Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible

An unintended consequence of my ‘twice as good’ mindset has been that slowly but surely over the years I have turned into an insufferable go-getter. Even though I didn’t always have the right support in school, I knew I wanted to do well, so once I decided to commit to something, I was unstoppable, and I would always try to give myself a competitive edge in everything I did. So when most kids went to school only on weekdays, I attended Saturday school, too. When my friends had their lunch breaks, I assisted with the school’s fairtrade stall, and when I had my first internship I was the first to put myself forward for the position of chairwoman of the corporate social-responsibility committee.

It instilled a work ethic in me that meant I never wanted to take anything for granted. Friends from Warwick tell me they suffered from the same overachieving addiction: from volunteering to be playground prefects to taking Duke of Edinburgh Awards, to attending after-school debating clubs. By the time they were teenagers they had assembled an impressive roster of extra-curricular activities. It is now more apparent to me than ever that we didn’t just end up where we are out of luck: it is the result of a concerted effort over time. Some of us had challenges at school that we had to climb above, navigating the high expectations of our parents and sometimes the low expectations of our teachers.

ITV’s Charlene White became the first black woman to present News at Ten in 2016: a seat predominantly occupied by white men since the show’s inception in 1967. Despite, understandably, viewing it as a burden, the journalist and news anchorwoman credits having to work ‘twice as hard’ throughout her 20-year career in the industry as the reason she is where she is today.

‘Well, I was always raised – as I’m sure everybody else that you’ve spoken to has been – to work twice as hard as your neighbour. So at school I had to work twice as hard as the kid next to me, I had to do the same thing when I was at university, and I’ve done the same thing within my working life. I don’t know how to do any different, to be honest. So within my first few years of working, I did work placements from the age of 16 – not that anybody told me to do it. At 15, 16, I sent out 50 letters, because email wasn’t a thing then, 50 letters to try to get work experience. I got the Guardian newspaper, and that sort of changed everything, because as a result of being able to get in there for a summer, it then became that much easier to get work placements elsewhere. Then when I was working at the BBC, I was working across six different networks at the BBC, so Radio 1 and 1Xtra as a staff member, but then freelancing having my own show on BBC London. I was presenting the 60 seconds news on BBC Three and I was presenting the entertainment news on the BBC News channel. I was presenting bulletins on 5 Live, and I was presenting the early morning half-hour news before Wake Up to Money on 5 Live as well – I was just essentially working seven days a week with double and triple shifts.

‘I know for a fact that there’s absolutely no way in the world that I’d have got to where I am now, at this age, had I not done all of those things. And yes, there’ll be lots of people who haven’t had to do any of that stuff, at all, and yes, that does annoy me. I hope that when I have kids and they’re in the working environment, they don’t have to go over quite so many different hurdles. I had no one in my family who worked in telly. And when you’re working alongside people who, literally, it was their dad who insisted that their best mate give them a placement in a TV studio, and that’s how they ended up working in telly, and it’s like – do you know how hard I had to work in order to be able to get here? I didn’t have that luxury. And it’s also the understanding, and I don’t think people always understand it, so I actually sat down with a friend of mine and tried to explain it to him, because he was like, “Yes, but just because, you know, I had a parent who worked in telly, yes, that was an introduction, but I have worked really hard in my career in order to be able to get to where I am,” and I said, but what you don’t understand is how hard it is to just walk through the door of a newspaper, or of a TV studio, or a news studio, when you know no one. That is the hard bit. So when you’re able to do that, then I’m afraid we haven’t come from the same part, or same perspective, or the same situation in any shape or form.’

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A rose by any other name may leave you unemployed

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Some may not accept this ‘twice as good’ notion as fact, but the statistics speak for themselves. You’ve probably heard the following: men apply for a job when they meet only 60 per cent of the qualifications, but women only apply if they meet 100 per cent of them. As an ethnic minority, even when you do meet 100 per cent of the job description, you worry that it might not be enough and that you will still face discrimination. In 2012, an All-Party Parliamentary Groups report warned that ethnic minority women are discriminated against at ‘every stage’ of the recruitment process.

The report revealed discrimination against names and accents, which made it much harder for ethnic minority women to get responses to applications. Interestingly, some found markedly better results when they changed their names to ‘disguise their ethnicity’.

People with ‘white English’ names were 74 per cent more likely to get called for an interview following a job application than candidates with an ethnic minority name, despite the two candidates having exactly the same qualifications.

During a speech in 2015, the then Prime Minister David Cameron appeared shocked by a practice that is a shrug-worthy reality for most minorities. ‘Do you know that in our country today,’ he gasped, ‘even if they have exactly the same qualifications, people with white-sounding names are nearly twice more likely to get call-backs for jobs than people with ethnic-sounding names?’ Well, yes. We do.

‘One young black girl had to change her name to Elizabeth before she got any calls to interviews. That, in twenty-first-century Britain, is disgraceful,’ he continued.

Disgraceful indeed. Surprising? Not in the slightest. The young black girl Cameron referred to wasn’t me, but it might as well have been. Trying twice as hard on my job applications is something I’ve become accustomed to. When I first graduated there was one particular marketing job at an ultra-posh investment management firm in Mayfair that I really wanted. Even though I was confident about my credentials and I felt I met the criteria, I knew it might not be enough. Before I clicked submit on my application I took one last look at their website. I went on the ‘management team’ section and saw a sea of white, mainly male faces staring back at me. This tipped me over the edge. These days you expect most companies to hide their lack of diversity and wheel out at least one person of colour, but this company were so unapologetically white. I read over my CV again and 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’ (#uddc28587-a4fe-5f04-81f4-fa6c27447ca9)).

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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,

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.

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’.

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 one. So it’s like looking at nothing – the next level isn’t visible. Just as Malorie Blackman and Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock spoke of the need for role models for school children to aspire to, so this need continues into the workplace.

Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t always a concrete ceiling. There are some black women in leadership roles who have brilliantly navigated the complexities of being both black and a woman in the workplace. Look at the sheer number of black women we have interviewed who have not only smashed the glass – and concrete – ceilings but who now dominate in their fields. But for many of us, when we first enter a workplace we often discover unwritten rules for getting ahead that we struggle to understand, let alone follow, and therefore, unlike our white male or female counterparts, we can’t hit the ground running, even with all the enthusiasm and ambition in the world. We often find ourselves shut out of the informal networks that help white men and women find jobs, mentors and sponsors, and through no fault of our own, we then fail to navigate these spaces successfully – which explains the feelings of career stagnation and frustration as evidenced in the Race at Work Report.

But surely the recent attention that has been given to issues of diversity in the workplace is helping to bring down this ceiling? Well, not exactly. Despite all the talk of diversity that has been happening over the last couple of years, it looks like black women have been sidelined yet again. Noticeably, when there is a drive to get women into prominent positions in business, it tends to end up being just one kind of woman. If I had a pound for every time I went to a diversity panel only to find it made up of white men and women talking about how to increase diversity, but really actually only meaning that the door should be widened to let white women in, I would be a millionaire.

It can be all too easy to hold up gender as the symbol for diversity in an organisation, and we have centred white women on the diversity agenda in the same way we have centred white working-class boys in the educational attainment debate. But diversity is about much more than just gender, and we shouldn’t be amalgamated into the same monolithic talent pool. For far too long, black women’s aspirations in the UK have not been part of the conversation. The sooner we realise this the sooner we can have richer conversations about it and work together to come up with practical solutions to the problem.

Research in 2014 revealed that the gap at management level between BAME people and white people is not only disproportionate to their representation but also still widening.

It therefore came as a big surprise when the Tesco chairman John Allan warned that white men are becoming ‘endangered species’ on UK boards: ‘For a thousand years, men have got most of these jobs; the pendulum has swung very significantly the other way now and will do for the foreseeable future, I think. If you are a white male – tough – you are an endangered species and you are going to have to work twice as hard.’

This, from a white man who sits alongside eight other white men and three white women on Tesco’s board … It came as no surprise that research in 2017, conducted by the Guardian and Operation Black Vote, found that Britain’s most powerful elite is 97 per cent white. Proportionally, there should be 136 BAMEs in The 1,000 power list. There are just 36. It gets worse when divided along gender lines, as less than a quarter of those BAME positions of power are occupied by women.

Ultimately, helping black women progress in their careers at the same rate as their white counterparts is both the right thing to do and the profitable thing to do. It could add £2 billion to the UK economy each year, according to a government review.

The author of the report, businesswoman Ruby McGregor-Smith, said, ‘The time for talk on race in the workplace is over, it’s time to act. No one should feel unable to reach the top of any organisation because of their race.’ When you feel things aren’t fair you are more likely to feel resentful and therefore disengaged at work. Treating all women in the workplace as if we face the same challenges within this diversity agenda is ineffective. Organisations need to take bold and crucial steps to remove the systematic discrimination that has been allowed to run rife.

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The invisibility vs. visibility problem: Now you see me, now you don’t

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In order to ensure that black women don’t regard their careers as concrete dead ends, we need to understand the subtle, and at times concealed, challenges we face upon entering the professional environment: challenges that can stop us from progressing and breaking through the glass (and concrete) ceiling.

Firstly, there is the invisibility/visibility problem. This is twofold. By virtue of being a double minority you are very visible: you stick out like a unicorn, and this is reinforced by microaggressions that frequently remind you you’re the ‘other’. But ‘being seen’ isn’t as straightforward as you might think, because with this visibility comes more scrutiny. Dawn Butler explains how the double-edged sword comes into play: ‘As black women, you are both visible and invisible. If you ever do anything wrong, people will always see you as the person who did something wrong. You do something right it’s like, oh well, what do you expect? And so you are both invisible and visible. You can be invisible, looked over for promotion, and you can be visible when they want to blame you for something.’ Simply, if something goes wrong, you become the rule and are judged more harshly, but if you do something well, you’re seen as the exception.

In order to progress in your career, you need to be visible, to do good work and be seen as leadership material. Yet studies have found that black women are being overlooked and are less likely to be rated in the top two performance-ratings categories, or to be identified as ‘high potential’ at work, compared to white employees. Black women are at an immediate disadvantage in the workplace, because we do not look or sound like the people who overwhelmingly make up the majority of today’s business leaders – white men.

I’ve been incredibly conscious as I progress in my career, of how white and male it is, and increasingly aware that I look nothing like my boss, his boss or his boss. Some might say that doesn’t matter, but I’m inclined to say it does.

I remember one occasion at work when I asked a colleague to send me a new picture for our business-banking brochure: the licence on the one we had was running out so it was time to replace it. The current photo was a stock image of a white man in a suit, looking at his iPad, with a backdrop of a glass office – very clichéd, but it gets the message across, right? My brief to him this time was, ‘Please send me something a little more diverse than this?’ An hour later he sent me an image of another white man, a younger millennial guy this time, wearing business casual wear. Again, I replied, ‘Not what I was thinking, are there any more options?’ I had made up my mind not to specify, and I was intrigued to see what he would come up with. An hour later, he sent me three images: one of a white man looking powerful in a suit (this time he was giving a presentation), one of a black man in a suit in another glass office and one of a white woman in a suit. I went over to his desk and asked, ‘Are these the only stock images available?’ By this point he was obviously irritated, but I was standing over his shoulder and I could see lots of stock images of black women he could have chosen, but he hadn’t.

According to Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, a psychology professor at Columbia University, the same unconscious bias my colleague demonstrated is at play when the average person thinks of a woman leader: ‘the image that comes to their mind is of a white woman – like Sheryl Sandberg. However, If you picture a black leader, you’re more likely to think of a black man than a black woman.’ She continues, ‘Because black women are not seen as typical of the categories “black” or “woman”, people’s brains fail to include them in both categories. Black women suffer from a “Now you see them, now you don’t” effect in the workplace.’

Black women are already leaning in; they want leadership positions but they are being overlooked. When you go to work you just want to do your job to the best of your ability, be appreciated and recognised fairly for it, rather than having to show the world that you’re perfect. We shouldn’t have to be invisible or visible at the whim of other people’s prejudices, but we need to stop fighting that visibility; instead we should try to take advantage of it. ‘Putting our heads down’, hoping our hard work alone will pay off and ‘covering’, downplaying what makes us different, as Yomi discusses in the ‘***Flawless’ chapter, won’t do much for our career progression.

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock says we can turn this visibility into positivity: ‘I’m working in a very white-male-dominated arena, I always think, no matter what I do they’re going to remember me, because there’s only one black female in the room and it’s me. So when I’m in meetings I try to be as positive as possible, I try to make an impact, I want my voice to be heard and I want them to remember me for something positive.’