Part I – How Workplaces and Leaders Can Support Women of Colour
On Sunday, January 21, 2024, we facilitated Thousand&One’s signature workshop offering ‘Supporting Women of Colour in the Workplace’ in Glasgow in partnership with The Woodland Community Centre.
The goal for this workshop is two-fold: first, we explore and unpack common workplace biases we encounter in the workplace, and in the latter half, we move into brainstorming strategies and solutions to help women of colour navigate these challenges.
A few minutes into the session, it was clear we all had a lot on our minds. The room was filled with stories and accounts of shared experiences. In fact, our personal experiences as fellow women of colour, and of those we spoke to in previous years as part of the research we’ve been conducting, were quickly validated.
The workplace is a tough place for racialized folks. And the higher we go, the lonelier it gets. We all had stories of racist encounters, and hostile conversations that always undermined our expertise and questioned our self-worth. A lot of us have identified survival tactics, but more often than not, we've been forced out of companies or even industries, moving from job to job.
In our workshop, we spoke at length with our community about what we need to thrive in the workplace. So in today’s blog, the first of two parts, we explore how organizations can support WOC at work. What kind of actions can leaders and executives take to ensure WOC are respected, supported, recognized, and ultimately, set up for success?
Illustration by Liu Liu
1. Up your feedback game
This one is for leaders, managers, and supervisors – provide feedback that sets women of colour up for success. This means honest, constructive, and actionable feedback that leads to growth and promotions, helping diversify leadership teams and providing equal opportunity to all.
According to research women are less likely to receive feedback than their male colleagues, and this is detrimental to their professional growth. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Zuhairah Washington and Laura Morgan Roberts discuss how it “can be difficult to share critical, real-time advice - especially when there is an element of difference (race, gender, age) between the giver and the receiver.” But there are ways in which we can acknowledge these differences and power dynamics that inevitably shape our working experiences while managing to offer racialized colleagues the kind of feedback they deserve.
Executive leadership coach Hanna Hart explores the elements of a more inclusive approach to giving feedback. An inclusive feedback conversation, Hart reminds us, is grounded in a number of best practices:
Specificity: Effective feedback must be specific. This means offering actionable steps, timelines, and follow-up conversations. It also means, staying far away from vague feedback or making remarks about personality traits.
Growth Oriented: Good feedback is grounded in a growth mindset that prioritizes learning and understanding, rather than feeding into blame games.
Dialogue: One of the most important steps to promoting a more inclusive feedback conversation is understanding that it’s a two-way discussion. Higher-ups need to ensure that they not only offer constructive feedback to their employees but also ask how they can best support them.
“The workplace is a tough place for racialized folks. And the higher we go, the lonelier it gets.”
2. Keep the work hybrid
Hybrid work structures benefit all of us. They give us some liberty when it comes to making choices and balancing life and work. A post-pandemic world showed us that there’s a lot to be gained when we’re flexible. For women of colour, this flexibility is even more important. Here’s why:
According to the McKinsey report on women in the workplace 2023, women continue to carry out “a disproportionate amount of childcare and household work.” The report outlines that 38 percent of mothers with young children would have to leave their jobs if they weren’t given the flexibility to work from home.
Caring responsibilities are even more dire for women of colour and ethnic minorities. In her piece for the Guardian, Donna Ferguson writes about how caring roles block career advancement for three in five women.
According to the same McKinsey report, hybrid or remote work offers more than just flexibility for women; it means facing fewer microaggressions and higher levels of psychological safety. The day-to-day discrimination WOC face at work impacts their health and well-being, as well as their progress at work. Being able to choose when they show up to the office can bring some comfort.
3. Be intentional about DEI
Our workplaces are not designed with WOC in mind. For a lot of us, when we show up to work we are entering spaces that are systematically and structurally racist and patriarchal. What’s more, our leaders and managers are mainly white men.
Increased efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in workplaces foregrounds the need for rethinking our work structures and how our employees of different backgrounds and identities show up.
One of the most important measures for workplaces is to be intentional about DEI practices and to ensure safer and healthier environments for WOC. Here are a few things to consider when turning towards intentional DEI:
Do the work: Sign up for anti-racist workshops and training. It’s imperative that leadership teams take time to do the learning and unlearning that’s necessary as part of this work. Often, the (unpaid) labour to teach is placed on racialized folks, adding to their already heavy workload.
Facilitate safe spaces: For many WOC, our organizations are lonely places. We’re not always (if at all) granted the psychological safety we need to express ourselves or our ideas. Having exclusive spaces for us to come together can lead to deep healing and allow us to feel validated in our shared struggles. This can take different shapes: a racial caucus or an exclusively WOC employee group. When in doubt, ask what your colleagues need to feel better supported.
Document and report discrimination: Freelance writer, Amy Rigby, in her piece on WOC in the workplace, advises organizations to include “a straightforward process for reporting violations” and to “document the process every employee should follow if they experience or witness discrimination.” In fact, one of the best ways to support your marginalized colleagues is by actively using your privilege to challenge and report discrimination.
The structures and systems that have been designed and built benefit only a few at the expense of others, and the double whammy of race and gender means that WOC have it especially hard. For systemic change to take place, there needs to be a restructuring of power dynamics, more brave leaders and allies, and organizations that are more intentional about diversity and inclusion, rather than treating it like a checklist. So, leaders, CEOs, and executives, we turn to you: what steps will you take today to make your organization more inclusive?
Coming up Next
You guessed it, we’re not done yet! In our next blog, we’ll relay 3 additional steps leaders and organizations can take to better support WOC and other marginalized employees in the workplace.