Working as a Young, Black Woman in America
Research shows that Black professionals have less access to mentorship than their white counterparts. They are also more likely than any other racial group to face microaggressions and discrimination at work.
Job and life advice for young professionals. See more from Ascend here.
I was 22 and had just started working as a consultant in New York. As a Black woman, I knew that my race and gender would impact my experience at work. I just didn’t realize to what extent. It wasn’t my first time navigating a primarily white space, but it was my first “official” job and I (naively) held on to the shiny optimism everyone has when they begin a new role.
It only took a few months for that optimism to fade. I couldn’t escape the many barriers that arose as a result of my Blackness — a reality that became apparent when compared with my white partner’s experience in the same role, at the same firm.
Andrew* and I had been dating for two years before we became colleagues. He was a year older than me and was hired around the time I completed my summer internship at our organization. When I graduated a year later, we found ourselves in the same position, and I was hopeful that his familiar face would ease my transition into the workforce.
Unfortunately, it did not.
Once, on my way to an early morning meeting at a client’s office, I was intercepted by a receptionist who asked whether I was delivering food from DoorDash or UberEats. Dressed in business casual attire, without any delivery bags in hand, I was shaken by the implication that I somehow looked like I didn’t belong in the building.
When I shared this experience with Andrew, he sympathized. He also admitted that nothing like this had ever happened to him — and probably never would. I naturally turned to the few Black colleagues on our office’s leadership team for guidance, but felt guilty for taking up their time. On top of their regular workload, I knew they were doing the emotional labor of mentoring all the other junior Black employees. Meanwhile, Andrew had no shortage of potential mentors to whom he could personally relate, and whose career trajectories he could easily envision for himself.
The tipping point was when I was assigned to a particularly difficult supervisor. With them, my smallest mistakes turned into crises, my progress went unacknowledged, and my sincere questions were labeled as “attitude problems.” Each time I exceeded my supervisor’s expectations, they asked if Andrew was secretly helping with my work. The repeated and untrue assumption that my white boyfriend was responsible for my high performance forced Andrew and I to confront just how polarizing our experiences were.
The amount of time and effort required for me to survive in the same environment Andrew thrived in every day was immeasurable. But, more importantly, going through it all side-by-side pushed Andrew to see firsthand the burden that racial disparities can create. Likewise, it made me realize just how many white professionals are oblivious to their privilege, and to the realities people without those privileges face.
A recent study by Coqual shows that Black professionals are more likely than white professionals to identify as being “very ambitious” in their careers. However, they are also four times as likely as their white counterparts to believe that they must work harder to advance.
What does this imply?
Black professionals often have differentially higher ambitions than their white colleagues but are also painfully aware of the distinct obstacles that stand in our way. The study highlights a few of the most common roadblocks: Black professionals have less access to senior leaders and mentorship, and are more likely than any other racial group to encounter prejudice, insults, invalidations, and insensitivities at work.
Other studies affirm that the challenges we face are driving burnout and high levels of attrition among Black professionals — at every level. No matter how much I loved aspects of my job — the steep learning curve, the team dynamics, and the exposure to new challenges — the chasm between my experience and that of my white peers made it difficult to thrive. Ultimately, I burned out as a result of the limitless mental and emotional energy I spent trying to be the best at my job while constantly doubting my professional potential.
Failing to acknowledge these identity-based professional disparities means failing to design adequate solutions to inequitable work environments. Research shows that when people avoid talking about race in situations that demand a candid conversation, they are perceived as more biased than people who acknowledge the inequities at hand. As long as workplaces continue to ignore the experiences plaguing Black workers, we will continue to be woefully undervalued and underrepresented in professional spaces. This is why the responsibility lies with leadership and management — not you, the junior employee — to openly address the real race-based challenges at work.
Still, if you are just starting out in your career, like I was, this can be difficult to face. As young professionals, we often don’t have the agency or power, let alone the energy, to reform these structures ourselves. But with the right tools, young BIPOC can survive and even thrive long enough in these environments to hold their leaders accountable and initiate some kind of transformation.
On my own journey, I learned three important lessons that helped me develop as a professional, and eventually, enroll in Harvard’s Master in Public Policy and Master in Business Administration’s dual-degree program, where I hope to develop even more skills to become a transformative leader.
As a young Black woman, I was so concerned with not making waves that I waited far too long to speak up for myself. I thought that if I suffered in silence and worked twice as hard to succeed, one day all of my hard work would magically pay off and no one would notice I’d even broken a sweat.
Ultimately, just as I was nearing my breaking point, one of my mentors sat me down and asked me what I was afraid of. He explained that there was no shame in standing up for myself and doing whatever it took to make the job work for me. In fact, he helped me see that I could get more respect for advocating for myself and for systemic change than I ever would by continuing my fruitless attempts to fit into an inequitable environment. That’s when I finally realized that I was only hurting myself by refusing to assert my own needs.
I had spent a lot of time analyzing the circumstances that were getting in the way of me fulfilling my greatest potential, and it would have been a shame to never raise those insights to leaders with the power to change them. When I was rattled in a building lobby, I needed resources on how to overcome the mental and emotional toll of implicit otherness, not just advice on presenting myself professionally. When envisioning my own career trajectory, I needed leadership models who had succeeded under the same conditions, not just ones who shared my alma mater or industry interest. And when managing a relationship with a biased supervisor, I needed a resolution process that would address the underlying patterns, not just an oversimplified conclusion that we didn’t mesh.
So, I started small, by having vulnerable conversations with my teammates before gaining the confidence to voice my experiences and recommendations to higher levels of leadership. By relentlessly raising those obstacles to the right stakeholders, I was able to finally open the door to the relief and support I needed. Now, I’m my own ruthless advocate.
When you’re starting out at any new job, it can be difficult to find your allies, and to understand when to ask for help. That difficultly can be doubled when your belonging in a professional environment is in doubt, explicitly or implicitly. Trust takes a long time to build and very little to destroy, but I could not let my fear of conflict with the wrong people get in the way of meeting and building relationships with the right ones.
So over time, I learned that while I couldn’t increase the representation of Black leadership at our firm, I could build a broader network of support. This led me to invest even more time in our affinity network where I learned from Black colleagues with work experience at different companies in different roles, and at different levels of tenure. I also became more proactive about building relationships with non-Black mentors. I asked them to lunch, listened to their stories, and learned from their experiences overcoming challenges of their own, which provided me with useful problem-solving tools.
Those relationships have been fundamental to my success. I gained mentors who counseled me through tears and supported me when I was close to breaking. They helped me prepare my graduate school applications, and to this day, we continue to share the lessons we learn as our careers progress.
For too long, I thought of self-care as a luxury that I just didn’t have time for until I’d checked everything else off my to-do list. But over the years, I’ve learned that, at the end of the day, teams will change, projects will end, and jobs will pass. My body and mind are the only constants, and taking care of both is critical to getting through personal and professional storms.
I’ve always known this in theory but didn’t fully understand it until I noticed that the negative emotions I was carrying around at work were beginning to follow me home. My work was dictating my physical and emotional wellbeing, leading to sleepless nights and persistent anxiety that began to hurt my personal relationships. This lifestyle was unsustainable and unproductive, so I knew I needed to reset my relationship with self-care.
I replaced an hour of work after dinner with an hour of restorative yoga. I stopped spending commutes scanning through emails on my phone and started listening to podcasts that gave me perspective instead. I let go of my fixation on success by stepping back to check in with my mind and body. This is how I slowly began to prioritize my personal needs and become a healthier person outside of work. That strengthened foundation carried over into my professional life as well, and gave me the energy to take control of my situation where and when I could.
If you can relate to any of these experiences, here’s what I want you to know: Your professional belonging is yours to determine. There will be obstacles that your peers will never see. There will be stifling pressures that many workplaces are not yet equipped to resolve. And unfortunately, a lot of this will feel out of your control.
But you have more agency than you may realize. You get to decide when to limit your personal investment and remove yourself from a situation to protect your wellbeing. You also get to decide when you will not be deterred. When we choose to persevere, we generate the power to hold our leaders accountable for change, and we realize our potential to become leaders capable of transforming the world ourselves.
*Name changed for privacy
Working as a Young, Black Woman in America
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