Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t always a concrete ceiling. There are some black women in leadership roles who have brilliantly navigated the complexities of being both black and a woman in the workplace. Look at the sheer number of black women we have interviewed who have not only smashed the glass – and concrete – ceilings but who now dominate in their fields. But for many of us, when we first enter a workplace we often discover unwritten rules for getting ahead that we struggle to understand, let alone follow, and therefore, unlike our white male or female counterparts, we can’t hit the ground running, even with all the enthusiasm and ambition in the world. We often find ourselves shut out of the informal networks that help white men and women find jobs, mentors and sponsors, and through no fault of our own, we then fail to navigate these spaces successfully – which explains the feelings of career stagnation and frustration as evidenced in the Race at Work Report.
But surely the recent attention that has been given to issues of diversity in the workplace is helping to bring down this ceiling? Well, not exactly. Despite all the talk of diversity that has been happening over the last couple of years, it looks like black women have been sidelined yet again. Noticeably, when there is a drive to get women into prominent positions in business, it tends to end up being just one kind of woman. If I had a pound for every time I went to a diversity panel only to find it made up of white men and women talking about how to increase diversity, but really actually only meaning that the door should be widened to let white women in, I would be a millionaire.
It can be all too easy to hold up gender as the symbol for diversity in an organisation, and we have centred white women on the diversity agenda in the same way we have centred white working-class boys in the educational attainment debate. But diversity is about much more than just gender, and we shouldn’t be amalgamated into the same monolithic talent pool. For far too long, black women’s aspirations in the UK have not been part of the conversation. The sooner we realise this the sooner we can have richer conversations about it and work together to come up with practical solutions to the problem.
Research in 2014 revealed that the gap at management level between BAME people and white people is not only disproportionate to their representation but also still widening.10 It therefore came as a big surprise when the Tesco chairman John Allan warned that white men are becoming ‘endangered species’ on UK boards: ‘For a thousand years, men have got most of these jobs; the pendulum has swung very significantly the other way now and will do for the foreseeable future, I think. If you are a white male – tough – you are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard.’11 This, from a white man who sits alongside eight other white men and three white women on Tesco’s board … It came as no surprise that research in 2017, conducted by the Guardian and Operation Black Vote, found that Britain’s most powerful elite is 97 per cent white. Proportionally, there should be 136 BAMEs in The 1,000 power list. There are just 36. It gets worse when divided along gender lines, as less than a quarter of those BAME positions of power are occupied by women.12
Ultimately, helping black women progress in their careers at the same rate as their white counterparts is both the right thing to do and the profitable thing to do. It could add £2 billion to the UK economy each year, according to a government review.13 The author of the report, businesswoman Ruby McGregor-Smith, said, ‘The time for talk on race in the workplace is over, it’s time to act. No one should feel unable to reach the top of any organisation because of their race.’ When you feel things aren’t fair you are more likely to feel resentful and therefore disengaged at work. Treating all women in the workplace as if we face the same challenges within this diversity agenda is ineffective. Organisations need to take bold and crucial steps to remove the systematic discrimination that has been allowed to run rife.
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The invisibility vs. visibility problem: Now you see me, now you don’t
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In order to ensure that black women don’t regard their careers as concrete dead ends, we need to understand the subtle, and at times concealed, challenges we face upon entering the professional environment: challenges that can stop us from progressing and breaking through the glass (and concrete) ceiling.
Firstly, there is the invisibility/visibility problem. This is twofold. By virtue of being a double minority you are very visible: you stick out like a unicorn, and this is reinforced by microaggressions that frequently remind you you’re the ‘other’. But ‘being seen’ isn’t as straightforward as you might think, because with this visibility comes more scrutiny. Dawn Butler explains how the double-edged sword comes into play: ‘As black women, you are both visible and invisible. If you ever do anything wrong, people will always see you as the person who did something wrong. You do something right it’s like, oh well, what do you expect? And so you are both invisible and visible. You can be invisible, looked over for promotion, and you can be visible when they want to blame you for something.’ Simply, if something goes wrong, you become the rule and are judged more harshly, but if you do something well, you’re seen as the exception.
In order to progress in your career, you need to be visible, to do good work and be seen as leadership material. Yet studies have found that black women are being overlooked and are less likely to be rated in the top two performance-ratings categories, or to be identified as ‘high potential’ at work, compared to white employees. Black women are at an immediate disadvantage in the workplace, because we do not look or sound like the people who overwhelmingly make up the majority of today’s business leaders – white men.14 I’ve been incredibly conscious as I progress in my career, of how white and male it is, and increasingly aware that I look nothing like my boss, his boss or his boss. Some might say that doesn’t matter, but I’m inclined to say it does.
I remember one occasion at work when I asked a colleague to send me a new picture for our business-banking brochure: the licence on the one we had was running out so it was time to replace it. The current photo was a stock image of a white man in a suit, looking at his iPad, with a backdrop of a glass office – very clichéd, but it gets the message across, right? My brief to him this time was, ‘Please send me something a little more diverse than this?’ An hour later he sent me an image of another white man, a younger millennial guy this time, wearing business casual wear. Again, I replied, ‘Not what I was thinking, are there any more options?’ I had made up my mind not to specify, and I was intrigued to see what he would come up with. An hour later, he sent me three images: one of a white man looking powerful in a suit (this time he was giving a presentation), one of a black man in a suit in another glass office and one of a white woman in a suit. I went over to his desk and asked, ‘Are these the only stock images available?’ By this point he was obviously irritated, but I was standing over his shoulder and I could see lots of stock images of black women he could have chosen, but he hadn’t.
According to Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a psychology professor at Columbia University, the same unconscious bias my colleague demonstrated is at play when the average person thinks of a woman leader: ‘the image that comes to their mind is of a white woman – like Sheryl Sandberg. However, If you picture a black leader, you’re more likely to think of a black man than a black woman.’ She continues, ‘Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories “black” or “woman”, people’s brains fail to include them in both categories. Black women suffer from a “Now you see them, now you don’t” effect in the workplace.’15
Black women are already leaning in; they want leadership positions but they are being overlooked. When you go to work you just want to do your job to the best of your ability, be appreciated and recognised fairly for it, rather than having to show the world that you’re perfect. We shouldn’t have to be invisible or visible at the whim of other people’s prejudices, but we need to stop fighting that visibility; instead we should try to take advantage of it. ‘Putting our heads down’, hoping our hard work alone will pay off and ‘covering’, downplaying what makes us different, as Yomi discusses in the ‘***Flawless’ chapter, won’t