New research from Harvard Kennedy School provides more insight into the unique challenges that Black women face in the workplace. Researchers Elizabeth Linos, Sanaz Mobasseri, and Nina Roussille investigated how having more White coworkers influences Black women’s retention and promotion rates in the workplace. Their study revealed a troubling finding: when Black women start their careers working with a higher percentage of White colleagues, they are more likely to leave their jobs and less likely to be promoted. This article will explore their research in more detail, examine what’s driving the inequities and provide actionable steps to address these systemic barriers.
“Our study examined how the racial composition of employees’ first teams affects their later career outcomes at a large professional services firm,” Mobasseri shared in an email. “We analyzed over 9,000 new hires from 2014-2020, tracking who gets promoted, who leaves, who works with whom, and a series of other measures, including performance evaluations, time on the project, and other key indicators of success. We can see how results differ by the race and gender of a given new hire. Our main analysis measures how working with more or fewer White coworkers at the beginning of a new hire’s career affects promotion and turnover at the firm.”
The results of their research revealed the unique challenges faced by Black women at work. Mobasseri explained, “When Black women start their careers working with more White coworkers in this firm, they are less likely to stay at the company and less likely to get promoted. Specifically, our study found that increasing a Black woman’s share of White coworkers by about 20% at the start of her job leads to her being 16% more likely to leave the company and 12% less likely to get promoted. This effect was unique to Black women—we don’t see similar effects for other employees.”
When probing deeper to understand these findings, Linos explained in an email that although their study did not follow the day-to-day interactions that likely impacted Black women’s overall workplace experiences, their research highlighted some important findings. “One clear avenue through which these results emerge is through performance evaluations. Our data shows that when a Black woman has more White coworkers early in her career, she is more likely to be labeled a low performer at her performance evaluations. We also see that she is more likely to log more training hours.”
Scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw gave us the language to better understand gendered racism in her pivotal paper on intersectionality that highlighted how the overlapping forms of oppression that Black women face simultaneously make their experiences of discrimination unique. This research elucidates one of the many ways that this can show up in the workplace. Linos explained, “When you parse out results by race and gender, the key findings become clear: the experience of being a Black woman in a predominantly White, high-wage firm is different than that of other groups—even other people of color.” Linos went on to share, “The race of your coworkers shouldn’t matter at all for whether or not you get promoted, or whether you leave the firm. It certainly shouldn’t affect how you are evaluated in your performance evaluations. But these results are in line with existing research on the double disadvantage that Black women face at work.”
With this research in mind, organizations and institutions must take deliberate action to ensure that their workplaces are built on equity and fairness. “Most companies overlook rigorous investigation into how their everyday work practices create disparities,” Mobasseri shared. “Want to build equity and cultivate inclusion? Look carefully at how you staff teams—those early assignments create ripple effects that can disadvantage Black women throughout their careers. Examine your performance review system—are people being evaluated fairly based on the work opportunities they receive? Track who gets assigned to high versus low priority projects. The goal is to identify and redesign organizational practices and systems that may appear neutral but produce racially disparate outcomes.”
Linos highlighted an important principle that is often overlooked in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts—diversity simply isn’t enough. It’s not enough to invite people from historically marginalized, excluded and underrepresented backgrounds into your workplace if there aren’t also systems set up to ensure that the workplace is rooted in equity and fairness and that there are measures in place to mitigate harm, exclusion and bias. “Focusing solely on recruitment and selection initiatives to solve diversity challenges at work is likely not enough. There’s no point investing heavily in diversifying your applicant pool if an organization isn’t also paying close attention to what’s happening at work that might affect retention.”