Women at Work - Sisterhood Is Scarce

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

We hold ourselves back when we let differences like race or class divide us from other women. We talk about the very different experiences and professional relationships black and white female managers had in 1970s and 1980s corporate America, and how workplace sisterhood is still in short supply. Guests: Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. We've talked a lot on this show about the problems we women deal with throughout our careers. The gender age wage gap, male colleagues who interrupt us, sexual harassment, dead-end work. But we haven't talked enough about the problems we create for other women by ignoring them or looking past them. Like if we're white and we keep our relationship with a woman of color in our office to just a passing smile in the hallway. Or second guess her decision in public. Or when we don't stand up for her or advocate for her or sponsor her.

When we, whether we realize it or not, raise the barriers to her advancement. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. And I'm Nicole Torres. This episode is the first of a two-part conversation about sisterhood and how we still have a ways to go when it comes to supporting one another. You know, we keep saying women. Well, no group of women are monolithic.

Everybody has a different experience. That's Ella Bell-Smith. She's a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Just to put it bluntly, because I see it in South Africa, white male power would prefer to deal with a white woman than to deal with a black woman. That's Stella Nkomo. She's a professor at the University of Pretoria. Back in the mid-1990s, Ella and Stella plunged into an eight-year research project. They wanted to learn about the lives and career struggles of Black and white women who had made it in corporate America, how they got there, and what they experienced in the 1970s and 80s as the first wave of female managers. They surveyed over 800 women and did in-depth interviews with 120. They asked the women they interviewed about their childhood with questions like,

what supports were there for you in high school? What obstacles? They talked to them about their early adulthood, asking what kinds of personal sacrifices have you had to make to get to where you are today? They also interviewed them about their relationships with others. They asked black women, would you say that you are particularly close to any of the white women colleagues in your company? And they asked white women the reverse. Ella and Stella turned the stories the women told them into a book called Our Separate Ways. Harvard Business School Press published it in 2001, and it's become a classic on intersectionality. Lo and behold, the same stories that we told, what, how long ago now? 20 years maybe? Are still alive and well and kicking, but with a whole new group of women. Which is why we wanted to talk to them, to hear the chapter of women's history they documented back then,

and to hear how gender, race, and social class still affect women's work relationships and experiences today. Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo, welcome. What made you want to study how black women and white women relate in the corporation? What were you seeing out there in the world? Two reasons. In the 80s, in the 70s, after the women's movement, there were very few women in corporate America. And people were just beginning to write about that experience. But what Ella and I noticed from different vantage points was that people were talking about women in management, but they weren't talking about black women or women of color. Everything that was being written was primarily about white women, and it was as if black women didn't exist or they weren't there. So one issue was the invisibility

of black women in these discussions and thinking about the experiences of women in management and leadership positions in corporate America. And then, of course, our own personal experience. We knew what we were experiencing. So we began to think, what are other women experiencing? How come their stories are not being told? So that was part of the motivation to kind of fill that void. But to tell you the truth, and Ella can pick up on this part of the story, our intent was to tell the stories of black women in corporate America. We didn't set out to necessarily study the relationships between black and white women in corporate America. Right, Ella? We wanted to look at all women.

We wanted to look at Hispanic women. We wanted to look at Asian women. We wanted to look at Hispanic women. We wanted to look at Asian women. So we wanted to really look at every group of female, with the exception of white women, because there's so much out there. So we wanted to tell their stories. So we put in a grant to the Rockefeller Foundation and to the Ford Foundation. And what was interesting, the feedback that we got from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation was, you can't look at all these groups. You know, there's just two of you. We said we would put a research team together. But, you know, we'd like you to focus on black men and black women.

And I pushed back. He said, you know, why do we always contrast? Because they wanted to know what the sexism was. And I said, well, wait a minute. I want to know what the racism is. I said, so I want to do white women. And they looked at us as if we were crazy. And I looked at Stella and I said, it's not black men.

It's white women. Because we had had enough experiences, at least let me talk for myself, I had had enough experiences where trying to build a relationship, a professional relationship with white women in graduate school was not easy. I mean, it was competitive. It was, you know, do as I say. It wasn't collegial. It wasn't warm. It wasn't supportive. It was anything but that. So I was really curious about, well, what was this relationship like between black and white women? And I had heard enough in terms of my consulting work in organizations and companies, that there was no kindred spirit between these two groups. So I wanted to flush that out a little bit more. And Stella did too. We both did. You know, when we looked at each other, it was like, bingo, the light bulb went on. And the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation said, OK, that sounds like an interesting concept because nobody had talked about what the issues were between women in a racial divide.

So before we dive sort of into the research in further detail, I want to just back up and ask a little bit about sort of the high level findings. You know, if you had to kind of summarize the high-level findings of this work, what are sort of the main points that you found? For me, the power of class. One story from the Black community perspective was that you could take a poor girl, I mean, a very poor girl who grew up in the rural South. And while she didn't have food on the table, her mother was sharecropping all day.

She was out in the fields working, too, or cleaning white folks' kitchens to help family out, to put food on the table. She didn't have a sense of shame. She had a principal that, you know, was behind her. She had teachers. She had ministers.amed. Nobody reaches out to her. The principal in her high school tells her, you know, you need to get a job. She's valedictorian of her class. But the principal tells her, you know, you don't have the money. She doesn't have food to eat at lunchtime. So she goes in the library and she reads. Her story is one of shame. Her story is one of humiliation. Her story is one of I'm going to pull myself up by my bootstraps all by myself. So you begin to see what poverty does in a woman's life. You begin to see the power of class. That to me was extraordinarily powerful. managers at that time seemed to be totally oblivious to the structural barriers and the political climate and seeing the organization as a place based on merit. That was striking that if I work hard, I'll be okay in this environment. So this sense that it was a level playing field

and all they had to do was to work hard. And so if you go back to their childhoods, they had much less socialization or education from their families that look, your gender is going to be treated differently. And the black women were buffered from that because they were told by their families, yes, you can be anything you want to be, but you're going to face racism. You're going to be treated differently. So you need to prepare yourself for this. And this became an ongoing difference between the women in terms of how they responded to the corporate environment. So the black women were much more willing to speak out when they saw injustice. They were able to label things as discrimination, whereas the white women were more like, well, it's just

the way a corporation is. You'll have to learn how to fit in with that. And I think that's still one of the problems because one of the strategies that you hear now from that very popular book, lean in, that women need to do more to fit in and lean in and show up and work hard. I think that kind of idea about how do I become successful was very striking to me. And it's interesting to me that we're still hearing some of that in the advice that's given to women today. So what did you want to happen as a result of your research and our separate ways? What was your goal? I think we had a lot. That's a good question. I think we had a lot of goals, a lot of dreams, a lot of dreams and a lot of goals. So one goal

obviously was to make people aware that to understand the experience of women in management, you had to look both at race and gender. You couldn't just talk about gender. I think another goal was that hopefully in the end that this would allow women themselves, particularly white women, to begin to understand that their experiences are not defining the gender issue alone. And that this would get women to become aware of each other and how we differ, depending on our context, depending on our ethnicity and our race, our class. So to raise the awareness of women, and maybe that somehow would help to allow women to become allies in the workplace. And I think the last thing was to get white men who were in power and corporations to begin to really make a commitment to empowering women and to understand that they were part of the problem. Those were some of the hopes.

I'm not sure any of that has happened, but that was the dream. So how did women react to your findings? Oh boy, I'll take that one. Okay. That was fun. The white women, all these questions about, you know, how did you do this research? And how did you analyze this data? And how did you reach this conclusion? And who validated the data for you? women read the book and took it to heart in a very powerful, powerful way. So you'd walk in a room, and if a white woman had read the book, she'd come and she'd hug me, you know, just like, oh, you know, you made me realize things that I never thought about. So you got this kind of mixed result from the white females. But for the black females, it was almost an amen because somebody had finally seen them. Somebody had finally recognized how their journey was different in the corporate world, how their journey was different on how they got experiencing racism, daily doses of racism.

There was one story that just, I don't think I'll ever forget this story. African-American woman in the sales department, and she had just beat everybody out. She had just had a stellar year. And they had, the company had their little celebration or offsite retreat. And, you know, it's Friday night, so everybody's at the bar. And, you know, she's gotten the award. She's finally, she nailed it. And she's with her colleagues. She's the only black female in her group. She's the only female in her group. And one of her male, white male colleagues looked at her and said, yeah, you had a great year. You're a lucky little black bitch, aren't you? What? Whoa. That really

happened. You know, no white female had a comparable story. And I'm not saying that white females don't have this story. The thing that makes the story so alarming to me is that nobody came to her defense. Nobody stood up for her. Nobody said, you know, like, you're way out of line. How could you say that? She was left out there to defend for herself. So we know that women face a glass ceiling as they try to advance in their careers, but you say black women face the additional barrier of a concrete wall. What do you see? What are you talking about there? Okay. We came up with the concept of concrete wall because of the fact glass you can shatter. So much had been written about the glass ceiling in terms of women's advancement in the corporate world and the shattering of it.

And what would it take to shatter it? Having a good sponsor, having job visibility, getting the right assignment, coming in and really proving yourself as a team player and having the right relationships could hopefully shatter the glass ceiling. Concrete, you can't shatter concrete. You can't see what's on the other side. Concrete, you either have to dig under or find a way to climb over or find a way to get around it. And if you don't have the right sponsorship, if you don't have good allies, if you don't have the opportunity, you know, you're not seen. That's the other thing. At least with glass, the other side can see. Concrete, nobody can see you. You're an unknown entity. And you're invisible in terms of the worth and the

contributions and the innovation that you can bring to the table. One woman said it this way, I've been here for many years, but I feel like a guest in someone else's house. That she was never able to shake off that feeling of exclusion and you know I can perform but nobody is seeing it I can't build relationships because nobody really is paying any attention to me you're trapped you can't move either way and what we found in the research was that the way that black women and others have written about this, the way they do advance oftentimes is to leave the company. They stay in the company much more longer to get the visibility, but the way that they get to advance is by going to another company. Then they can get

locked in that same concrete wall reality again. The other thing that's very interesting is that corporations don't do a good job of storytelling. They don't do a good job. Some of them are beginning to, but they definitely don't talk about who was there before you, your historical legacy. So these women are in companies where there have been other senior black women in the past, but because the pipelines are so weak, particularly for women of color, what you see is that they still think they're the very first ones. They don't recognize that, you know, you're about third generation in the corporate reality, number one. Number two, you have a legacy to stand on. You belong. Number three, what's the syndrome that everybody talks about

that you think you're not good enough in and you believe it? Oh, imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, yes. Thank you. You know, they're walking around, well, I have the imposter syndrome. And the reality is, no, your corporation hasn't invited you in. You might have some of the imposter syndrome. But the other thing is, you have not been given the green tag, the go tag, if you will get to see a broader picture. And if they would share that broader picture, their contacts, the vision, the innovation that's going on,

what's hot, what's going on in the company on the cultural level, on the political level, on the strategic level, I think it would help, I know it would help black women and other women of color to advance more quickly. I mean, there's part of a need for a white woman when she is in a position of power in her company to say, where are the other women who don't look like me? Can I add another graphic about that concrete wall, Ella? The other graphic is this, and we heard in our own careers. When a person decides to sponsor someone in an organization, they see it as a risk factor for themselves because if I sponsor you, I need you to be successful. And I think white men and some white women are reluctant to go out on a limb for a black person.

I heard it in my doctoral career after I finished my doctorate. And many years later, one of the people who had decided to let me come in said, we really didn't think you would do it. We really didn't think you'd ever get your PhD. And I think the idea that if I sponsor this black woman, she may not make it. We're seen as a problem. People question your competence. We heard this from the women. You know, I remember the one woman who said, you know, here I am, Chicago MBA, previous experience, and I can see people are reluctant to think that I can do the job.

So presume to be incompetent at a very deep level based on your race and your gender being inferior. And so no one wants to sponsor a person like that. And I think a greater opportunity in terms of the glass ceiling, that white people are not assumed to be inferior because of their race. And I need to say that. This white supremacy is an idea that hasn't gone away and not everybody says it as explicitly but the idea that this black person this black woman i'm not sure that she really is competent and i'm not prepared to go out and take a risk on her. And if there's another opportunity to take a white woman, I'd rather bet on her. That may be harsh, but that's something to think about,

and I think it happens more often than we want to say it. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Thank you. Business School professor, Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from

Madhupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your I'd like to go back to the question of white women's obliviousness. And one of the ways that that really stood out to me in the national survey that you conducted for this project was that 90% of the black women said they had conflicts at work with white women. But only 4% of the white women said they had conflicts with black women. And I'm curious to know what you made of that. Well, I think there's two things that make of it. Well, that tells you right then and there that very difference in perception. But part of it maybe is the fact that more of the black women were likely to be supervised or had white women. But I also think that the white women would have portrayed

themselves, this is my sense of their ability to get along with black women, is sort of like over-inflating their relationship with black women when there really was no relationship for the most part. There was no camaraderie. So most of the time, as some of the black women said, they were ignored by the white women. The white women didn't reach out to them. So we think a lot of it was just a non-existent relationship or affinity. But some of it is this unfortunate thing. And I've had that in my own professional experience where white women that

I may know as an acquaintance and I'll hear from somebody else, they'll say, oh, I'm very close to Stella. I know her very well. And that's not true. So they sometimes claiming relationships that are not really there as a sign to say that, look at me, I'm not racist. It's sort of like that thing, some of my best friends are black. And it's a very superficial thing where you haven't really engaged me at all, but you claim this relationship with me. That was my take on it. The other thing that is interesting, and we see this even today, the affinity groups, you have the women affinity group and then you have the ethnic affinity groups. So you can often go into a corporation and, you know, you go into the women's affinity group.

And I just had this experience last year. And it's nothing but white women sitting around the table. And it's like, okay, where are the women of color in your organization? Oh, well, they go to the African American group or the Hispanic group. Well, have you invited them to the women's group? Because, you know, they are also female. Well, we keep the door open, but they want to go there and it's okay. The opportunities to build relationships, the opportunity to come together, the opportunity to share work experiences, to really be allies with each other, as Stella said, those are not great in the corporate world for women of color and white women. And if a woman of color does go to the quote unquote women's affinity group, those issues are basically going to be regarding white females, their particular work issues, which are often more grounded around work-family issues.

For a white woman, the work-family balance, and for black women it is too, but for an African-American woman, she's trying to get the racism off her back. She wants to deal with work-family issues too, but that experience of oppression is beating her to the ground, oftentimes more so. So the agendas get to be different, if you will. Just building off of that, when your book came out, when this research was out there, did you hear from other women of color, you know, that the experiences and challenges that Black women faced were familiar to other women of color too. I remember going to Google and having a whole room with Asian women. They were in tears. They were absolutely in tears when I talked about what the Black women

experience were having and what their experiences were. And they talked about being so extraordinarily isolated because the Black women weren't connecting with them. Nobody was connecting with them and their isolation and their loneliness and being trapped in the more technical job positions, the technical ghetto and not being seen as potential leaders in the company. Very, very interesting. So everybody has a version of their separate way. And the other thing I found, because when I came to South Africa and women here started reading it, I think the power of the book is the life story approach, because many of the women said, I could see my own story in the stories of those women.

So it seemed to resonate for them, even though the context was somewhat different. But the idea of either growing up poor, growing up wealthy, they could identify with that. So in your book, you wrote that one of the biggest barriers to sisterhood is that black women and white women have these stereotypes about one another can you oh yeah oh yeah that push buttons huh yeah sure did would you would you mind just just sort of describing them quickly and then telling us do they still still hold? Are they still current? Let's start with the mammy for the African-American woman and her as the caretaker. You know, she is the one that solves all the emotional problems. If you have a problem,

you go talk to, another term for that would be big mama. You go talk to big mama. I do still see black women channeled or stereotyped in that way, where they're expected to do the emotional work for the company and not being able to be recognized for all the other contributions, the analytical contributions that they have. The stereotype for black women that really holds so true is the one that's always angry. And I cannot think of her name to save my... Sapphire. Sapphire. Oh, yeah. Thanks to Amorosa, Sapphire is alive and well. I cannot tell you how many times I walk into a company as a consultant

and people will look at me and say, you know, people have brought me in an HR. Well, one of the questions we want you to help us with is why are black women so angry? And I'm like, huh, what's your data? Well, they don't smile. They don't socialize. You know, they kind of keep to themselves. They seem to have a chip on their shoulder. And it's based on what? It's based on what? Because black women are not running around grinning and smiling and, oh, let's have lunch. They're busy trying to do the work that you're giving them and trying to show that they're not there for a social gathering because that's the way they're socialized. So I tell young sisters, oftentimes, I need you just to lighten it all up. Don't come in with your black outfit on. Put some pearls on. Put a colorful scarf on. And don't fold your arms.

So there's a whole way of talking to younger black women so that they can open up in their body language because the assumption is is that black women are angry and that still holds today for white women you know the the the the ice queen i mean lord knows rosabeth canna wrote about that the woman who's out for herself the woman who will run anybody over right the iron maiden i think the iron maiden exactly the snow queen the iron maiden yeah she's been around for a long time i think the one that we talk about that makes white women very uncomfortable is the miss anne the one that's there to do the work for the white male and will sabotage other efforts, particularly women of color, in order to take care of the company. So, Ella, are you saying that the stereotypes are alive? And, well, I hesitate to say well, but are they still there? We won't say they're well. Let's just say they're there. And I think oftentimes we collude. I mean, I can see myself.

I would say that the stereotype I allude at Tuck would often be the mammy. I mean, I have to own it. And when I find myself in it, I get frustrated. The students of color will come to me. I'm like, why are you always coming to me? There are other people who care about you here in this context. Well, you know, and I'm picking the women up you always coming to me? There are other people who care about you here in this context. Well, you know, and I'm picking the women up.

Somebody has a hard day. I go into that over caretaking role. So that means I've got to balance that out with the fact that, you know, I'm still doing scholarly work that has integrity, guys. You know, I'm not just here to be the emotional caretaker. I work very hard not to be the angry black woman, trying not to be the sapphire. Because once you get the sapphire role, it is hard to get that one off of you. It's really, really hard. And you lose points a lot with that one. So I'm very strategic when I do have something to say that's not necessarily all that positive. I have to be very careful about how I present it so that I'm not seen as, you know, the angry black woman. Stella, anything to add to that? No, I think that what you have to understand is that there are perceptions that the women have because we haven't done enough work to really get to know each other and to individualize. I mean, Ella, I was thinking about how often you and I would be confused. People would confuse us. And we are physically very different. Ella is short and very fair skinned. I'm tall and dark and our manners

are quite different. But for the longest time, people would confuse us. So they're talking to me as if I'm Ella and talking to Ella as if she's Stella. And so part of it is, I think, this thing of perception. So for example, the mammy versus the sapphire boils down to something very simple. And I've heard it from white colleagues. If they see you as approachable, they can talk to you. That's the person they prefer. They prefer the mammy for engaging with you. If you speak out, you're militant, you're angry, and you might just be making a point about something. And then in terms of the stereotypes of white women, when black women described those stories to us, it wasn't so much that they were evoking antebellum or slavery images. They were talking more about their interactions with the white women. For example, the Miss Anne, where you think you have a white female colleague and you share something with them, maybe a complaint, some observation. And the next thing you know, that colleague takes it to those in power.

And it comes back to bite you. And so the interpretation is that she's a Miss Anne. She's really protecting the interests of the white males. The stereotypes come from actual behaviors that each group has seen and how they interpret them. So I don't think they've gone away because the behaviors are still there where sometimes black women feel betrayed by a white woman or in fact black women do get angry or they decide as Ella said, she tempers how she engages people because she doesn't want to come across as the angry black woman. So in a sense, we end up enacting the stereotypes. And so they stay alive. They stay alive because we're aware of them. So often we end up enacting them. We've been talking mostly about the experiences of women in the U.S. and Stella,

you've talked a little bit about what you're seeing in South Africa, but can you talk more about, you know, some similarities or differences in women's experiences that you see in South Africa or even more broadly, you know, among women across the world? Okay, that's a big question. We can start small. Okay, okay, I'll start with South Africa, because I've been here for 18 years. In the sense South Africa, the issues are quite similar, but also quite different. They're similar in the sense, you know, apartheid caused a big racial divide. So the, the relationship between black and white women is a difficult one because under apartheid, all women were considered to be minors. They had no legal authority. They

could not act in their own behalf, but that played out differently for black and white women. So middle-class white women protected by the husbands. But for the black women, that meant racism, separation from families, from their husbands, poverty. They could only work as domestics. White women could work as secretaries and cashiers. So that created a divide and white women would have mostly had relationships with black women as their domestic help. So that historically is quite similar to the U.S. But in terms of now, post-apartheid, you have a similar dynamic. If you look at the statistics in South Africa on who holds top leadership positions. White women are doing much better than black women. So white women do get positions more than

black women get them, although black women are a larger percentage of the population. The other thing too is how women here think about feminism and what it means to be a feminist. African women are reluctant to use the term feminist in the way that we use it in the U.S. They feel that too much of how feminism is understood is coming from the Western definition in opposition to men. It's about women fighting men is their interpretation. And people want to talk about the liberation of all people because there's still unemployment, there's still poverty, there's still homelessness. So they want a broader agenda when you talk about feminism than just talking about women's rights.

So one of the things I've learned about the context, women in other countries. So if you think about women in the Middle East or women, Muslim women, that we have to be very sensitive that their context and their life stories and their histories are quite different. And so they get really nervous or upset even if it seems like we want to come and rescue them from the subordination they're feeling from their religion or they're really being persecuted by their men and they should become feminists and they should challenge their men so the sense is that they want to us to be respectful and try to understand their context and not try to impose a western sense of feminism there's many femin, and it differs on the geography. It differs in terms of religion. And if we talk about global sisterhood, that is so critical if women are to align across nations,

that we really have the ability to think out of our own context and not make judgments based on where we come from. So have you seen black women and white women manage to achieve sisterhood? I mean, when sisterhood happens, what's happening there? Oh, you know, it's funny. I teach up at Tuck. I was the first African-American woman in many of these schools, or the second. And I have to say that at this stage in my life, I have very close, dear friends who happen to be white females. And I think one of the things that happens is that in those relationships, we have shared our pain. We have shared our frustration. We have gotten out of trying to be, you know, I'm perfect.

And, you know, my life is just great to, you know, I'm not so perfect. And this is where I messed up. And they can see it. I have a very good colleague, you know, she will come in my office and she said, I saw what they did to you just now. I saw how so-and-so responded to you and you should go say something. I mean, there's a there's a different sense of awareness that I see with the white female friends. I do have they can call it like I can call it around race, around gender, around class. There is a different aptitude around these issues and cultural differences. And I think as I've gotten older, I think I have gotten more compassion as well to understand that their journey, again, is not a cakewalk. And some of their experiences have been hard for them. I was taught resiliency as a kid, as a little black girl. So I know how to

bounce back. A lot of times, some of my white girlfriends, they weren't taught resiliency. So they don't bounce back real well. And I've learned to have compassion on, you know, the bounce back factor. And, you know, here, let me give you a little, what I call a little black girl strength. You need some black girl strength right now. And we laugh about that. And we drink about that, you know, and, you know, we travel about that and go on trips together. And it's really, really quite wonderful. I would say that you really have to be authentic and real. And you've really got to understand what the system is doing to you. And that you accept women where they are, because there's a part of being educated about who we are

as women, what we value, what's important, and to go through that process with each other. I've also seen that in this day and age, when there are more African American women and more minority women, women of color entering the playing field, that the edge of competition is beginning to sharpen amongst them as well. They're not as willing sometimes to embrace and to connect. And, you know, sisterhood is sometimes not all that it's cracked up to be. Well, I really wish we could keep talking about this, but I know we're just about out of time. So I want to thank you for sharing so much of your time with us today and really helping enliven our discussion

around these issues. You're welcome. Well, thank you so much for the engaging conversation and for your questions. Thank you both. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their

business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Well, one of the things that hit me hard was this notion that African-American women feel so isolated in the workplace and aren't forming those incredibly important relationships, the ones that really do

help you learn and help you advance in an organization. That struck me too. I think there are a lot of reasons that we talked about for why like those relationships aren't formed, why they're not forming relationships. So one of those reasons was that women of color, I think they're specifically talking about black women, often they were the first generation like in their families to be in corporate America. And so therefore their focus was on just performing and like doing their job. It wasn't on developing those relationships because no one had told them that that's really important. And that resonated with me because I am the first generation of my family to work in corporate America.

So no one has ever told me, like given me advice for how to like represent myself at work, how to form relationships that would help me, how to find a mentor or a sponsor or advocate. So that struck me too. My focus for a really long time until doing this podcast was just on performing at work and making sure I was doing my job, not necessarily all the soft skills stuff that's required. Nicole, I'm also just curious. So often in this conversation, I feel like women of Asian descent get just left out of these kinds of conversations. Like, what do you make of that? So I think it's still very real that like as an Asian American woman, I do feel left out of the conversation around shared sisterhood and around race and advancement fairly often. Like I cannot tell you how many times I have heard like, you're not really a person of color, are you?

Or you don't see yourself as a person of color. If I'm not that, like what am I? I'm not white. And I don't have some of the same advantages. I face a lot of stereotypes that people of color face, but they're specific to Asian Americans. So I feel like that happens to a lot of people. And that is tied to feeling left out of the conversation.

I mean, if there's one thing I took out of this is that you know we can't ignore that there's this gulf and we're struggling to figure out how to bridge it but it's there it's big and it is really harmful. I know that you know we can't just flip a switch and make it better but what can we do to make it better yeah I struggle with that too I think a lot of times I come out of these kinds of conversations wanting to be an ally wanting to be supportive wanting to have shared sisterhood and instead I end up doing things that are kind of clumsy or embarrassing or like aren't what's wanted or needed. And it's one of those things where like the worst thing is to do nothing, I think. But it's also the risk of putting a foot wrong is almost entirely inescapable sometimes in situations where i'm not sure quite what to do i kind of try to put myself in someone else's shoes and use empathy to kind of say like well if the shoe were on the

other foot what would i want and as a white woman who often wants like men to be good allies what i want them to do is like speak up and be vocal in their support and like do things and like show that they stand, you know, with me or whatever are on my side, the side of women. But it seems like in some cases when I have tried to do that as a white woman with women of color, it's like it's not what they want. It's like stop talking, white woman. People have had the microphone long enough, you know. And so I try to just listen a lot more I try to think about how can I learn how can I be open-minded how can I do things like you know if someone says like oh well we just can't hire women of color because there's just not a big enough pipeline you know we, where we'd love to. I try to sort of

call BS on that. And I'm like, no, we just, you know, like, so I think it's one of those things where I sort of fumble through and I'm sort of fumbling through my answer right now. But it's one of those things where I feel like to try and do a clumsy job, but have good intentions is probably better than to just not try. I agree with both of you. I think that fumbling your way through this conversation clumsily is better than kind of ignoring it, pretending it doesn't exist and hoping it goes away. I was at a conference recently and people were talking about how their companies were trying to become more diverse and inclusive and to make sure that people

of color were you know feeling welcome and like they had a space to like voice their opinions and stuff and someone said that one of the like biggest drivers of this cultural change in a lot of these companies has been younger people and millennials who have been saying like we won't work in a place that's not really diverse and that doesn't create an environment where people can have relationships and that stuck with me too like if we're talking about where we are now how little has changed since 20 years ago and how much we would like to change over the next like 10 or 20 years, I like to think that organizations are embracing calls for more diversity and inclusivity more than they have been. So I feel like that's a real difference. And like it took a lot of awkward, fumbling conversations to get there.

What did you guys think of that anecdote about the African-American woman who was being celebrated for some great accomplishment. And I guess a guy came up to her and said, the black bitch comment. Yes. What was your take? What did you think about it? I mean, obviously it's awful. The worst part of that for me was that no one said anything to defend her. I mean, come on.

Yeah. Yeah. What really worried me was that no one said anything to defend her. I mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah. What really worried me about that comment, I am not a confrontational person most of the time. And so in some ways I could imagine myself being in that situation, not knowing what to say and freezing and then berating myself later for being like, no, you should have thrown yourself on that grenade. What the heck? You know? So I think for me, that was like a kind of bucket of cold water in the face where it was like, okay, if you have to listen for those moments and you have to prepare ahead of time to not rely on your courage in the moment, but you have to prepare ahead of time to like, what am I going to say if someone makes a comment like that?

And to prepare to say, because you, Amy, are like a fearless and courageous person, and you would not stand for that. But you have way more. I'm thrilled you think that, but the question I asked myself was would I have had the presence of mind to say, wait a second. Yeah. I mean, sure, Sitting here in the studio

with people I feel super comfortable with, I can say, yeah, sure. But I can't tell you with 1000% assurance that I would have had that courage. I also think there's like a super strong imperative in a lot of organizations to praise in public and criticize in private. And I think that's really problematic in situations like that. I totally agree with you. Because it's like the organizational training would be like, oh, pull the person aside, tell them that wasn't acceptable, like give them a warning or whatever. But like, no, everyone in the group needs to see you call that out.

Yeah. I literally gasped when I heard that. Like it was a generational thing to me. I just could not see that happening today. I know that's like crazy to think about, but I think today because of social media and people like are more vocal, like that stuff would not fly. Like you don't have to necessarily even confront someone, but you could like tweet that and then that person like that, it would just be over. Well, what worries me is that it does happen and it gets tweeted and then we react but it it happens yeah it happens in my mind i give some kind of amazing like erin sorkin

west wing style righteous speech in actuality i think the best i could hope for is like uh you don't talk to her that way that's unacceptable something really short it's just like we don't talk that way at this company yeah and you know i think a little bit of shame or a lot of shame yeah i mean i think calling someone out in public and saying that it's not cool that it's not, is the right way to handle it. And I hope we'd have the presence of mind to do that should something ever happen in front of us. So, you know, I think as we talk about how frustrated we are about the situation, we're also asking ourselves, what can we do about it?

And fortunately, the conversation doesn't end here. We will continue the conversation with two women who are committed to fostering shared sisterhood. That's our show. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Nicole Torres. And I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hoke is our supervising editor. And we get production help from Rob Eckhart and Isis Madrid. If you'd like to read Our Separate Ways, you can find it on hbr.org or anywhere you download books. Like Amy was saying earlier, our conversation about workplace sisterhood isn't over. We'll pick it up with Tina Opie, who you might remember from season one, and Veronica Ribello.

We'll be talking with them about their experiences, research, and ideas for how to take steps towards sisterhood at work. We also want to tell you about a new newsletter that we're launching. Nicole, you have been leading this. What's it about? So it is going to be a monthly newsletter all about women and work. We'll keep you up to date with what we're publishing to hbr.org and give you updates on the show. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening. How did you guys first meet each other? Oh,'s well that's a long story that's a long time ago but we we went we went to the same high school oh my god okay cool where was that James Monroe in the Bronx New York uh-huh Stella's younger sister Betty was she was one year behind me in junior high school. And we became dear friends.

And she would always talk about her sister, who was working on a PhD and doing all these amazing things. And then Betty and I lost track of each other. And when I started teaching at Yale, one of my students who you know, Robin Ely at the time, was telling me about this amazing African woman who was also doing research and had a research interest on black women, and we just had to meet. We were doing, I was creating a symposium. So I called Dr. Nkomo to see if she could be a discussant on the panel. And the conversation went something like this. She was very professional, very regal. I was like, wow, I finally get to talk to you. But towards the end of the conversation, I did something really stupid.

You have an African name, a South African name, but you don't have any African accent. You don't sound like you're from Africa. And she laughed. And she says, oh, you know, my husband is South African. I'm from New York. I kind of laughed. And I said, that's interesting. I'm from New York. And the New York conversation usually goes like this between two New Yorkers. Like, oh, well, what borough are you from? I'm from the Bronx. I said, I'm from the Bronx. And the next question was, well, where'd you go to high school? And she said to me, I went to James Monroe. And I was like, girl, wait a minute. You went to James Monroe? I went to James Monroe and I was like, girl, wait a minute. You went to James Monroe? I went to James Monroe. I said, what year did you graduate? She will not allow me to tell you the year she graduated. She told me the year and I told her the year I graduated, which is not that

far apart, trust me. She said, well, perhaps you know my sister. I said, well, who is your sister? And she said, Betty Brown. I started screaming in my office. She was like, you know my sister. And I said, girl, my maiden name is Ella Bell. And she started screaming. And I said, you're the sister that got the PhD that married the South African and yada, yada, yada. And she said, you're the girlfriend that broke up with the husband and really had a nervous breakdown. And we started laughing to the point that, you know, we were just eight and we have pretty much been pretty close since then um I think it was two um as my husband says two girls from the Bronx that somehow had made it in this um elite academic world of which you know nobody was prepared for um Nobody was socialized for, no one, you know, with no academics on the family tree.

And here we were kind of carving out a path. And it really solidified our relationship because we were pretty isolated out there as African-American women.