Ambition in Black + White. Melinda Marshall

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      Black Women Are Invisible

      At the close of 2014, Lorraine,* a regional director at a medical device manufacturer with twenty years of experience supervising her firm’s top accounts, approached her boss to talk about the opportunities he saw for her in 2015. It wasn’t that she was unhappy, she explained: she took pride in her work, in the relationships she’d built, and in the value she delivered. But she’d been in her current role for six years, and hungered for new opportunities to grow and learn. She’d watched as her peers took on assignments that put them on track for profit-and-loss positions with strategic oversight. She wanted that responsibility; her track record, she pointed out, was impeccable in terms of leading teams to exceed revenue targets. She wanted to be put in charge of a business unit and report directly to the CEO. And if that was not in the cards, she wanted to know what the firm had in mind for her—which succession plan she fit into.

      Her boss heard her out, and then said, “Lorraine, you’ve reached a milestone you probably never imagined. You’re among the top two percent of people here who make over two hundred thousand dollars a year. Do we really need to talk about what you haven’t yet achieved? The milestones you haven’t met?”

      The meeting was clearly over. Lorraine forced a smile to her lips, thanked him for his time, and retreated to her desk shaking with suppressed fury. “I was beside myself,” she admits, recollecting the exchange. “Would he have said such a thing to a man? Why is it, when you ask for things as a black woman, you’re made to feel you should apologize for asking?”

      Lorraine has given herself a time frame: if in six months she hasn’t been given a stretch assignment or other growth opportunity, she’s going to leave the firm. “I would be interested in running a small company,” she confides. “I’ve got the track record; I just need to get over my doubts.”

      At the same time, however, she’s dismayed at the prospect of having to leave a company where she’s built a significant book of business and proven her leadership skills. “I’ve seen this company take a risk on certain people—some white women, some black men—because maybe they will work out,” she reflects. “So why not me? I know they’re comfortable with what I do and how I do it. Why not give me a chance? What have I been proving for the last twenty years, if not that I can be relied on to help grow this company?”

      Stuck and Stalled

      In corporate America, black women hammer at the glass ceiling, but rarely break through. Despite their fierce ambition (91 percent consider themselves ambitious), black women are more likely than white to say they feel stalled in their careers (44 percent vs. 30 percent). Less than half (45 percent) are satisfied with their rate of advancement. They stick firmly in the marzipan layer right below top management—if they even reach it—in sight of the C-suite but seemingly not in the sights of those who occupy it.

      Why? Why, as Lorraine asks, aren’t qualified black women given a chance to run the company?

      Conscious and Unconscious Bias

      We cannot overlook, among the myriad reasons our research uncovers, the role that bias plays. Unconscious bias—or even conscious bias—tortures the career path of both black and white women, from the very first step. A job opening may not be shared with them; their application may receive less attention based on their gender alone; their qualifications may be assessed absent objective guidelines; their skills may be deemed appropriate for only limited job functions; their performance may be assessed on an unlevel playing field, where they’ve been given the most difficult clients or least likely sales prospects. While multinationals proclaim and enforce rigorous antidiscrimination policies, bias persists at all levels, because rarely is it overt enough to be deemed outright discrimination.

      That’s true for all women. But black women experience bias for both reasons of gender and race. To those in power (overwhelmingly, white men), black women are particularly invisible.

      One executive and business advisor offers an example. At the consultancy where she used to work, she watched her boss repeatedly offer the lead role on new business to a colleague of hers—a white male whom she had hired to help her execute a massive cost reduction project for a multimillion-dollar client. “My boss simply couldn’t remember that it was my leadership, my work, and not that of the guy I’d hired and promoted while I was doing it,” she says. “He’d look me straight in the eye and say, ‘Why don’t we put Tom on this new account? He did such a great job with that cost reduction project.’”

      One senior vice president and executive editor at a big cable network likewise describes a phenomenon that occurred with some frequency early in her career as a broadcast journalist—before she had won the backing of powerful leaders at the news channel. “During editorial meetings in the early nineties,” she recalls, “I noticed that sometimes if I were to say, ‘Let’s do A,’ the room would continue in its discussion. I’d hear that idea of mine coming out of someone else’s mouth. And then the room would hear it, understand it, and get behind it.” She adds, “Initially I thought it was race related. Then I began to think it was not only race related but also gender related.”

      Even when black women insist that leaders acknowledge their contribution, recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into opportunity. “I feel like I’m always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” says Nichelle,* a twenty-year veteran of her firm. “My performance reviews have been uniformly outstanding: I could run every one of our leadership programs, and my exposure to leaders is crafted very strategically. But despite being supported, I’m not promoted.” She adds, “This leaves me to surmise that the only things preventing my advancement are my color, size, and shape. I don’t know what’s said about me behind closed doors, but I look around and see that the females who get the promotions are usually white and regardless of race, are almost always cute and petite. And I have to wonder, as a big girl over fifty, what my chances here really are.”