Читать книгу Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible - Yomi Adegoke - Страница 14

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‘I’m not just black, I’m a woman, so there are two glass ceilings I have to break every time I open my mouth. But if I wake up in the morning and think, “Oh my God, I got two ceilings I’ve got to smash today,” that’s no way to live.’¹

Destiny Ekaragha

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‘Did the student who the teacher gave an A have two heads?’ my dad asked disappointedly as we were driving back from my Year 8 parents’ evening. Growing up in a Nigerian household, I was accustomed to these rhetorical questions. This particular one was further evidence that, one, my dad could exaggerate for England; and two, yet again I had fallen short of meeting his expectations when it came to my grades.

‘You have to be twice as good as them’ was something that was implied in everything I did or – according to my dad – couldn’t do. As discussed earlier in the chapter ‘Lawyer, Doctor, Engineer’, the importance of excelling at school knew no bounds. You could get 98 per cent in an exam and your parents would ask, ‘What happened to the other 2 per cent?’ You would then get 100 per cent in the next exam and you’d be asked why you weren’t studying law like your cousin; and eventually you would apply to university and they’d want to know why you didn’t apply to Oxford, as Warwick was good, but it wasn’t quite the most prestigious. Lessons on racism were intrinsically linked to work ethic. You work hard, you get good grades, so you don’t give them an excuse to treat you any differently.

Alongside feeling irritated and thinking they were overreacting half the time, I had some sympathy for my parents’ attitude. They knew I would be judged more harshly than my white friends on certain occasions and that, whether I wanted to be a lawyer or run my own business, meeting the minimum standard would, at times, just not be enough. When former First Lady Michelle Obama gave her version of the ‘Twice as good’ speech in 2015 to Tuskegee University, a historically black university, she said a version of the thing all black parents say to remind you that life will be more difficult for you than for your white friends: ‘The road ahead is not going to be easy. It never is, especially for folks like you and me. Because while we’ve come so far, the truth is that those age-old problems are stubborn and they haven’t fully gone away … So there will be times when you feel like folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are.’²

Unfortunately, those old-age problems haven’t gone away, and discrimination rears its ugly head, both before we enter the workplace and then while we make strides to progress within it. It can often leave us feeling that we have to work twice as hard only to get half as good back. This can make for a tough existence as a black woman. When you enter white spaces you find yourself trying to figure out: will this qualification be enough? Will my South London twang give me away? Or are they simply plain old racists and I’ll never get my just rewards no matter how ‘twice as good’ I am?

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‘Luck has nothing to do with it, because I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.’

Serena Williams

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I can’t remember how many times in my career I have sat in meetings in which I am the only black woman or person of colour in the room. Yet without fail I’ve been surrounded by four Jamies or three Chrises, all of whom are, of course, white men. I have no grievance with these particular names, but I’ve noticed how they tend to be over-represented in every place I’ve worked, whereas finding a black woman is like trying to find a black girl on TV’s Love Island. And that’s what I have a problem with. Where are we? In those meetings I find myself thinking, again and again, ‘Why do I continue to be the only black girl in marketing in this office?’ As Yomi pointed out in the previous chapter, we are proportionately the largest group of graduates in the UK, but we remain the most unemployed.

It’s clear that Britain is a long way from being a level playing field of opportunity for all. Even after you’ve achieved the right grades in school, and you’ve gone above and beyond at extra-curricular activities, when it comes to the transition from education to employment something goes awry. In 2016 the Social Mobility Commission revealed that black and Asian children are less likely to get professional jobs, despite doing better than their white working-class counterparts at school.³

I always assumed that going above and beyond, and striving always to be exceptional, would be enough. I didn’t think I had the privilege of just being ‘okay’: mediocrity wouldn’t do. This resulted in an irrational fear of being left behind, the same fear that led me to try to get a job when I was 16, convinced that I was never going to get my GCSEs. You know the fear that wakes you up at 3am in the morning? You think it might just be pangs of hunger but it’s actually a fear of failure that intensifies when exams loom, or on the night before a job interview.

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.⁴ 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’.⁵ 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.⁶

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’).

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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,⁷ 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.⁸ 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’.⁹ 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.¹⁰ 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.’¹¹ 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.¹²

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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.’¹⁵

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.’

Vanessa Kingori MBE, Publishing Director of British Vogue, explains why we should embrace visibility rather than fight it.

‘If I’m in a situation where I’m sat around a room, there’s no point pretending that I’m less visible; I have to be aware of that and then I have to make good of it. But I think it’s such an advantage, because if you think about it, there are many business books written about trying to be noticed, trying to get cut through, trying to get your bosses’ attention, trying to whatever. We celebrate that in our work and our output, right? So it’s like, “I want to be noticed.” We have that in our physicality, rightly or wrongly, there’s no point fighting it. It just is what it is, but use it as an advantage. There are lots of people who look the same, who will not get the opportunity you have to have that cut through, so you use that platform.

‘Be prepared for that meeting, go there with a few things you’re already ready to say, that will challenge opinions and make people think “That’s a smart cookie.” So it’s all about the prep and being present in that room and not shrinking. You can’t try to do something that just physically isn’t possible. You can’t be less black and less female, right? So just make it count. Don’t fight something that is a given, I think it’s a massive advantage.’

But how do we go about making it count? Performance ratings are key; they are an opportunity to illustrate to your manager what you’ve achieved that year. Ratings affect promotions and pay rises, so it is important that your manager takes note of you and is exposed to the work you have done throughout the year. But how do we come across as driven and ambitious without rubbing people up the wrong way?

Multi-award-winning senior lawyer and diversity leader in the UK, Funke Abimbola MBE, explains how she became part of the talent pool and made sure she was identified as high potential at her law firm.

‘I went about ensuring that my work was visible, not in a showing-off way, and you have to be very clear not to be seen as being out for yourself, either. So, I did it through my team, showcasing what we are doing as a team, individually and collectively, and that can only happen if someone is an effective leader. So, the way I showcase the visibility is: we’ve got all sorts of internal communication channels here that want stories about what different teams are doing, we’ve got a magazine, we’ve got a Google community, we’ve got a weekly email that goes out, we’ve got all sorts of channels for communication. So, as a team, we drip-feed positive stories about all aspects of what we’re doing – the announcements don’t always come out from me; individual team members will sometimes put out announcements about others, so quite often others put out announcements about me winning awards and I do the same for them, to try to avoid anyone thinking that you’re just doing it to promote yourself as an individual. In many ways, the stories can get out there. It is about showcasing what you’re doing and the impact, communicating that and really driving that narrative, so that there are so many examples of what you’ve done, that when it comes to the end of year, you’ve got a long list of examples of what you’ve done. The evidence is always overwhelming; really, it’s like, here it all is, and this was the impact.’

However, there may be some instances when you’re doing all of the above, already working twice as hard and trying to take advantage of that visibility, but it isn’t reflected in your progressing to the next level in your career. This can be really frustrating, and it may then be that it is time to look elsewhere. Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE agrees, ‘If those people don’t recognise it, it’s one of those things. That door may be closed; another will be open elsewhere, and you have to knock on those doors, and you might think it’s because you’re black, you might think it’s because you’re young, you might think it’s because you’re a woman, but none of that matters; there’s a door that’ll be open for you somewhere else because you are those things, but you have to go and find that door; don’t be knocking on a door that’s not going to value you.’

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Mentoring and sponsoring

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On my first day of Year 7, every girl in my year was assigned a ‘Big Sister’, a girl from one of the older years whose role it was to guide you through your first year at secondary school. I found it reassuring that there was someone who would watch my back, look out for me and tell me how to get by. She showed me that I wasn’t alone, and also what a ‘good student’ looked like in person.

We cannot underestimate the positive impact that having a mentor and sponsor can bring to your career. Studies have shown that ethnic minorities who advance the furthest in their careers all share one asset: a strong network of mentors and sponsors who nurture their professional development.¹⁶ However, there is currently a lack of mentors or sponsors for black women in the workplace, and this often can be a problem when it comes to our development.

I always thought that mentors and sponsors were the same thing, and I would use the words interchangeably, but they aren’t, and knowing the difference and taking advantage of it could really make an impact on your career progression. Funke Abimbola explains how it works:

‘I call this the triumvirate: sponsorship, mentoring and coaching are the three things that are essential to career progression, and they’re all very different. Mentoring is guidance and advice. Sponsoring is someone actively looking for opportunities for you and putting you forward for them. Coaching is actually teaching you the skills: how to influence; how to communicate; how to get by; this is how you should run the meeting and so on. All three have been absolutely essential for my career progression.’

Black women who want to advance in their chosen fields can benefit hugely from the added visibility and support that a sponsor brings to their careers. This is because within every company there are a few people who are part of the decision-making process, who steer the more plummy projects. These are the people who have the access to talk you up behind closed doors and also to defend you against detractors. This matters, in particular, because it is on the more high-profile projects and assignments that you will have your chance to prove yourself to your peers and to this cohort of decision-makers.

If you can find a sponsor who is impressed by you and wants to support you, your chances of promotion and pay rise increase tenfold, as Sandra Kerr OBE explains: ‘These processes are often that of advocacy, where senior leaders recommend known individuals for consideration – a form of active sponsorship, whether it is formalised or not. If these conversations do not include either BAME leaders or senior leaders who are being exposed to BAME talent, the diversity of the pipeline is unlikely to change.’¹⁷

CEO of Stemettes, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon understands first-hand the benefits of sponsorship: in 2017 she received an MBE, and having a sponsor who advocated on her behalf was essential. Interestingly, to this day she still doesn’t know who sponsored her application, but the person in question really understood Anne-Marie’s personal brand as a STEM leader.

‘I didn’t apply for the MBE; you don’t nominate yourself for an MBE. Someone else has to do a whole load of work, on your behalf, without you knowing, puts their name on the line, or puts their neck on the line, and says this person needs to get an honour, “Because what they’re doing is a lot.” That’s how honours work. That person didn’t mentor me to have an MBE. That person sponsored it.’

How do you get a sponsor? Karen Blackett says it has to come organically: ‘I find it weird when people at events, who I’ve never met before, ask me to be their mentor, because you’ve got to have some sort of chemistry with the individual and know a bit about them to be able to help. So I think getting a sponsor needs someone you have to have a relationship with first, and I think if black women are finding it difficult to get a sponsor, it’s because they haven’t worked out their own personal brand to have somebody be able to advocate for them. So once you’ve worked that out – and it takes time, it takes rewriting and rewriting, sitting there, saying it out loud, writing it down once you write that down to be able to articulate it, you’ve then got to stress-test it to see what somebody else thinks. Once you’re able to do that, I think it’s easier to find a sponsor.

‘Having cheerleaders is incredibly important – some of the women that you’re interviewing are my cheerleaders and I’m theirs, because I think it’s really important to have people that are objective, who aren’t necessarily in your workplace, who know the real you, the authentic you, who can basically give you a verbal slap when you have those moments, those crises of self-confidence, those moments of lack of self-belief – and we all have them – and you need somebody that’s basically going to say “Why not?” and counsel you through it. And drink lots of wine, if need be, when something’s gone wrong.

‘But you all need someone that’s “Team Karen”; everybody needs that. And so I definitely think you need somebody as a sponsor because you need to be in the room, and not just in the room, you need to be at the table. If you’re not, you need somebody who is going to talk on your behalf, because that’s where your next career move comes from. That means you have to have a personal brand, and that person needs to be able to articulate it. And if they can’t, that’s why it’s difficult to get a sponsor.’

Karen is right; having a sponsor comes more easily once you know what your personal brand is and you’re able to articulate it to others. Again, Yomi goes into this in ‘***Flawless’, and it isn’t something that necessarily comes easily. For me, it started with building up my confidence and self-belief, and it also meant I had to shut out the voices, inside and out, that would tell me I wasn’t good enough and shouldn’t be there and that I had to work harder – the voices that had been so loud that summer of my GCSE results. An unintentional consequence of growing up with a ‘twice as hard’ mindset was constantly experiencing Imposter Syndrome. As I explained in the ‘Lawyer, Doctor, Engineer’ section, I was raised with mixed messages: with parents who would boast about my achievements to family members in one breath and then criticise me in the other for not getting straight As. As a result I was not able to internalise my achievements properly and would instead attribute my accomplishments to luck, as opposed to the fact that I had worked hard for them. Confidence building is a big thing, and understanding I have a right to be in the room, that I have a contribution to make, I have value to add, has been key in my career development. Don’t let Imposter Syndrome stop you realising your potential.

Malorie Blackman talks about her experiences of feeling like an imposter: ‘I was at the Black Powerlist dinner last year, and I was sitting there, and I was at a table and I had a CEO to the left of me and an Admiral to the right, and I was thinking, “Why am I here?” I was thinking, “Oh my God!” and everyone sitting at the table was the great and the good, and someone else was managing a portfolio of millions and millions, and I’m thinking, “Why am I here?” So I just kind of thought, “No, you’ve been invited! You have a right to be here just as much as anybody else.” But the fact that I was still thinking that, just said to me I still have a way to go, I still suffer from Imposter Syndrome.

‘The one person who blocks me most is myself. When people say,“Can you do this?” or, “Could you do that?” and I think, “Oh, I can’t do that!” And I look back now and there have been some opportunities where I think, “Oh, you should have done that.” And it was me thinking, “Oh, I’m not sure that’s for me,” or, “I can’t do that.”

‘I really don’t mind failing because I think I learn a lot from my mistakes and my failures, but for me, the worst thing would be to be on my deathbed and to think, “I wish I had tried and I wish I’d had the guts to try, and it was the fear holding me back and I should never have let it do that.” And that would be worse.

‘And I think for me as well, it is about appreciating that your comfort zone is very nice, but it’s called a comfort zone for a reason, and I think the way you grow is to move outside the comfort zone, and to take risks and so on. And I think it’s been instructive to me, especially in my writing career, that the books that have done the best for me are the books I’ve taken risks on and the books where I’ve thought, “I’m going to get a kicking for this one!” but I’m going to do it anyway.

‘And even if you don’t believe in yourself, it’s kind of like what they say about “Fake it till you make it.” So, fake it until you absolutely believe it and don’t have to fake it anymore, because you can do it! And you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it.

‘There are certain times when I’m asked to do stuff and I think, “I don’t think that’s for me!” you know, but now I kind of think, “Okay, why is it not for you? Is it really not for you, or are you just shying away from something?”And then just go out there and grasp these opportunities, because sometimes it’s true: they will only come once.’

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A seat at the table

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For those of us who do try twice as hard as our neighbours at school, then our colleagues at work, and eventually succeed in breaking through the concrete ceiling, being a trailblazer can bring pressures of its own. Shonda Rhimes, in her book Year of Yes, spoke about being the ‘First Only Different’: taking a seat at the table as the only black woman and the pressure that comes with it. In her decision to cast Kerry Washington in Scandal as the ABC network’s first lead, black, female character in 37 years, she was aware of the consequences if this move didn’t pay off and the show didn’t find an audience. How long would it take for another opportunity to come along for another black female director? She said, ‘When you are a First Only Different, you are saddled with that burden of extra responsibility – whether you want it or not. I was not about to make a mistake now. You don’t get second chances. Not when you’re an FOD. Failure meant two generations of female actors might have to wait for another chance to be seen as more than a sidekick.’¹⁸ As black women, we are not strangers to striving for success, but as we go through our careers we realise that getting that promotion and a seat at the table is bigger than our own personal victories, and we begin to fear that there is no room for failure because it runs the risk of them not letting in more girls who look like you.

BAFTA award-winning director Amma Asante knows all too well the weight of this responsibility.

‘I think the hardest thing is knowing that the world outside, even your own community, doesn’t necessarily always have the opportunity to see or know what you go through as that “one and only” with a seat at the table. That seat at the table comes at a price.

‘Oftentimes you’re invited to the table to sit, but you’re being asked to speak in the same voice as those that you’re occupying the table with, as opposed to being invited to the table to reflect and represent the voice that is uniquely yours and might in some way represent something of your community.’

Trying twice as hard and smashing the concrete ceiling can often mean you become a role model for others. This can be intentional or unintentional, but being one of the few black female faces in a certain space can bring its own challenges. Karen Blackett, who became the first woman to top the Powerlist 100 of most influential black Britons, acknowledges this.

‘I think there is pressure in being a role model. Of course there is, because any person who is good and has got a good heart wants to pull other people through. So that you’re not the first all the time and so that you’re not always the pioneer, and to make it easier for other people to get through. But you would hope that if you’re sitting at a table, you’re sitting there because of what you’re good at and what you’ve achieved, not because of your gender or because of your race, but because you’re good at what you’ve achieved.

‘You’re there because of something that you can do, which complements everyone else around the table, or what everyone else around the table can’t do. And then it’s about pulling other people through, until it becomes the norm, rather than the exception. And that’s the thing, I’ll never rest until it’s the norm that there’s a multitude of faces around the table, rather than just one or two.

‘So yes, there’s pressure, yes you feel like being a role model. You need to make sure that you’re really good and you make things easy for the people around the table to have more like you come in, and that you’re around the table because of what you can do, not because of your gender or your race.’

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#BlackExcellence

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From one role model to another: if there’s anyone who embodies the twice-as-hard mentality, it is Serena Williams. Navigating and dominating the whitest-of-white sports, she rose above racism and sexism to win 23 Grand Slams. She isn’t just a great female athlete or even the best black athlete: she is undisputedly one of the greatest athletes ever. When I was growing up, I would support her as if she were British: her blackness and femaleness were central to both our identities and she made me so proud to be a black girl. Why? Because I realised that my desire for her to win was because she is a shining example of black excellence. In a society that often makes us feel, as dark-skinned women, that we are at the bottom of the pecking order, her success on the court made me feel better about my existence as a black girl in the world. It gave me the confidence to believe that I too could achieve great things if I also worked twice as hard.

Yet in spite of this, Maria Sharapova, Williams’s blonde, white ‘non-rival’ rival, was for a very long time the highest-paid female athlete in the world, despite only winning five Grand Slams. What Maria lacks on court she makes up for in her financial advantage off it, because corporate sponsors prefer a certain type of ‘look’ to be the face of their products.

When this was brought up in a New York Times interview with Serena in 2015, her response was diplomatic: ‘If they want to market someone who is white and blonde, that’s their choice – I have a lot of partners who are very happy to work with me. I can’t sit here and say I should be higher on the list because I have won more. I’m happy for her, because she worked hard, too. There is enough at the table for everyone.’¹⁹ I respect Serena for her humility, but working twice as hard and sometimes getting half as good back has sometimes left a bad taste in my mouth.