Jessica Faye Carter

February 18, 2010
The Conference Board
Diversity and Inclusion Leadership and Management Seminars
New York, NY

March 2010
Social Media Training
Corporate Client
New York, NY

March 25, 2010
Women’s History Month Event
Huntsville, AL

April 6, 2010
Social Media Panel
Chicago, IL

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Below are the slides from my presentation “Mirror, Mirror” at the 2009 Diversity Women’s Business Conference.

I recently presented on diversity and technology in New York. Below is a version of the presentation:

Occasionally, I get questions during a presentation that have broad applicability, and I post the questions and my responses here.  Below are two questions raised by a bright young woman at the recent Forte Foundation MBA Women’s Conference (a conference you should definitely attend should you have the opportunity to do so.)

Q1. I work in a predominantly male environment, and it seems like all the guys ever want to talk about is fantasy football or fantasy baseball. I’d like to connect with them, but I’m not interested in sports at all. What can I do?

Answer:  A couple of things. My first piece of advice would be to “be yourself” and avoid the pretense of being excited about subjects that don’t interest you.  Here are a couple of options:

• Make it a learning opportunity. You can use your co-worker’s interests as an opportunity to learn more about them.  Try casually asking them about the benefits and rewards of participation in fantasy sports—a subject of fairly fierce debate—but preferably not when they’re in the middle of a heated discussion. Or ask them about the strategy behind putting together a team (player selection, how current news impacts their decisions, etc.). But if you do this, your colleagues may follow-up with you later about your inquiries, so be prepared for further conversation.

• Go the work route.  You may prefer to engage your co-workers on issues related to work and avoid sports altogether, since you don’t really have much of an interest in fantasy sports (something also true of many avid sports fans, by the way).  In such a case, you can engage your colleagues by asking for their opinions about other work-related issues. Not questions about your specific role (which you should already understand), but you can get their thoughts and ideas about departmental changes, procedures, and everyday challenges. One caveat: avoid political hot potatoes.

For more information on small talk, check this out; for more on cross-gender communication, this.

Q2. What are your thoughts about the old saying, “Men are promoted on potential; women are promoted on performance”?  I have witnessed this firsthand at my current company and was wondering if there are any measures that can be taken to prevent this.

Answer:  Women often encounter situations at work where they are expected to perform at a higher level than their male counterparts in order to advance. Catalyst refers to this challenge as a “high competence threshold” in one of its studies on women’s leadership, in which women are confronted with higher hurdles and lower rewards than men when pursuing leadership roles. And as a practical matter, these higher hurdles take the form of women having to prove themselves more often than men to reach the same goals.

The solution? Individual women can consistently perform and remove the barriers for themselves, but any broader resolution would require more institutional support, and probably some kind of re-evaluation of the talent management process.  Sounds like a great project for women’s employee resource groups.

Other questions? Email them to info [at] jessicafayecarter [dot] com.

Here is a PDF of my Corporate Chess presentation from the Forte Foundation MBA Women’s Conference.

Social media technologies have arrived.  And they have broad implications for diversity in the workplace.

Through marketing, project management, or even daily conversations, companies and employees are interacting across geographic boundaries, departmental functions, industries, and schools of thought. There is little doubt as to the benefits that social media affords, in terms of lower costs, instant feedback, convenience, expanded networks and innovation. But with respect to diversity, social media’s impact is both positive and negative.  

Two powerful aspects of social media that relate to diversity are anonymity and community. I’ll examine each in turn.

1.  Anonymity.  Social media allows a certain amount of anonymity, which can act as a powerful buffer against “groupthink” or other psychosocial phenomena that don’t support diversity of thought.  An example of this could be found in a working group that uses an online meeting system that allows users to contribute their thoughts anonymously.  In some cases, such a system increases the truthfulness of the feedback received and prevents “personalities” from controlling the flow of the conversation.  Employees with ideas that differ from those who “control” the group can express those views and expect them to receive due consideration.  Ideas flourish, and contributions increase.

At the same time, this anonymity allows employees a place to retreat, and creates a space where they can be honest, so that at least in some sense, the rest of the workplace is not seen as a place where employees can be authentic without penalty.  It may also embolden the expression of unpopular (and sometimes unpleasant) views and increase conflict in a particular group.  Or employees may become overly concerned about the views held by their colleagues and may spend too much time trying to figure out “who said what.”

Of course, many collaborative work systems are not anonymous, but even in such cases employees still experience a sense of distance from their work and colleagues when collaborating remotely, so that there is still likely to be an increase in the diversity of responses received in a social media format.

With respect to identity, employees will find that social media has made them less anonymous inside and outside of the workplace. Primarily because their private lives and thoughts are often on at least partial display through various profiles they share on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Bebo, Hi5, Gather, and other similar sites.  Incidents like this or this make this point all too clear.

2. Community.  The notion of community has changed dramatically through social media, allowing groups to operate almost like independent tribes, except that these tribes have moved beyond traditional demographics and affiliations.  Their notion of community is increasingly diverse, centering around non-traditional aspects of identity and affiliation (e.g., interests or expertise).  As a result, these teams experience a wide range of perspectives and contributions.

Further, as they forge a shared identity through their collaboration, these groups often operate more effectively and efficiently. The challenge occurs when they become part of cross-functional initiatives, and may then behave more tribally, resulting in project delays, infighting, and petty turf wars.

When it comes to consumers, companies are using social media to develop focus groups for product evaluation and development.  In doing so, they are building brand loyalty and keeping their “finger” on the pulse of consumer trends. One downside to this is that the digital divide still prevents many potential consumers from contributing to the data held by these firms. But as everyday life becomes more digitized, hopefully that will change.  For more information about how to harness the power of online communities, read Derek Powazek’s article, The Wisdom of Community.

Ultimately, social media technologies are excellent tools for facilitating increased diversity in the workplace. The challenge is to prepare for and manage the challenges that may follow.

The burgeoning rift within the Black community between critics and loyalists of President Barack Obama is undergirded by a little-known sociological phenomenon: fictive kinship.

The irony is palpable. A community which actively campaigns for diversity has virtually no tolerance for differences of opinion?  The remarkableness of this behavior is not in its existence, but in its root.

Scholars describe fictive kinship as a powerful, shared group identity that extends beyond familial boundaries and typically exists in oppressed communities.  One of its major functions is to protect and define the minority group’s identity by acting as a boundaries around the group—it is “us versus them.”  One negative outflow of this protection is that it can lead to the rejection of internal dissent within a community—usually in the name of its self-preservation. 

An example of fictive kinship in action: when then-Sen. Obama initially entered the presidential race, fictive kinship reared its head immediately: some African-Americans expressed skepticism that Mr. Obama “wasn’t Black enough.”  This concern was less about speech patterns and education and more about whether Mr. Obama understood himself in terms congruent with African-American identity.  The initial question was: is he one of us?

But once Mr. Obama was understood and accepted as “belonging” to the community, fictive kinship took on a secondary role, banishing those in the community who criticized him into enemy territory: either you’re with us (including Mr. Obama) or you’re against us. No in-between.

Tavis Smiley, a prominent journalist and activist, criticized Mr. Obama on a popular radio morning show and was deluged with negative emails from listeners.  He was accused of everything from jealousy to the desire to torpedo Mr. Obama’s campaign, despite Smiley’s unwavering commitment to the betterment of the African-American community.  Smiley left the radio show to pursue other projects, but the power of fictive kinship remained in force—well over 90% of African-Americans voted for Mr. Obama in the presidential election.  Not much was heard from those who disagreed with him.

There is no reason to limit fictive kinship to cultural groups; it has a way of surfacing in relation to gender (and other aspects of identity), too. 

When Governor Sarah Palin was announced as Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate, she was immediately attacked by feminists for a variety of reasons.  Notably, Dr. Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, launched a scathing assault that implied that Palin was not even a woman.  The actress Sigourney Weaver referred to Palin as “Bush in a skirt.” It would seem that Dr. Doniger and Weaver view Palin’s pro-life views as moving her outside of “womanhood” and they are not alone.

Feminist voices continue to refuse to address the sexism and misogyny which has surfaced with Palin’s appointment: a pornographic video featuring a Palin look-a-like (no such video for Biden, mind you), t-shirts crudely likening Palin to female anatomy, or the Pakistani president’s hug threat—one which Pakistani feminists lost no time in denouncing.  For many prominent feminists (Camille Paglia excepted), Palin is not part of this so-called sisterhood and is therefore not entitled to any defense whatsoever. No matter what is done to her.

That marginalized groups would seek to protect themselves and retain certain aspects of their identities is perfectly understandable.  When progress has been slowly achieved and battles hard-fought and hard-won, it is essential that whatever success has been attained not be eroded.  The reality is that the notion of identity in America is changing, and it is only natural for marginalized groups to cope with these cultural shifts by reinforcing their community boundaries.  

But these boundaries cannot promote or require uniformity. Diversity must be allowed to flourish within these marginalized communities.

Maybe there is some good news to be found in all of this. When those who seek inclusion—whether cultural, gender or otherwise—reject diversity in their own midst, for whatever reason, it offers perhaps the most compelling evidence that human beings are really not so different, after all.

Note:  I felt it necessary to add a brief statement after this article because it deals with matters of politics, a subject on which I do not generally opine.  As such, it should be noted that my political affiliation is independent and that my use of political figures in this article is designed to illustrate the challenges of diversity within diversity—not to specifically endorse or reject their philosophies.

So, who are the working women out there?

I searched out the data on working women in the U.S. labor force and found a helpful release on theWomen’s Data Center of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research website.  This data provided the rate of women’s participation in the labor force, conveniently broken down by ethnic background.

My reason for seeking out this data is simple—the depictions of non-working women in the media are usually women of color, and I wanted to see whether these images are backed up by the numbers.

They’re not.

First, I should provide a bit of an overview about what these statistics mean.  When we think about the rate of participation, we can understand it as the number of working women in a particular group as a percentage of all of the women within that group. For example:

# of Group X women that are working / # of Group X women

So if we take 100 Black women and 50 of them are working, then Black women’s rate of participation in the labor force is 50%.  This is not to be confused with representation in the labor force, which is the group of working women as a percentage of the entire labor force:

# of Group X women working / # of entire labor force

In this example, if the entire labor force is 10,000 people and 1,500 are Asian-American women, then Asian-American women’s representation in the labor force is 15% (all of these examples use, of course, hypothetical numbers). 

So I examined the rates of women’s participation in the labor force, and not their rate of representation.  Through this, I was able to determine that the stereotypes about women of color with respect to work are not backed up by the numbers.

Here’s what I found:

Participation Rates

African-American/Black women have the highest participation in the labor force at 63.1%. This rate is 4-6% higher than any other group of women.  This means that 63% of all Black women are working.  White women and Native American women participate in the labor force at around 58% (58.8% and 58.2%, respectively), followed by Asian-American (57.5%) and Hispanic/Latinas (56.6%).  The majority of all groups of women are working, including women of color.

In light of these statistics, I ask this: what’s with the welfare queen stereotype, generally used against African-American and Hispanic women?  Well, the numbers just don’t back it up.  These statistics indicate that a higher percentage of Black women are working than any other group of women—the majority of Hispanic women are also working.

Mind the Gap!

There are also fairly broad perceptions generally that men work more than women, so I figured I’d examine those statistics, as well. Below are the rates at which men and women in different ethnic groups are working. I’ve focused on the gap (or difference) in their labor participation rates:

African-Americans - 5.6% difference between the men and women’s participation rates. This is the smallest gap across all ethnic groups, meaning that almost as many Black women work as compared to Black men.

Asian-Americans - 15.8% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Whites - 13.7% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Latinos/Hispanics - 22.7% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Native Americans - 10.6% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

These numbers remind us that the majority of women of color (and women) are participating in the labor force, and underscores the need for programs and initiatives related to their professional development and career advancement.  It also means we ought to reject images of women of color as lazy, and unwilling to work.

Because, actually, most of us are working already.