calculations seriously. However, a pivotal moment reversed this dynamic. Right before John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth [Deiss, Reference Deiss2006]) was to launch, he placed an emergency phone call to headquarters. His conversation with Al Harrison, who oversaw the space program in the film adaptation, unfolded as follows:

At this moment, Johnson’s actual credibility level and epistemic capacities were finally acknowledged. Yet, the fact that it required direct intervention from an astronaut underscores how deeply testimonial injustice shaped the professional lives of women at NASA. The reason I provide an example of speaker-directed testimonial injustice is to illustrate that different forms of epistemic injustice often occur to the same individuals over their lifetimes, especially for those who are systemically wronged.

Mary Jackson, another protagonist in Shetterly’s account, nearly faced hearer-directed testimonial injustice by oversimplification. Recognised for having the “the soul of an engineer” by Kaz Czarnecki, he took her under his wing despite his being “white, male, Catholic, and a Yankee” (Shetterly, Reference Shetterly2016a: 127–28), encouraging her to become an engineer. However, in the 1950s, American engineering schools did not accept women. To become NASA’s first Black female engineer—a goal she would achieve in 1958 (Shetterly, Reference Shetterlyn.d.)—Jackson appealed to the court for an exception to attend an all-white school. Although she won the case and was admitted, upon entering the classroom, she was exposed to negative identity prejudices common for her time:

Without giving Jackson the benefit of the doubt, the professor assumed that her epistemic capacities were inferior to those of men, consequently deflating her credibility. Given that it was their first encounter, it is plausible that the credibility deficit was based not on evidence of Jackson’s capacities but instead on general negative prejudices about her gender and race.Footnote ^23, Footnote ²⁴

Through Shetterly’s writing, we learn that at NASA in the 1940s, few people were overtly racist; instead, most were ignorant and thoughtlessly prejudiced. This dovetails with Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice:

Shetterly similarly describes how Black women at NASA “code-shifted through the unfamiliar language and customs of an integrated life” (Shetterly, Reference Shetterly2016a: 111). This tension underscores how deeply rooted credibility judgements based on negative identity prejudices can be—plausibly still relevant to our lives today as more empirical evidence about our cognitive biases from behavioural economists and judgement and decision-making scholars comes to light (Bertrand & Mullainathan, Reference Bertrand and Mullainathan2004; Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2003; Tversky & Kahneman, Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974, Reference Tversky and Kahneman1981).

As we encountered earlier, the systemically disadvantaged will likely face multiple types of epistemic injustice over their lifetimes. The relationship between hearer-directed and speaker-directed testimonial injustice can be cyclical, such that one leads the other. Fricker describes the compounding effect of multiple injustices as the “perfect conditions conducive to a runaway credibility deflation” (Reference Fricker2007: 159–60). This compounding effect could heighten the intensity of primary and secondary harms to victims, if not in terms of psychological intensity, then at least in terms of moral intensity. While the women of Hidden Figures overcame these injustices, their ability to do so was exceptional. For many employees, the cumulative effects of compounded epistemic injustice will be deeply felt, whether due to a loss of confidence, diminished career prospects, or any of a host of follow-on harms.Footnote ²⁵

Katherine Johnson’s exclusion from key meetings—an instance of hearer-directed testimonial injustice by omission—limited her ability to improve her mathematical analysis. This, in turn, might have worsened speaker-directed testimonial injustice, increasing the possibility that her testimony would be discredited or ignored. However, one might think that the speaker-directed testimonial injustice in this case is not that straightforward, insofar as Johnson does not have the relevant knowledge. So there might be a sense in which it makes sense that her testimony does not receive uptake. Notice that the reason Johnson does not have the relevant knowledge is that she was forbidden from attending the all-male meetings of her research group. In this case, the initial hearer-directed testimonial injustice by omission itself creates room for a follow-on speaker-directed testimonial injustice, where the men will not consult Johnson or hear what she has to say because she lacks the relevant knowledge.

We are now in a place to see the theoretical value of explicitly employing distinct concepts for hearer-directed versus speaker-directed epistemic injustice. Doing so creates space to explore how speaker-directed testimonial injustices in professional settings (e.g., financial institutions, corporate boardrooms, fiduciary relationships) may arise because of hearer-directed injustices. When systemically disadvantaged individuals are denied access to quality training, mentorship, and knowledge sharing spaces, they may be structurally positioned in ways that make it harder for them to be heard or express themselves, which attests to their actual epistemic capacities.

Though she is writing in a different context than I am, Regan Penaluna tells us a story of how women in the history of philosophy (and girls and women historically) “didn’t have the same access to knowledge or encouragement as [their] male peers” (Reference Penaluna2023: 69). She goes on to suggest that this lack of access and qualitative difference in knowledge women were provided made it “exceptionally hard for a woman to mount a sustained and public defense of her gender in the face of statements” declaring that women’s “capacity for understanding … is weak” (Reference Penaluna2023: 23). In other words, for women to be able to speak or provide information, they must first be provided with an education that equals that offered to their male counterparts—one that equips them with the reading, writing, and speaking tools to defend their ideas.

At NASA, systemic hearer-directed testimonial injustice seems to have shaped career trajectories, particularly through mentorship opportunities.Footnote ²⁶ Shetterly describes how informal networks of support played a crucial role in professional advancement:

Advancement required both competence and access to spaces where ability was recognised and nurtured. Working with men in the mid-twentieth century required women in those positions:

At NASA in the 1940s, negative identity prejudices existed among male managers, astronauts, and engineers, making it systematically more challenging for female engineers and mathematicians to advance within the organisation.

Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson were fortunate to have been able to overcome the obstacles to having their credibility acknowledged. Yet, systemic change does not depend solely on those affected. It also requires those in power to recognise and dismantle structural hurdles. As such, let us turn to one way of combating structural prejudice: the virtuous speaker.

4.1. The Theory of the Virtuous Speaker

To develop the concept of the virtuous speaker, I once again turn to Fricker’s (Reference Fricker2007) framework. She characterises testimonial justice as a hybrid virtue with dual ends—the epistemic end of securing truth and the ethical end of promoting justice (Reference Fricker2007: 121). How does one cultivate the virtue of testimonial justice? Fricker’s view is that the virtue is centrally reflexive, requiring continually and actively reflecting on one’s credibility judgements and the basis of those judgements. Virtuous speakers will step out of “spontaneous, unreflective mode and into active critical reflection” (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007: 91).Footnote ²⁷ They will ask themselves questions such as: Why did I assign my hearer this particular credibility rating? Are there residual or implicit negative identity prejudices influencing my credibility judgement? What is required (e.g., what would I need to know, believe, and feel) so that I can judge hearers according to the credibility levels they deserve? How can I remind myself to continue self-monitoring my credibility judgements of hearers?

To illustrate the virtue, let us return to our case study. William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor was the third black person to earn a PhD in mathematics in the United States and the first to publish an academic research article (Fox, Reference Fox2020; Maxwell, Getz, & Lloyd, Reference Maxwell, Getz and Lloyd1999; O’Connor & Robertson, Reference O’Connor and Robertson2016; Parshall, Reference Parshall2016). Noticing Johnson’s talent after she tackled every math class offered by her college by junior year, he created “advanced math classes just for her” (Shetterly, Reference Shetterly2016a: 30). There was no unjust omission of concepts and theories. Dr. Claytor was thus a virtuous speaker securing both justice and truth. He mitigated residual unjustified prejudices about women’s mathematical abilities (epistemic end), while avoiding behaving unjustly by deflating her credibility and seeing her as less of a knower than she is (ethical end). By meeting these ends, Dr. Claytor—without knowing it—provided Johnson with the epistemic goods necessary for her intellectual and professional advancement.

In Fricker’s view, the guiding ideal of the virtue of testimonial justice is “to neutralize any negative impact of prejudice in one’s credibility judgements by compensating upwards to reach the degree of credibility that would have been given were it not for the prejudice” (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007: 91–92). Notice, however, that this corrective process is context-dependent. Like all virtues (Annas, Reference Annas1993, Reference Annas2011; Aristotle, 2014; Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2013; Zagzebski, Reference Zagzebski1996), testimonial justice must be cultivated with attentiveness to context, requiring speakers to navigate complex circumstances with moral and epistemic discernment. There is no fixed algorithm for determining precisely how much adjustment in credibility judgements will be needed in a given situation. As I will show next, what in some cases might first appear to be the vice of testimonial injustice is actually the virtue of testimonial justice at work.

4.2. The Virtuous Speaker in Business Ethics and Management

Consider John Becker, a senior division chief at NASA, known for rigorously challenging his subordinates’ mathematical calculations. When Mary Jackson, a black woman, presented her work, Becker and she went “back and forth over the data, trying to isolate the discrepancy” (Shetterly, Reference Shetterly2016a: 105). As it turns out, the fault was Becker’s, not Mary’s; Becker had given her faulty raw data. Although it might not seem like it at first glance, Becker’s intellectual engagement with Jackson’s work demonstrated the virtue of testimonial justice in leadership.Footnote ²⁸ He did not dismiss her calculations based on prejudices related to race or gender, but instead treated her as he would have any other bright engineer. As Shetterly notes, “[h]er showdown with John Becker was the kind of gambit that the laboratory expected, encouraged, and valued in its promising male engineers” (Reference Shetterly2016a: 105). This moment exemplifies just epistemic practices in organisational contexts, showing how a leader can treat all deserving employees as credible knowers, regardless of their identities.

At a broader level, virtuous speakers in business are those who ensure that knowledge sharing practices in organisations are both just and rigorous, fostering a culture where employees are valued for their epistemic capabilities rather than on identity-based assumptions. The rigour of Becker’s questioning as an example of virtuous speaking is especially relevant to managers and leaders in industries such as aerospace, technology, finance, and pharmaceuticals, where a single error makes the difference between, say, killing the astronauts we are trying to send to the moon and bringing them back to Earth safely.Footnote ²⁹

The concept of the virtuous speaker has direct implications for business ethics and management, particularly in mentorship, leadership, performance evaluations, training, and other such knowledge sharing practices that I have previously referenced. McKinsey partners Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, in a conversation about 2024 talent-management industry trends, tell us that not just any learning and development strategy will set companies and business leaders apart. They say, “it’s time to double down on a human-centered approach to leading and managing” (Hancock, Weddle, & Rahilly, Reference Hancock, Weddle and Rahilly2024), one that is perceived by employees as “fair” (Hancock et al., Reference Hancock, Hioe and Schaninger2018). This involves investing in coaching skills, conducting ongoing key performance indicator (KPI) reviews, and developing the soft skills necessary for initiating and conducting difficult conversations (Hancock et al., Reference Hancock, Hioe and Schaninger2018). In my view, a commitment to the virtue of testimonial justice strengthens fairness by ensuring that employees with similar epistemic capabilities receive comparable knowledge, whether through coaching, mentorship, training, or other means, without allowing prejudices to shape how knowledge is shared.

Beyond internal organisational benefits (e.g., mentorship, feedback, and leadership development), virtuous speakers may influence participation at a market level. Consider again the financial sector, where De Bruin (Reference De Bruin2021) argues that speaker-directed testimonial injustice affects both the supply and demand of capital. De Bruin uses speaker-directed testimonial injustice to explain why minorities with similar endogenous characteristics received unequal access to capital. When banks and creditors request information from prospective borrowers, they need to know the endogenous characteristics of the prospective borrower, including the candidate’s (or company’s) skills, expertise, financial situation, and so on. Judging candidates differentially when they are similar in all respects except exogenous features (e.g., race or gender) is epistemically unjust.

Although the candidates are not providing direct testimony, and there appears to be a conflation of business acumen (or credibility and skill) with one’s capacity as a knower, we can charitably understand De Bruin as noting that knowledge provided by some candidates is treated differently because of negative identity prejudices. What should matter is whether these prospective borrowers are, in fact, credible and skilled enough to repay the loan, as evidenced by their financial history. However, De Bruin argues that a different epistemic concept is needed to explain demand-side disparities—why women and men do not seek out similar quality loans. The crux of his explanation is that persistent negative identity prejudices surrounding women in finance make it more likely that they are less epistemically self-confident. In turn, according to De Bruin, women conduct fewer and lower-quality searches for financing.

This could be a reason for demand-side disparities. However, let us consider an alternative theory. In essence, my expanded understanding of epistemic injustice, by introducing hearer-directed testimonial injustice, may offer a unifying explanation of the demand-side and supply-side issues affecting financial disparities.Footnote ³⁰ Say women and young girls, from the outset, are systematically being educated, trained, and spoken to very differently about numbers, markets, finance, banks, credit, and so on, relative to their male counterparts only in virtue of their gender. This constitutes hearer-directed testimonial injustice (by oversimplification, omission, or some combination). Then, demand-side disparities may be driven by low self-confidence because of what is (or is not) being said to women, not only because what they do say does not get uptake.

If women do not have equal financial education and, in turn, financial acumen and justified financial confidence, then they might be more likely to perform lower-quality and fewer searches as prospective borrowers (ceteris paribus). Indeed, empirical research may support this idea: a study on basic financial literacy (interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification) shows statistically significant gaps between men and women, as well as between whites, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics, on the other (Lusardi et al., Reference Lusardi, Mitchell and Curto2010). Other empirical research cites a variety of sources for the gap,Footnote ³¹ including but not limited to parental characteristics (Chambers et al., Reference Chambers, Asarta, Farley-Ripple, Chambers, Asarta and Farley-Ripple2019), college education and work experience (Chen & Volpe, Reference Chen and Volpe2002), and the household division of labour (Fonseca et al., Reference Fonseca, Mullen, Zamarro and Zissimopoulos2012). According to a meta-review, factors such as confidence, socialisation, demographics, computation, interest, cognition, and risk tendencies also play a role in explaining the global gender gap in financial and economic literacy rates (Haag & Brahm, Reference Haag and Brahm2025).

The meta-review suggests that many of these explanatory factors (choice of college major, career, confidence, and computational ability) may be partially influenced by social and cultural factors such as stereotypes (Haag & Brahm, Reference Haag and Brahm2025: esp. 16). Indeed, the recommendations offered by these authors parallel those presented in this article: “[b]oth parents and professionals in the educational system should be aware of socialization effects, actively counteract gender stereotypes, and promote girls’ self-efficacy regarding math and economics” (Haag & Brahm, Reference Haag and Brahm2025: 18). While this is one part of a more complex solution, it seems important in economic and organisational contexts to develop virtuous leaders, educators, finance professionals, and parents, in their capacities as givers of knowledge not just as receivers.

At a granular level, this would mean: (i) ensuring that all employees receive just and constructive performance evaluations and feedback that comport with their credibility levels; (ii) providing equal quality mentorship, learning, and professional development opportunities that are free from negative identity prejudicial credibility deficits; and (iii) training leaders, educators, finance professionals, and parents to be reflexive in their credibility judgements and, ultimately, the way they provide information to hearers.Footnote ³²

Virtuous speakers are, undeniably, only part of the solution. Other initiatives need to be put into place: it is insufficient to merely have opportunities to improve epistemically and professionally without eventually handing those who deserve it a promotion (like Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson at NASA). Mussell (Reference Mussell2021) reminds us that some individuals are so systemically excluded that they are not even recognised as speakers, and, I would add, hearers who deserve our attention, too. Addressing epistemic injustice requires integrating the roles of both virtuous hearers and virtuous speakers, incorporating disadvantaged employees into knowledge networks, and enhancing business and financial literacy from the outset.