How White Co-Workers Can Derail Black Women's Careers

A Harvard study reveals that Black women are uniquely and negatively affected when there is a higher percentage of white people in the workplace early in their careers.

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When Donald Trump spoke before the joint session of Congress last week, he made sure to hammer home the point that he is against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

DEI has become Trumpspeak for nigger, and he is the poster child for rampant and open anti-Blackness in America. He is doing everything in his power to make the entire country anti-Black.

"We've ended the tyranny of so-called 'diversity, equity and inclusion' policies all across the entire federal government and indeed the private sector and our military," he said in his speech last Tuesday.

He also said people “should be hired based on skill and talent, not race and gender.”

Trump has redefined DEI to fit a white supremacist narrative, and he is using rote learning — the standard in the U.S. education system — to make sure everyone else (read: white people) misunderstands the concept of what DEI truly means to suit his agenda.

If I never hear the phrase “DEI hire” out of the mouth of a white person again, it won’t be soon enough.

The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion means that a person is being hired simply because they are Black is patently false, and Trump and everyone working with him knows that.

The truth is, even with DEI initiatives in place, the person most likely to get a job is not Black; it’s white women, but you won’t hear Trump or any of his cronies complaining about that.

Here’s why this matters.

Recent research from Harvard Kennedy School shows just how much having white co-workers negatively impacts the careers of Black women in the workplace.

In “Intersectional Peer Effects at Work: The Effect of White Coworkers on Black Women’s Careers,” researchers Elizabeth Linos, Sanaz Mobasseri, and Nina Roussille studied the impact of having more white co-workers on Black women in the workplace — analyzing the role having a majority of white co-workers played in the ability of Black women to get promoted or even stay with the same company over a longer period.

They found that Black women who begin their careers working around a higher percentage of white co-workers are more likely to leave their jobs and less likely to get promoted.

This means that even when Black women are hired — and best believe, they have to go above and beyond to prove that they are “worthy” of being hired — they are not set up for success in the workplace in the same way that their white counterparts are.

The study analyzed 9,000 new hires from 2014-2020, tracking who got promoted, who left the company, promotion evaluations, and key indicators of success, among other things.

“We can see how results differ by the race and gender of a given new hire. Our main analysis measures how working with more or fewer white co-workers at the beginning of a new hire’s career affects promotion and turnover at the firm,” Mobasseri told Forbes magazine.

“When Black women start their careers working with more white co-workers in this firm, they are less likely to stay at the company and less likely to get promoted. Specifically, our study found that increasing a Black woman's share of white co-workers by about 20% at the start of her job leads to her being 16% more likely to leave the company and 12% less likely to get promoted. This effect was unique to Black women—we don’t see similar effects for other employees.”

This is why DEI matters. This is why the demonizing of DEI is harmful. This is why getting rid of DEI initiatives will have a long-lasting effect on Black people as a whole and Black women specifically.

Linos told Forbes, “One clear avenue through which these results emerge is through performance evaluations. Our data shows that when a Black woman has more white co-workers early in her career, she is more likely to be labeled a low performer at her performance evaluations. We also see that she is more likely to log more training hours.”

Lower performance evaluations. More training hours. These things are happening not because the Black woman is unskilled or bad at her job; it’s happening because implicit bias puts Black women under a microscope that their white counterparts don’t examine. They are expected to hit a higher threshold of accomplishment and performance than those around them.

Linos told Forbes something we know to be true.

“When you parse out results by race and gender, the key findings become clear: the experience of being a Black woman in a predominantly white, high-wage firm is different than that of other groups—even other people of color. The race of your co-workers shouldn’t matter at all for whether or not you get promoted, or whether you leave the firm. It certainly shouldn’t affect how you are evaluated in your performance evaluations. But these results are in line with existing research on the double disadvantage that Black women face at work.”

Diversity is just one part of the DEI equation. Equity is also important. As Janice Gassam Asare — the author of the Forbes article — notes, “Organizations and institutions must take deliberate action to ensure that their workplaces are built on equity and fairness.”

Linos echoes that sentiment.

“Focusing solely on recruitment and selection initiatives to solve diversity challenges at work is likely not enough. There’s no point investing heavily in diversifying your applicant pool if an organization isn’t also paying close attention to what’s happening at work that might affect retention.”

Black women face inequities in everyday life. DEI initiatives in the workplace help ensure the playing field is at least somewhat even for them.

When you work to eradicate these initiatives, you are making a firm commitment to white supremacy, institutionalized racism and misogynoir.