At the time, I felt optimistic. My employer had invested both time and budget. Employees, including executives, had attended trainings. We made sure our website didn't feature only stock photos of white men, and we ramped up our recruiting efforts to diversify our candidate base for job openings.
We had also created affinity groups for people of color and women, to provide a sense of community and opportunities for networking. To support our women's affinity group, we decided to invite a dozen members to join our executive team at a major financial services conference in Chicago. They would have an opportunity to get to know our executives over an intimate dinner and learn how committed our leadership team was to our diversity initiatives.
The dinner fell on the seventh game of the Series. I caught the top half of the first inning in the hotel lobby before we all left together. At the restaurant, a mainly Black waitstaff showed us to our private dining room. Pseudo castle doors separated us from the rest of the restaurant. The waiters gripped the iron door handles with both hands, braced themselves, and heaved backward to unseal them and haul them open.
We had our own décor—mock Medieval. I imagined the instructions the waitstaff had probably been given to provide us with “exceptional” service in this finance-friendly steakhouse that resembled so many others.
For me, the dinner was a means to an end. I needed to see that our leadership team understood the promise of diversity initiatives as a business imperative. I wanted management to genuinely believe supporting inclusion was a good call.
Those hurdles had now been cleared. Our affinity group had made it to the castle. Around us hung wall art in powerful frames: out-of-period noblemen in braided coats on rearing steeds, both species puffing out exaggerated chests. These were no rough-shod ponies of the Wild West; flaxen manes cascaded over their elegantly rounded shoulders. Hooves glistened. These were proper equine trophies, symbols of their riders' net worth.
“Have you decided on your order?” A waiter interrupted my thoughts.
“The salmon, please. Thank you.”
As he left the room, I overheard a snippet of the Cubs game broadcast in the restaurant. Bottom of the fourth. I couldn't hear who was ahead.
I was seated between the VP of Business Development and my boss, a woman I looked up to and had learned from. She was one of few female leaders in the industry. Glancing around the table, I felt a brief sense of pride. The women from our affinity group seated with the executive team made this the most gender-balanced financial dinner I had attended.
I had gotten to know one woman at the table a little better during the conference. I'll call her Irene. She had confided to me that she had waited for decades to launch her own career in finance because she felt that, as a woman, she wouldn't have been taken seriously until a few years ago. I had assured her that she was in the right place, that our affinity networks were created with her in mind.
As the night went on, I lost track of how long we had been there. I excused myself to use the restroom. As I pushed open the heavy door to reenter the main restaurant, I saw there were no guests left. Tables had been wiped and chairs were stacked against the walls. I cringed. The waitstaff were patiently standing by the walls, hands folded over their aprons, waiting for us. We were already an hour over our time. We were the customers I had dreaded in a previous life. I apologized and said I'd try to get our group to wrap it up.
The kitchen radio blasted the game. They were headed into extra innings.
When I returned to our room, I told the group that we were the only ones keeping the place open and suggested we take the party back to the hotel bar. But the conversations carried on. After another 20 minutes, one of the Black waiters slipped in gingerly and asked if everyone was happy with their evening before they wrapped up for the night. He was ignored. He tried again. “I'm so sorry to put an end to what looks like such a fun night, but we are going to have to be closing up soon.”
Irene cut him off. “Oh, honey, we pay your bills, so we'll be leaving when we're leaving.”
Our server nodded and retreated. As the door was slowly closing, but still partially open, Irene exclaimed loudly, to the whole room, as if sharing a joke she needed everyone to hear the setup for, “You know what I miss? Back in my day, I could have called him ‘boy’ and no one would have had a problem with it. Back in my day, I could have had him fired for speaking to a white woman that way.”
A moment later I found myself standing. I was on my feet, an involuntary reaction, irrepressible. I was not weighing questions of correctness; it was far more basic. Somehow I thought I could not be the only one, but around the table my colleagues were only staring, staying seated, saying nothing.
“Oh honey, sit down, don't get upset,” Irene urged.
Nervous laughter rattled through the room.
My hands went cold. How could I be the only one? They all said they cared. They made public statements. What are they doing? Why is nobody saying anything?
A roar was audible from the kitchen. The Cubs had gone ahead.
When my voice came, it was shaking. “Back in your day,” I reminded Irene, “you wouldn't be sitting at this table. Back in your day, you wouldn't have been taken seriously as a woman in this profession. We're all here tonight because we don't want to go back to that time.”
An exec nervously pushed around chunks of his surf and turf. I picked up my purse and coat, gave the castle doors one last shove, and left.
I rushed past the servers waiting to clear our table, out of the restaurant, and into a lone taxi waiting like a lifeboat.
On the way back to the hotel, triumphal horns blared throughout the city. I wanted to rejoice with my euphoric driver, but I was stunned.
I was not a victim in this situation. Nor was I a hero—I was simply mistaken. I thought that because our company had invested in these inclusion initiatives, our culture had actually changed. I thought the executives sitting at that table who had stated their commitment to diversity and attended trainings would have stood with me. I didn't think I was going to be alone.
We had checked all the right boxes, but the unspoken code of conduct hadn't changed. We had had our moment of truth, and nobody stood up.
And by running the programs that let us think we were the good guys, I was complicit.
How had this happened?
≈
The following Monday, I got the call from HR: My position no longer existed in the organization. I was terminated, effective immediately. The reason given was a recent merger. I knew about that merger. I had helped coordinate the resulting reorg, and I knew that all staffing decisions had been made months ago, so I found this difficult to believe. Either way, we were happy to part ways.
A few months later, I attended a CEO panel at the top of Seattle's World Trade Center. The topic: What Does It Mean to Be an Effective Leader?
The year was 2017, and the #MeToo hashtag had turned into a rallying cry for millions. Social activist Tarana Burke had coined the phrase in 2006 to build solidarity among survivors of abuse. More than a decade later, Alyssa Milano retweeted the phrase one night, and by morning, a movement was born. Around the world, women were taking the secrets they had kept inside whisper networks out into the international spotlight. Hollywood's leading ladies founded Time's Up to cover legal costs for victims seeking justice. Everywhere I went, I heard “Me Too.”
Tarana Burke held the movement accountable, continuing to speak out for women who weren't going to be protected and still had to show up to hostile workplaces every day. For the movement's legacy to have meaning, she argued, employers would need to take meaningful action. It was up to business leaders to take the next steps.