How to Succeed When You’re Marginalized or Discriminated Against at Work
How to Succeed When You’re Marginalized or Discriminated Against at Work
“Hacking” your work only works if you’re a person who would be congratulated for your ingenuity. If you’re not, here’s what to try instead.
Image
CreditCreditNicole Xu
By Alan Henry
But it was running headlong into someone who held me and my expertise in such low regard — for no other reason than his preconceptions about who I was — that forced me to reckon with the notion that so much popular productivity advice, including some that I’ve dispensed, is accessible only to people who have the option to use it in the first place.
An example: At a previous job, my new boss (he was new, I had been there for years) had been on the job for about two weeks before I met him. In that time, I learned, he had set up meetings with all of my peers to introduce himself. I didn’t get invited to any of those meetings.
It was at a conference, where my colleagues and I each gave a presentation on the teams we led, that I finally walked up to him to introduce myself. Before he gave me his attention, however, he went out of his way to speak to everyone else who passed his view. Politely watching this for about 15 minutes, I knew something was wrong. Eventually my opening came, we spoke for a few seconds, and he was off. That wasn’t the only red flag, but it was the first. I spoke to him once more in passing, and then a third time — until I left the company.
Let’s be real: There’s no use in telling managers that you need help prioritizing your work if they’re convinced “you people” are lazy. Me writing an article that suggests you “spend time growing your skills at work” isn’t helpful if you’re saddled with busywork because everyone assumes you’re the “office mom.”
Ultimately, if your boss or co-workers believe that women shouldn’t be in the workplace, or that African-Americans are unmotivated, no “productivity hack” will force them to objectively look at your accomplishments and decisions the way they would employees they view without biases.
That’s the real factor determining whether you can take productivity advice at face value: privilege. Let’s talk about that — who has it and who doesn’t, and what you can do when you don’t.
‘Glamour work’ vs. ‘housework’: Who gets the opportunities matters
I think it was during a meeting where one of my colleagues essentially took credit for all of the work that I did, then described himself as our de facto supervisor, that I realized how firmly I was being marginalized. What really drove it home was that our boss was in the room and didn’t object or clarify.
I could have spoken up, opened myself up to being seen as “angry” or “aggressive” for rebuking him publicly, but I chose to let it pass, hoping he was just talking himself up and that people would see through it.
When that same colleague made sure to assign himself high-profile projects and reject attempts from people outside his circle to get involved, I understood how stark the difference between office “glamour work” and “housework” truly is.
A 2018 story in Harvard Business Review pointed out that women of color in the workplace are asked to do “office housework” — the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep departments and teams humming — more often than white employees. That kind of work rarely raises an employee’s profile, in contrast to “glamour work,” which is highly visible, helps people make a name for themselves and leads to promotions and other career success.
Office housework can be important, but it’s often “someone has to do it” work. It’s organizing schedules so that people can meet instead of actually leading the meeting, or giving presentations to co-workers instead of to an industry conference.
Another story in Harvard Business Review, also published in 2018, encouraged managers to assign work fairly and to intervene when they found that the “superstars” on their teams were hogging glamour work while women and people of color wound up doing behind-the-scenes work. Unfortunately, trusting that individual managers will assign work fairly doesn’t always yield the best results.
Taking on more housework to try to advance your career while a colleague works on a single glamour project will leave you tired and stressed, with less time to work on things that may raise your own profile.
Some of the best methods to manage our workloads and our careers can be locked off to marginalized people, mostly because of the way we’re perceived by other people.
That shouldn’t be the case. However, until that changes, here are some ways that women and people of color can cope.
Trust your gut: Don’t get gaslit
Unfair treatment in the workplace often comes in the form of “microaggressions” — subtle actions that undermine a person and are often explained away by forgetfulness, ignorance, or anything but the malice that usually inspired them. (Like the colleague who conveniently decided he deserved credit for my work, for example.)
When people who have been treated this way decide to speak up about it, they’re usually told to consider the intentions of the aggressor instead of the action, or to consider that maybe the issue isn’t as bad as they think, or not significant enough to warrant corrective action. Worse, they may be told that the event didn’t happen at all.
Whether you think you’re being gaslit by a co-worker trying to get away with treating you poorly, or a boss who would rather not confront bad behavior, trust your experiences and your interpretations of those experiences.
When I asked Ruchika Tulshyan — author of “The Diversity Advantage” and founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy firm — what to do if a co-worker’s bad behavior falls in that gray space between “openly marginalizing you” and “quietly hoarding the best work,” she acknowledged that it’s a tricky situation to address. But providing proof — your own, or someone else’s — can remove doubt.
“One way I’ve seen people navigate this is to collect the data — literally document the number of times you’ve been asked to do the office housework. This does mean that you have to bear through the three, four, five or more times you’ve been asked to order lunch, but once you have that record, it is harder for your manager to argue with it,” she said.
“Also, if possible,” she added, “take note of the instances where colleagues are asked to do glamour work, and who they are.”
Ms. Tulshyan explained that many managers simply aren’t aware of their own biases, and may be open to conversations about them. If your relationship with your manager is otherwise good, maybe a talk will even things out.
“After all, we are all a product of a global society that portrays women as helpful and collegial, and women of color as being naturally predisposed to do the non-glamorous work,” she said. “We default to these stereotypes often without noticing. Being able to show proof that the glamour work is being distributed unfairly can help you make your case more convincingly.”
Similarly, Ms. Tulshyan extolled the benefits of finding colleagues you can speak with candidly. This way you have a sounding board to help you objectively see through your own self-doubt and determine whether you’ve actually been slighted or ignored, or whether you’re being paranoid. This colleague could be someone in the organization, but people outside are a good option as well since they wouldn’t have the baggage of the company’s culture to cloud their perspective.
“It is good to have someone to check in with about that gray space, as it’s easy to talk yourself out of confrontation — you don’t want to risk your job or reputation. But if the situation is serious, it’s necessary to have backup who will remind you why you need to talk about it with your manager.”
“But most of all," Ms. Tulshyan said, “if your instinct tells you nothing will change, I would trust that.”
You don’t have to be twice as good, but you do have to “manage up”
Parents of color have told their children for generations that in a society where racism and discrimination manifest in insidious ways, they need to be “twice as good” to succeed. Statistics often bear that out, showing that to be paid equitably, enjoy the same opportunities for promotion and career advancement, or be seen as equally valid members on a team, that yes, people of color often do have to work twice as hard, or be twice as good at the things they take on.
This also means that employees of color and specifically women, often volunteer for work that’s less glamorous — the office housework — to make a positive impact, or be seen as active and engaged.
Ms. Tulshyan explained that while this drive is well meaning, it can often be counterproductive, and it gives managers cover to ignore their own behaviors and implicit biases when assigning work or handing out opportunities. Your best tool in this case, she said, is learning the fine art of saying no without ruining your career. It takes practice, but being able to point out that you’re working on other priorities or to assert that you’d rather skip one opportunity so you can give yourself a chance to be successful at another is an important skill.
“In my experience, learning to say no comes from practice, or sometimes humor can be handy. Playfully say: ‘All right, I’ll order the lunch this time, but it’s John’s turn next week,’” she said.
“One way I’ve found to be helpful is to ask for more time to think through whether you are available to volunteer for a task. This is especially helpful in larger asks — so if your manager ‘voluntells’ you, you say ‘I’m going to think about this and get back to you.’”
Another important skill to learn is how to “manage up” to your boss. Recognizing quickly whether something is a small or large ask, and how it fits into your personal or team priorities is essential — and asking your boss for clarity on what your team’s priorities are is also essential.
It’s easier said than done, but the bottom line is to discuss your workload and priorities with managers in a way that helps them understand what you’re working on, and helps you decide whether to take on new work.
Ms. Tulshyan noted, however, that for real progress to happen, something has to change from the top down. “Ultimately, if you’re a woman or person of color, you must understand that you won’t be considered ‘twice as good’ when you’re doing the office housework,” she said.
“If anything, it ends up reinforcing existing power dynamics, where the person of color is considered less of a leader if they’re constantly being relegated to doing the non-glamorous tasks. More managers with privilege need to understand this, too — because it’s not a matter of being helpful or a team player if not everyone is expected to help out — just the folks from marginalized backgrounds.”
Beware the lure of “just helping out”
When I asked how employees can identify and avoid those pitfalls, or back out if they’ve overcommitted, Ms. Tulshyan was emphatic. She explained that this is a huge problem, “so much more prevalent for women of color, particularly African-American women, who are constantly fighting negative stereotypes about their perceived behavior and competence.”
“Part of it is learning to, and practicing how to, hold back the urge to constantly volunteer,” she said.
She also suggested that if you feel trapped in a cycle of taking on bad work, or you’ve already committed to helping out and it turned out to be a professional trap, consider working with your manager to set up a rotating system so that work is distributed more fairly among multiple people. Plan for a handoff far in advance, so you know you won’t be pigeonholed into busywork forever.
How to Succeed When You’re Marginalized or Discriminated Against at Work
“Hacking” your work only works if you’re a person who would be congratulated for your ingenuity. If you’re not, here’s what to try instead.
Image
CreditCreditNicole Xu
By Alan Henry
- Published Oct. 1, 2019Updated Oct. 3, 2019
But it was running headlong into someone who held me and my expertise in such low regard — for no other reason than his preconceptions about who I was — that forced me to reckon with the notion that so much popular productivity advice, including some that I’ve dispensed, is accessible only to people who have the option to use it in the first place.
An example: At a previous job, my new boss (he was new, I had been there for years) had been on the job for about two weeks before I met him. In that time, I learned, he had set up meetings with all of my peers to introduce himself. I didn’t get invited to any of those meetings.
It was at a conference, where my colleagues and I each gave a presentation on the teams we led, that I finally walked up to him to introduce myself. Before he gave me his attention, however, he went out of his way to speak to everyone else who passed his view. Politely watching this for about 15 minutes, I knew something was wrong. Eventually my opening came, we spoke for a few seconds, and he was off. That wasn’t the only red flag, but it was the first. I spoke to him once more in passing, and then a third time — until I left the company.
Let’s be real: There’s no use in telling managers that you need help prioritizing your work if they’re convinced “you people” are lazy. Me writing an article that suggests you “spend time growing your skills at work” isn’t helpful if you’re saddled with busywork because everyone assumes you’re the “office mom.”
Ultimately, if your boss or co-workers believe that women shouldn’t be in the workplace, or that African-Americans are unmotivated, no “productivity hack” will force them to objectively look at your accomplishments and decisions the way they would employees they view without biases.
That’s the real factor determining whether you can take productivity advice at face value: privilege. Let’s talk about that — who has it and who doesn’t, and what you can do when you don’t.
‘Glamour work’ vs. ‘housework’: Who gets the opportunities matters
I think it was during a meeting where one of my colleagues essentially took credit for all of the work that I did, then described himself as our de facto supervisor, that I realized how firmly I was being marginalized. What really drove it home was that our boss was in the room and didn’t object or clarify.
I could have spoken up, opened myself up to being seen as “angry” or “aggressive” for rebuking him publicly, but I chose to let it pass, hoping he was just talking himself up and that people would see through it.
When that same colleague made sure to assign himself high-profile projects and reject attempts from people outside his circle to get involved, I understood how stark the difference between office “glamour work” and “housework” truly is.
A 2018 story in Harvard Business Review pointed out that women of color in the workplace are asked to do “office housework” — the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep departments and teams humming — more often than white employees. That kind of work rarely raises an employee’s profile, in contrast to “glamour work,” which is highly visible, helps people make a name for themselves and leads to promotions and other career success.
Office housework can be important, but it’s often “someone has to do it” work. It’s organizing schedules so that people can meet instead of actually leading the meeting, or giving presentations to co-workers instead of to an industry conference.
Another story in Harvard Business Review, also published in 2018, encouraged managers to assign work fairly and to intervene when they found that the “superstars” on their teams were hogging glamour work while women and people of color wound up doing behind-the-scenes work. Unfortunately, trusting that individual managers will assign work fairly doesn’t always yield the best results.
Taking on more housework to try to advance your career while a colleague works on a single glamour project will leave you tired and stressed, with less time to work on things that may raise your own profile.
Some of the best methods to manage our workloads and our careers can be locked off to marginalized people, mostly because of the way we’re perceived by other people.
That shouldn’t be the case. However, until that changes, here are some ways that women and people of color can cope.
Trust your gut: Don’t get gaslit
Unfair treatment in the workplace often comes in the form of “microaggressions” — subtle actions that undermine a person and are often explained away by forgetfulness, ignorance, or anything but the malice that usually inspired them. (Like the colleague who conveniently decided he deserved credit for my work, for example.)
When people who have been treated this way decide to speak up about it, they’re usually told to consider the intentions of the aggressor instead of the action, or to consider that maybe the issue isn’t as bad as they think, or not significant enough to warrant corrective action. Worse, they may be told that the event didn’t happen at all.
Whether you think you’re being gaslit by a co-worker trying to get away with treating you poorly, or a boss who would rather not confront bad behavior, trust your experiences and your interpretations of those experiences.
When I asked Ruchika Tulshyan — author of “The Diversity Advantage” and founder of Candour, an inclusion strategy firm — what to do if a co-worker’s bad behavior falls in that gray space between “openly marginalizing you” and “quietly hoarding the best work,” she acknowledged that it’s a tricky situation to address. But providing proof — your own, or someone else’s — can remove doubt.
“One way I’ve seen people navigate this is to collect the data — literally document the number of times you’ve been asked to do the office housework. This does mean that you have to bear through the three, four, five or more times you’ve been asked to order lunch, but once you have that record, it is harder for your manager to argue with it,” she said.
“Also, if possible,” she added, “take note of the instances where colleagues are asked to do glamour work, and who they are.”
Ms. Tulshyan explained that many managers simply aren’t aware of their own biases, and may be open to conversations about them. If your relationship with your manager is otherwise good, maybe a talk will even things out.
“After all, we are all a product of a global society that portrays women as helpful and collegial, and women of color as being naturally predisposed to do the non-glamorous work,” she said. “We default to these stereotypes often without noticing. Being able to show proof that the glamour work is being distributed unfairly can help you make your case more convincingly.”
Similarly, Ms. Tulshyan extolled the benefits of finding colleagues you can speak with candidly. This way you have a sounding board to help you objectively see through your own self-doubt and determine whether you’ve actually been slighted or ignored, or whether you’re being paranoid. This colleague could be someone in the organization, but people outside are a good option as well since they wouldn’t have the baggage of the company’s culture to cloud their perspective.
“It is good to have someone to check in with about that gray space, as it’s easy to talk yourself out of confrontation — you don’t want to risk your job or reputation. But if the situation is serious, it’s necessary to have backup who will remind you why you need to talk about it with your manager.”
“But most of all," Ms. Tulshyan said, “if your instinct tells you nothing will change, I would trust that.”
You don’t have to be twice as good, but you do have to “manage up”
Parents of color have told their children for generations that in a society where racism and discrimination manifest in insidious ways, they need to be “twice as good” to succeed. Statistics often bear that out, showing that to be paid equitably, enjoy the same opportunities for promotion and career advancement, or be seen as equally valid members on a team, that yes, people of color often do have to work twice as hard, or be twice as good at the things they take on.
This also means that employees of color and specifically women, often volunteer for work that’s less glamorous — the office housework — to make a positive impact, or be seen as active and engaged.
Ms. Tulshyan explained that while this drive is well meaning, it can often be counterproductive, and it gives managers cover to ignore their own behaviors and implicit biases when assigning work or handing out opportunities. Your best tool in this case, she said, is learning the fine art of saying no without ruining your career. It takes practice, but being able to point out that you’re working on other priorities or to assert that you’d rather skip one opportunity so you can give yourself a chance to be successful at another is an important skill.
“In my experience, learning to say no comes from practice, or sometimes humor can be handy. Playfully say: ‘All right, I’ll order the lunch this time, but it’s John’s turn next week,’” she said.
“One way I’ve found to be helpful is to ask for more time to think through whether you are available to volunteer for a task. This is especially helpful in larger asks — so if your manager ‘voluntells’ you, you say ‘I’m going to think about this and get back to you.’”
Another important skill to learn is how to “manage up” to your boss. Recognizing quickly whether something is a small or large ask, and how it fits into your personal or team priorities is essential — and asking your boss for clarity on what your team’s priorities are is also essential.
It’s easier said than done, but the bottom line is to discuss your workload and priorities with managers in a way that helps them understand what you’re working on, and helps you decide whether to take on new work.
Ms. Tulshyan noted, however, that for real progress to happen, something has to change from the top down. “Ultimately, if you’re a woman or person of color, you must understand that you won’t be considered ‘twice as good’ when you’re doing the office housework,” she said.
“If anything, it ends up reinforcing existing power dynamics, where the person of color is considered less of a leader if they’re constantly being relegated to doing the non-glamorous tasks. More managers with privilege need to understand this, too — because it’s not a matter of being helpful or a team player if not everyone is expected to help out — just the folks from marginalized backgrounds.”
Beware the lure of “just helping out”
When I asked how employees can identify and avoid those pitfalls, or back out if they’ve overcommitted, Ms. Tulshyan was emphatic. She explained that this is a huge problem, “so much more prevalent for women of color, particularly African-American women, who are constantly fighting negative stereotypes about their perceived behavior and competence.”
“Part of it is learning to, and practicing how to, hold back the urge to constantly volunteer,” she said.
She also suggested that if you feel trapped in a cycle of taking on bad work, or you’ve already committed to helping out and it turned out to be a professional trap, consider working with your manager to set up a rotating system so that work is distributed more fairly among multiple people. Plan for a handoff far in advance, so you know you won’t be pigeonholed into busywork forever.
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