Despite calls for making the workplace more equitable, women, particularly Black women, continue to get the short end of the stick at work.
Only 6 percent of the top 3,000 companies in the US are led by a woman. In 2022, only two Black women served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. And in 2021, women earned only 83 percent of what men earned, while Black and Latinx women earned only 64 percent and 57 percent, respectively.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated challenges for women, particularly the many mothers who stepped back from careers amid school disruptions. Now, with schools and offices back up and running, many women are asking: What’s it going to take to effect real change?
According to Tina Opie, visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and author of Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work, it’s going to take purposeful dialogue aimed specifically at dismantling inequities in the workplace.
“Research has shown time and time again that some of the stereotypical feminine attributes, such as empathy, trust, connection—those are the things that really differentiate the most effective leaders.”
“Shared Sisterhood is the idea that if we want to have an equitable, fair, inclusive, connected world, the way that we can do that is by linking arms with each other and having transparent, honest communication and connections that are based on vulnerability, trust, empathy, and risk taking,” Opie says.
An associate professor of management at Babson College and founder of the Opie Consulting Group, Opie is Black and Christian. She collaborated with Beth Livingston, associate professor at the University of Iowa and a white atheist, on Shared Sisterhood, recognizing that it would take two authors, each with her own assumptions and biases, to unpack how high-quality relationships could address workplace injustices.
“Research has shown time and time again that some of the stereotypical feminine attributes, such as empathy, trust, connection—those are the things that really differentiate the most effective leaders,” says Opie.
Exposing inequities in the workplace
Opie uses many of the strategies in the book as a consultant to corporations struggling with racial and gender gaps. When engaging with senior leaders, mostly white men, she tries to “hold up a mirror—and it's a nonjudgmental mirror—so that they can see what they believe.”
After working with upper-level management, Opie meets with employees working at lower levels, which she prefers to do off-campus and outside of working hours where employees may feel more relaxed about discussing corporate culture.
“This is about leadership development and crafting innovative cultures,” says Opie. “So many companies are locked. They have these arthritic approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and then they're shocked when they don't have as much innovation as they would like.”
To redress inequities, Opie says companies need to dig deep, build bridges, and take collective action.
Step 1: Digging deep
Opie says leaders need to confront the entrenched beliefs that reinforce the pay and promotion gaps playing out around them. Power dynamics tied up with race and gender underlie almost every workplace interaction.
Digging requires those belonging to power-dominant groups to open up and learn more about the perspectives of marginalized groups. On a personal level, that may mean considering how one’s upbringing and environment shaped one’s beliefs. On an organizational level, it might mean digging into company policies to determine which practices, unintentional or not, are buttressing inequality.
“The dig process really causes people to be honest and recognize that they can move ahead if they so choose,” says Opie. “So, you can dig into your own assumptions, but you can also dig into your corporate processes.”
Questions she might ask of a company during the “dig” process include:
- What is the company’s pay scale by race, gender, and level? Would it share that data with everyone in the firm?
- Would it provide employees with salary bands and let them know where they fall within those bands?
- What would leaders do if they found that they’re underpaying an employee?
“That's often an inhibitor to people having this conversation because they're afraid of what they'll find,” says Opie.
Step 2: Building a bridge
Company officials need to make authentic connections with people from different races, backgrounds, and genders who share the same values and goals. The ultimate goal of bridging is not friendship, emphasizes Opie, but rather an opportunity for two parties from different backgrounds to discuss, without fear, the collective actions that could reverse unfair practices.
The work of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell offers a high-profile example, Opie notes. Gebru, who’s Black, and Mitchell, who’s white, explored fairness in machine learning as computer scientists at Google. They raised controversial questions about racial and gender biases in artificial intelligence that the company relied on, which led to friction with Google executives. Ultimately, they were both fired from Google, but brought visibility to these issues in the field.
Similarly, actresses Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer also formed a bridge when they advocated for pay equity in Hollywood for women and actresses of color. Spencer, who is African American, let Chastain know about big pay differences between Black and white actresses. Chastain responded by publicly advocating for fair pay and by starting a production company of her own with the goal of eliminating pay disparities.
Step 3: Taking action together
Collective action is the final step in Opie’s model toward remediation. This means taking realistic, specific actions, together, just as Chastain and Spencer did in Hollywood.
“Once you've linked arms with people who believe in equity and who are different than you, then we can together start dismantling these systemic inequities.”
“I don't want to hear just a ‘pay equity plan,’” says Opie. “Who's responsible for providing data from each department? What's the budget? And what are the metrics to measure progress? Once you've linked arms with people who believe in equity and who are different than you, then we can together start dismantling these systemic inequities.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: Unsplash/Christina @ wocintechchat.com