Special Edition: MAKERS: Keep Going – Intersectionality

I want to give a special thanks to the Maker's conference sponsors, PNG, Price Waterhouse Cooper's an official wellness sponsor Lulu Lemon. Now. We launched the Seneca Women podcast Network about a year ago with founding partner PNG and I Heart Radio with the goal of amplifying the voices of women around the world. You probably know that podcasting is a fast growing industry, with over fifty set of podcast

audience being women. But what you may not know is that only twenty of top podcasts are hosted by women. We want to change that, so we are launching dozens of women focused and women led podcasts. So if you have a show where you want to collaborate on a show, reach out to us at info at Seneca Women dot com Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest host for the Keep Going series, Amina Brown. Amina is a spoken word poet, author and host of the

podcast Her with Amina Brown on the Seneca Women Podcast Network. Amina, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Kim. What an honor to be guest hosting this special series and collaboration with Makers. We've been having such great conversations here and today's conversation is going to be very special. We're going to start with an excerpt from a talk given at Makers by Kimberly Crenshaw, Professor of Law at u c l A and Columbia Law School and executive director

of the African American Policy Forum. She is the person who coined the term intersectionality, and she's going to give us a guide on exactly what it is, or as she calls it, intersectionality. One oh one, and then I'll be joined by Dr Ellabell Smith, Professor of Management Sciences at the Tuch School of Business at Dartmouth. Dr Smith and I will go deeper into the definition of intersectionality, and she's going to suggest some practical ways leaders can

be sure they are taking intersectionality into consideration in the workplace. Now, let's listen to Kimberly Crenshaw and I'll be back right after with Dr Ellabell Smith. So I'm just gonna dive right in with how intersectionality can help us understand why we're not done. Now, there's a lot of nonsense circulating around about what intersectionality is, particularly from its critics. They say it's a religion, it's an identity politic on steroids.

My new favorite, it's a salt on straight white men. You know what I think about that. Now, all of these ideas about what intersectionality is is completely off the mark. What intersectionality is is a prism. It's a framework, it's a it's a template for seeing and telling different kinds of stories about what happens in our workplaces, what happens

in society, and to whom it happens. Now, some part of why we're not done is predicated on what we haven't been able to see, what what's not remembered, the stories that are not told. So intersectionality is like training wheels. It's to get us to where we need to go. It's glasses, high index glasses to help us see the

things we need to see now. In all honesty, when I fashioned the term some thirty years ago, I thought of it as remedial education for judges who didn't get to see or didn't seem to understand what was howpening to black women. They didn't seem to understand that black women can experience race discrimination in a different way than black men do, or they didn't understand that black women could experience gender discrimination in a different way than white

women did. Emma Degraphy, storied, was a person who understood that problem. She was claiming that she experienced discrimination as a black woman, but her employer and the court seemed to agree that since the employer hired black people and they hired women, even though the black people that they hired were all men and the women they hired were

all white, that Emma Degraphy couldn't prove discrimination. So I was trying to figure out what kind of framework they needed to see in order to keep black women from falling through the cracks of their very narrow conception of what discrimination was. So intersectionality was just like a flashing knee on sign. I know you're used to thinking about intersectionality discrimination in this way, but I want to draw your attention to where they overlap, where race and gender

discrimination intersect. So the point of intersectionality was to say that what happens to black women isn't the sum total of what happens to black men and white women. It's different and sometimes it requires a different approach. Now that's intersectionality. One oh one. I think a lot of people get that.

Oh so good to hear about intersectionality from Kimberly Crenshaw herself, And I'm excited to welcome Dr Ella bell Smith, Professor of Management Sciences at the Tuch School of Business at Dartmouth, to unpack some of this with me. Ella, talk to me how how does intersectionality help us understand the particular challenges that women of color are facing in the workplace. Well, first of all, hello, hello, Hello, I'm just delighted to

be here. UM. Okay. In the early research on women and management, UM breaking the glass ceiling that everybody was talking about, there was a book all about white women. Black women were invisible. UM the work that Um Price Cobs did and others, and they were more organizational consultants. The work they did around black executives was primarily based on black men. So black women literally fell in between

the cracks. We still fall in between the cracks. Um, intersexuality became really important because it allowed us to understand the intersection of race and gender, and for Black women, for Black women, for Brown women. We have to deal with an Asian women, Indian women, Native American women, we have to deal with the struggles that hit us because of our race and because of our agenda. Now, there

was a scholar before Kimberly, and I love Kimberly. Um filomena, he said, she used the term, and we used the book in a term in our separate ways because we wrote the book before Kimberly came out with a brilliant framework of racialized sexism. So we have a long history, if you will, over thirty years of trying to understand the particular isms that black women experience. It's critical, very

I could go on give you another a recent example. Uh, it's recently working with a client and um, they were doing wage analysis, which is really really important. And I was talking to the the guy who did they that great guy, brilliant, you know, good technique, all that kind of good stuff, and I noticed that he had people of colored blacks separated from gender. And I said to him in the analysis, and he was telling me, what,

you know, the numbers are too small. And I know you're gonna be talking to me about intersectionality, but the numbers are too small, and you have to do a whole different cut. And if you're doing statistics, you have to make sure you're filling all the cells in to get a really good analysis. And they're not enough Black women,

and so we really can't do that analysis. And YadA YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA. Um, we are still doing analysis UM around wage, around promotion, around other types of advancement at still lump black men and black women together, so we cannot differentiate what their experiences UM are, particularly around sorry, particularly around advancement UM. And you know, we've been preaching this song that you've got to understand again Kimberly's turn on the intersection between

race and gender. So it's silences black women to talk about their true experiences around racism, around sexism. It's silences black women to be able to talk about their pain. Its silences black women to be able to make demands about wage, about fair treatment, about promotions, and that's devastating because when you call it out, people really don't understand. Why are you complaining? What's the issue, what's the problem?

You know, you're needy the unique journey that black women have to deal with on a day to day basis. It's not understood, it's not talked about. It can't be fully celebrated either. Not all negative, it can't be fully appreciated either. Let me ask you about this. We have a lot of people listening to this podcast that are leaders, managers, They are in positions to actually make some decisions regarding

how things go in the workplace. What advice would you give to folks who are in a position to hire, who are in a position to handle promotions, handle raises and these different kind of conversations. What advice would you give to them on how they can take intersectionality and put it into practice. Don't ever show me as a consult organizational consultant. Don't never show me here's what's happening to the African Americans, and here's what's happening to the women.

What they can do, they can demand and always realize that you have to in your approach of understanding institutionalized racism. You need to look at it from a intersectional perspective. What's happening to the black men, what's happening to the black women, what's happening to the brown women, what's happening to the brown men, and what's happening to the agents based on race and gender. That becomes critically critically important.

You can't do these large lump analysis. Um, when you look at your pipeline, don't tell me, well, I've got women so often that here we've got women in the pipeline. My question is what do those women look like? Well, you know they're mostly white. Oh, you did an intersection analysis, you would know that you don't have have a diverse female popline. You just don't. And you're talking about we

got plenty of women. Why is it that when we talk about women in management in an executive positions that you know and and and those numbers are not great by the way, Um, but when we talk about them, um, you know, there's like, oh, yeah, we got women, but there's no thought to what's the ratio background of those women. And then when you say black women, well, you know, we haven't gotten there yet. It's like a second thought. Oh,

well we're gonna work on that next. Um. If you're gonna give all women equal footing, which you should be doing, then you've got to take an Internet intersectionality perspective. How are you developing all women? Which means you've got to look at it from a racial gender lens. Um development. You know, I teach it talk that we do these great executive programs. Um. If I see in a black face and some of our executive programs, I'm shocked. I'm shocked.

Companies are not spending money on developing black talent period. Okay, they're just not. Um, those programs are phil with white white men and a sprinkling of white women. Okay, but then no brown faces, very very few. The reality of it is, you've got them pay equal time to race and gender. That intersection on who are you developing, who are you grooming, who are you sponsoring? Who do you know?

What are you doing to get to know your diverse segments? Um, And it can't be well, you know, we have we have an affinity group for the blacks. I am tired of hearing that. You know, yeah, we we we have we have an employee reseurce group for our blacks. Okay, and we have one for women. Where do where do? Where do women of color fitted? H They don't feel totally welcomed in the white group because white women have a very our Our book are Separate Ways, which is

coming back out in August reissued. Get a copy of Everybody. Um shows clearly that the navigation that is needed for a black woman to succeed in a corporate arena compared to a white woman is very very different, Okay, different realities night and day. So the reality of it is you need to understand that women of color need a safe harbor where they can come to support each other, lift each other up, create a powerful network, and get to know to corporate executives. Um. I'm very very proud

of the work that I did decades ago. Now at PepsiCo, we actually started a based on the you know, the data. Always start with your data, okay, always what is the data tell you? Uh? And by data, you've got to collect some data, you know. We did focus groups with the African American women and the brown women, in Hispanic women and the Asian women. We wanted to know what their experiences where. We did exit interviews with the women okay.

We actually contacted women who had left PepsiCo okay, and the data was like, oh my gosh, it was powerful data which then enabled us to say, the women of color need a special UM employee resource group, and PepsiCo still has as far as I know, a woman of color, multicultural women. I believe they call it affinity group. You know, for years I did a leadership program ASCENT leading Global Women to the Top, and that was a program that

did two things. Here's the skills for brown and black and Asian women also UM white women to learn how to navigate, how to succeed. If we can figure out what's wrong with their reality in the workplace, then we can flip that and understand what is needed in order to get them to succeed, okay, both from their corporate sponsors UH and the culture as well as how they

need to bring their voice to the table. The second thing that program did was to bring white women into the program so that the women of different racial backgrounds to learn to be co conspirators, not allies. You know, we talk a lot about allies. You know, Allies can come and go and Allie can be there. Sometimes that all I can say, well, you know this is not in my best of venturess, So I'm not gonna fight this battle with you. Sometimes allies this want to, you know,

have a coffee break with you. Um. We need co conspirators, um, women who have skin in the game, women who really look out for each other, I have your back, Women who when they get to the table, particularly white women, because white women get to the leadership table quicker than black women, than Brown women, than Asian women, we need to say once you're at that table, when they're at that table, we need them to be able to say, where are my fellow women who don't look like me?

So we wanted to build that relationship, UM, so that they learned to become true sisters. Okay, because we don't necessarily grow up having a white woman as our best friend or a black woman as our best friend or hanging out. You know, we live in a pretty segregated world.

Not if you have that blessing, that's fantastic, but we want to to make sure that all women had and that came to assent an opportunity to develop those deep, trusting relationships, and those relationships you know, six years later, are still strong, still strong. It's amazing to see and how they support each other, you know. So you've got to number one, get the women to come together to realize that, you know, one success does not equal everybody's success.

Co conspirators want everybody to be successful, you know, and am willing to fight for that in a diplomatic way. Okay, But the companies have to be very aware on how they're doing their analysis, what their pipeline looks like, who are they developing, what they look like. You've got to ask the question, you know what, who who's in it? Based by race and gender? Okay, what kind of feedback are we getting? What kind of opportunities are we creating?

You know, we we've got to be able to think that and not just think every brown and black woman and employee relations or human resources or diversity positions. Okay, those are dead end. M hm, those are dead and because oh, well we've got in and human resources, We've got plenty of black women. Well who that. That's great, that's a good feel. But we need to have them in general management where they are accountable for the money

making part, the profit making part of the company. Yeah, we need to be able to show that we've got skills that we can do, that we can market a product. You know, we we were in the profit generating centers. That's the other thing I want to see. Don't tell me how I've got our d and I person is African American. Really, I'm so surprised. You know, it's like, Okay, where are they in the money generating centers? Uh, you're missing an opportunity. Dr Ella bell Smith, thank you so

much for joining us and taking us to task. I hope all of you that are listening are taken to task today that we can consider intersectionality in our workplaces. Dr Ella, thank you so much. You're so very welcome. Dr Ella bell Smith. Always wonderful to hear from her, and what a helpful way to look at and act on intersectionality in the workplace. So here are three questions to ask yourself when it comes to intersectionality. Do you have the data in your own workplace that you need

to make progress? Are you collecting the information that will allow you to address the specific needs of multicultural women and women of color which may be different from the needs of white women. Are you creating brave space where white women can go beyond ally ship and become co conspirators with women of color as they seek success and equity. Finally, are you developing your pipeline, are you ensuring that it's

filled with people of color and women of color? And as you bring people along, are you moving them into positions where they can have a real impact on the company. Let's think on these things and be ready to take action. Thanks for listening. You're listening to Seneca's Conversations on power and purpose brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio with support from founding partner PNG.

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