watched her boss repeatedly offer the lead role on new business to a colleague of hers—a white male whom she had hired to help her execute a massive cost reduction project for a multimillion-dollar client. “My boss simply couldn’t remember that it was my leadership, my work, and not that of the guy I’d hired and promoted while I was doing it,” she says. “He’d look me straight in the eye and say, ‘Why don’t we put Tom on this new account? He did such a great job with that cost reduction project.’”
One senior vice president and executive editor at a big cable network likewise describes a phenomenon that occurred with some frequency early in her career as a broadcast journalist—before she had won the backing of powerful leaders at the news channel. “During editorial meetings in the early nineties,” she recalls, “I noticed that sometimes if I were to say, ‘Let’s do A,’ the room would continue in its discussion. I’d hear that idea of mine coming out of someone else’s mouth. And then the room would hear it, understand it, and get behind it.” She adds, “Initially I thought it was race related. Then I began to think it was not only race related but also gender related.”
Even when black women insist that leaders acknowledge their contribution, recognition doesn’t necessarily translate into opportunity. “I feel like I’m always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” says Nichelle,* a twenty-year veteran of her firm. “My performance reviews have been uniformly outstanding: I could run every one of our leadership programs, and my exposure to leaders is crafted very strategically. But despite being supported, I’m not promoted.” She adds, “This leaves me to surmise that the only things preventing my advancement are my color, size, and shape. I don’t know what’s said about me behind closed doors, but I look around and see that the females who get the promotions are usually white and regardless of race, are almost always cute and petite. And I have to wonder, as a big girl over fifty, what my chances here really are.”
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