Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible. Yomi Adegoke
saw that I had proudly mentioned I was a ‘Google Top Black Talent mentee’ in 2012, a programme Google ran as part of their diversity initiatives. I looked back at the website, and then I did the unthinkable: I removed the ‘Black’ from ‘Google Top Black Talent’, so it read; ‘Google Top Talent’. It’s embarrassing now to think I did that, but I was so aware of my blackness and my femaleness and the sharp contrast between me and the management team that I felt I had to do what I could in order to secure an interview. Secure an interview I did.
My experience isn’t unique; I have friends who have admitted to using their English names rather than their Nigerian names on applications, in order to get them past the first pitfalls of recruitment. Such is the insidious nature of the discrimination we encounter that even when black women exit the labour market and opt to set up their own businesses, we still have to get through arduous obstacles before we can emerge on the same playing field as our white counterparts. Dr Clare Anyiam-Osigwe BEM, a multi-award-winning entrepreneur who started her skincare brand, Premae, at the age of 26, resorted to creating an alter ego when she was trying to get her business off the ground:
‘I’ve got my white alias, which is Nina Fredricks, and Nina is my alter ego – she gets me all the jobs, and all the gigs, and all the sales that I can’t get. Being on LinkedIn I discovered that there’s a little bit of a cartel. I would reach out to people – shopping channels. For instance, I’ll give you this story, I was trying to get Premae onto shopping channels, I was inviting people to connect with me – they wouldn’t connect. So I just went to page 100 on Google, found a white chick with blonde hair, ripped off a picture, created a fake profile that she’d only had two jobs, one of them was an unknown company and one of them was me – working at Premae as a wholesale manager – and her name was Nina Fredricks. And I got Nina to write to them. Within minutes they had accepted the friendship, “Yeah, Premae sounds amazing, we’d love to have you come on our show, let’s arrange a buying meeting next week.” So the day before the meeting comes, “Sorry, I’m not going to be able to come, but I’ll send Clare, she’s the founder, she knows everything.” “Oh, no, no, no, let’s postpone.” “No, no, no, you don’t understand, I’m going to be in Paris for three months launching Premae, so you need to see Clare.” “Okay, okay.”
‘I go in there, I’m nervous, naturally, because I’m thinking, “There’s so much resistance, what have I done to you lot? Why are you doing this to me? Why have I even had to create Nina? What is this all about?” I go there, and I think they just either forgot, or were just so ignorant, didn’t care, but they were just like, “So … How long have you been working for the company?” and I was like, “Wow …” I remember I just leaned back and I said, “Well, I started baking these balms on my kitchen stove in Islington, North London, so I guess the beginning?” and they were like, faces flushed, going red, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, you’re Clare, Clare the founder … Right …” and then it becomes defensive: “So, where did you study? What do you know about beauty? Why are you here? How did you know this? How did YOU create the world’s first anything? What makes you special?” – And I just said, you know, “I’m an allergy sufferer, it’s my basic formulations,” and at that point we’d gone out to over 200,000 homes through Glossybox and Birchbox, so we had got all these beautiful testimonials. “Hence the reason you want to see us, right? Because you’ve seen the brand. That’s my work, that’s what I do.” So one of the buyers has a brother with eczema, so she said, “Well, you know, my brother could really do with this product, I think the UK needs to see this product. So I’m really in,” and [she] was sort of looking at the other woman like, “We’re in, aren’t we?” and she was just like, “Still trying to process!” What? Because we could probably be the same age and she’s looking at me thinking, “I’ve just got a desk job and here you are, an entrepreneur, creating a whole establishment, and I just can’t, my brain won’t allow me to accept that as real.”’
Alter egos can be fun to create, the operative word being fun – just look at Beyoncé’s Sasha Fierce, she kills it every time she hits the stage. However, they shouldn’t be born out of frustration because of the blatant discrimination that black women come across when they try to progress in their careers.
Reviewing applications without the details of name and gender would be a positive step in broadening opportunities for people of ethnic minority backgrounds. But while David Cameron was able to persuade some companies – including the NHS, Deloitte, the BBC and the civil service – to allow job applicants to hide their names, only a handful of universities agreed to assess 2017 entry applications with the names of students blanked out. His plan for all university applications to be name-blind from 2017 was rejected by all the other academic institutions in the UK (see ‘Black Faces in White Spaces’).
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‘The only thing that separates women of colour from anyone else, is opportunity.’
Viola Davis
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One of the most common explanations for the gender gap in leadership positions is the notion that women aren’t as ambitious as men. So despite the three waves of feminism, apparently the real reason why FTSE 100 companies are run by white men is that women don’t have the same aspirations. Hilarious, right? Let’s debunk that myth: black women want to succeed in their careers and they don’t lack the ambition to do so. In fact, according to a report by an American-based think-tank,7 while just 8 per cent of white American women aspire to a powerful position at work, 22 per cent of black American women (a similar percentage to that of white men) aspire to a powerful role and are significantly more ambitious. The study’s authors found that ‘Black women are more likely than white women to perceive a powerful position as the means to achieving their professional goals and are confident that they can succeed in the role.’ Though there are no identical studies in the UK focusing solely on black women, and while our experiences vary somewhat over here, anecdotal evidence, as well as the 2015 Race at Work Report, suggests we have very similar attitudes towards our careers. It found that in the UK, black people in the workplace have greater ambition than their white colleagues: ambition to progress in their careers was at 72 per cent, in comparison to 41 per cent of white employees.8 However, black people were also the most likely to report feeling stagnated in their careers and to say that their career has ‘failed to meet their expectations’.9 It’s not hard to see why. The fact that black graduates are, on average, paid £4.30 an hour less than white graduates might also have something to do with this.
After President Trump beat Hillary Clinton to the US Presidency, I remember reading a tweet that said, ‘For the first time in history, Hillary Clinton knows what it feels like to be a black woman. You can have 30 years’ experience on a job you are over-qualified for and yet they still pick a white MAN with NO job experience over you.’ Isn’t that the truth?
It is safe to say then that it is not a lack of ambition, or their attitude, that holds back black women in the workplace. So what is the barrier that thwarts their ambition to a point where they feel less valued and inspired after only a few years at work? The concrete ceiling, that’s what.
Whereas white women experience career anxiety about the glass ceiling – the informal yet impermeable barriers that keep women from getting promotions or moving on to the next stage of their careers – for black women this ceiling can sometimes feel like it’s made of concrete. While glass may be tough, at least you can smash it. If you’ve ever dropped your iPhone you can relate to the painful sound of glass shattering against the concrete floor. However, the concrete ceiling faced by black women is even tougher to break down, and practically impossible to break through by yourself.
With glass, you can see through it to the level above and you know that there is something there to aspire to. If you can see it, you can achieve it, right? Concrete, on the other hand, is impossible to see through. There is no visible destination, just what seems like a dead end. You can’t see a black woman partner because, most likely, there isn’t