Check the Label
Monica Palacios, the famous comic and writer, has navigated various labels over the course of her career. On stage, Palacios riffs: “When I was born, I was of Mexican-American persuasion. Then I became Chicana. Then I was Latina. Then I was Hispanic. Then I was a Third World member (my mom loved that). Then I was a woman of color. Now I’m just an Amway dealer. And my life is happening.”
Her comments are in jest but the underlying meaning rings true: unique identities are blurred when society puts a label on an entire group. But a person’s gender, race and sexual orientation are part of his or her identity—part of what makes a person valuable to an employer.
“For whatever reason, people assume I am black, but I am also Latina,” a bi-racial friend told me recently. “When a Latina group was forming at my company, no one even asked me if I wanted to join it!”
Recognizing the fact that broad labels can unintentionally exclude some individuals, Catalyst recently renamed one of our main research areas. The areas formerly called Women of Color in the U.S. and Visible Minorities in Canada are now called Diverse Women & Inclusion. Deeper layers of identity among women—especially in global contexts—can involve class, sexual orientation, caste, disability, nationality, and immigrant status. The new term Diverse Women & Inclusion was intended to cover all of these particular factors in a more sensitive and inclusive way.
And that’s what it’s all about.
Careless labels can engender blatant stereotyping. More than a decade ago, Catalyst released a groundbreaking report on the way managers perceive women from diverse backgrounds. Latinas reported being stereotyped as lazy or too focused on family, citing managers who consistently underestimated their talents and capabilities because they spoke English with an accent. Black women reported facing stereotypes about being too direct. They described having to worry about whether the braids in their hair contributed to a perception that they were too radical or too bold. Asian women reported being stereotyped as passive “China dolls.”
In more recent Catalyst research, LGBT women discussed various dimensions of discrimination in Canada. “As a lesbian woman, I have sometimes had to fend off occasional stereotypes of lesbian women as all butch and muscular and ungainly—I’m none of these,” said one employee. Roughly a quarter of the LGBT women reported that their manager was not comfortable interacting with them.
These attitudes may explain why diverse women are so poorly represented at the top in Fortune 500 companies. In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available diverse women held 1.7% of corporate officer positions and only 1.0% of top earner positions. I’ve talked a lot about the glass ceiling, but for diverse women the ceiling is concrete. To fix this, workplaces need to embrace, develop and leverage their diverse workforce.
Catalyst is committed to representing the full spectrum of women worldwide. To do so, we’ve updated our own labels. The question is: are you working to change yours?
Tags: Asian, Black, Diverse Women, Fortune 500, Latina, LGBT, race, stereotypes
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under Diverse Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 10th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
This is both interesting and painfully obvious – as a Jewish woman working in finance in some ways I’m somewhat stereotypical (if you haven’t heard the more than a little nasty jokes about Jews and money you can Google them), and totally bizarre, since women, in general, don’t work in finance.
I defy that every day when I get up, get dressed, and go to work, and do what I do as best I can. I don’t know if it’s enough to break the glass ceiling that definitely exists, but I’m trying.