Voices of Executive Women of Color, Part 1: Lived Truths

Six months ago, I noticed that every client in my coaching roster was a woman of color. I had never branded myself as an executive coach for women of color. They came my way, they said, because “You’ll understand.”

I’m a woman of color, and have experienced othering throughout my life. But as I built my career over nearly two decades, I didn’t consider my race, gender, or religion as a part of my professional identity. I didn’t reject any of these identities, but for me, work was work.

I really believed the professional world would be a meritocracy. When I faced challenges in my career, I refused to believe those challenges were tied to my identities. Although sometimes, if I allowed myself to admit it, I wasn’t so sure it was normal to have so many experiences feel like a fight.

Gaining perspective.

I wanted to hear from more women of color about their experiences in leadership. The higher up you go, the fewer of them you find. We’ve read the reports: women represent roughly 1 in 4 C-suite leaders, and women of color represent just 1 in 16, despite their strong career ambitions (see footnote 1). What we don’t get in depth from those reports are the people behind the data.

So I interviewed 22 executive women of color. All of them hold or recently held the formal titles of director, VP, or CEO across a variety of industries and company sizes. They identify as Black, Asian, Latina, Indigenous or Native American, and Middle Eastern or North African (see footnote 2).

To say that I was inspired by their brilliance is an understatement. And while no executive’s story was identical to that of the next, the conversations revealed common challenges with being seen, heard, and respected.

With each conversation, I found myself increasingly dumbfounded: 

How is it possible that all of this brilliance has to push to be seen and heard? What does it say about what our organizations value?

No, not the published values. The lived ones. If you are an organization that is truly mission-driven, and truly wants to be a great place to work, why would you not elevate women like these 22 who are brilliant, introspective, think bigger than themselves, and have a desire to make a meaningful impact? When the world is desperate for this type of leadership, why aren’t organizations putting more of them in the highest seats of power?

For you, not just about you.

To the women I spoke to: this is for you, not just about you. You have grown your careers in environments where you didn’t have the language or the privilege to do so with ease. You figured things out on your own. You have proven yourself, time and again.

You also take an incredible degree of personal accountability. So much so, that even when the system is the culprit, you still ask yourself: 

How can I do things differently? What can I do better? 

While the context for these questions pains me, that type of introspection is what we need more of in our leaders and systems.

Today I’m sharing the dominant threads across our 22 conversations. No one’s experiences were identical to another’s. My desire is that each of you feels seen and heard in at least one of these threads, if not all six of them. In an article next week, I’ll share recommendations on where to go from here. Recommendations that put power into your hands.

I anticipate that what has been true for you will resonate with many other women leaders of color, and help them to know that they aren’t alone. This is for them, too.

Finally, to those of you who make people decisions in your organizations: by 2060, women of color will make up more than half of all women in the U.S. (see footnote 3). Supporting their career development now is an investment whose benefits extend far beyond the next quarter, the next year, and even the next decade. I recommend you start here: make a list of five women leaders of color in your organization. Invite them to a conversation where your focus is to hear their stories and their ambitions. Your future may depend on it.

Our dominant conversation threads.

To the executive women interviewed, here are the six dominant threads that came up across our 22 conversations:

1. You are confident in your competence. 

In order to have a meaningful impact in your roles, many of you described how you are strong contributors. High quality work and thoughtful engagement are two ways you contribute. This approach helped you get to where you are today, and is still relevant for you to be taken seriously. But it’s not working for your well-being or for your ongoing career growth.

It’s draining when stakeholders, like your employers, default to the idea that you need more training in skills as if the problem with advancing is based on your competencies. You are taught to second guess or question yourself first when there is no reason to do so. What needs questioning is other factors, like the environment itself:

“I often wasn't allowed to go to business development pitches or meetings without a white male peer. It wasn't a rule. It was more so a practice," said a former managing director at an AMLaw 100 firm. She continued:

"When firms think about supporting BIPOC attorneys, they immediately organize more training or skills development. What I needed most was for people to call out and hold accountable everyday behaviors from colleagues that obstructed me from opportunities to thrive.”

Competence in your job is also not the only thing you bring to the proverbial table. As a chief of staff in the healthcare industry described it,

“There is a hierarchy, no matter what anyone says. I am not as seen and heard as my white counterpart. And, I have to be so prepared: knowledge-prepared, emotionally-prepared, prepared to not be heard or seen, and be prepared to behave in a way that doesn't bother you.”

You’re looking for trust that will translate into allyship and sponsorship that gives you more visibility and advancement. The dissonance between your proven competence and stakeholder response begs the questions: 

Do my leaders really see me? What will it take for them to support my ongoing growth?

2. You face resistance or lack of clarity in growing your influence and your careers. 

For many of you, growing in your seniority has not made it easier to gain respect as a leader or further advance your career. You’re trying to make sense of the pushback you experience so you can do something about it.

More than one of you shared that you don’t want to have to pull rank or ask your seniors for help:

“My top challenge is garnering respect quickly,” said a chief of staff in the government. “I can usually get buy-in over time, but I need to get there faster. I don’t want to have to appeal to authority or defer to leadership. I don’t want to have to explain that I’m in this position because so-and-so wanted me to do this.”

Your desire for respect is bigger than you: it’s for the sake of making an impact. As a strategy & operations VP in the tech industry said,

“As I climb up the ladder, I face more and more resistance. How do you maintain credibility despite the resistance? How do you be effective in your role despite the resistance? I face resistance and continue to persevere. What if all of this energy just went to delivering? Any distraction from getting things done is distracting from our goal and purpose. We don’t have time for this.”

This challenge carried over into understanding what’s required to grow your career, especially when others are advancing and you’re not. A sales director shared,

“I hear about people getting tapped for things. I get positive feedback, but I don’t get tapped. Why am I not getting tapped? The dissonance for me, the macro thing, is: how do I get to the root cause of this so I can do something about it?”

Even when signs point to bias, you hesitate to draw conclusions, and even say, “I don’t want to go there.” I get it, I didn’t like going there either. But if we don’t go there, we won’t get answers.

3. You quiet aspects of yourself to be heard, and it can be exhausting. 

Many of you shared that you are conscious of your communication. While effective communication involves adapting how you deliver a message based on your audience, you have found that you need to deflect attention from yourself or put aside your culture to be heard. It’s a compromise whose burden you have to bear.

“We have the skill to make other [people] feel important,” said an executive director in financial services. “It’s a cool tool, but why can’t we be the bad a**es in the room?”

Another executive director, at a non-profit, juxtaposed two environments to illustrate the point:

“When I am with my Black professionals, I can use colloquialisms all day. This is not about professionalism. [In other spaces] I have to find the right words, I cannot use my shortcuts. For white men, the shortcut is the sh*ts, f*cks, and d*mns. I’m not going to use those shortcuts. I can’t relax into who I am because it would inhibit me professionally.”

A few of you commented on how important it is to lean into authenticity for your health and happiness. A former Fortune 500 CEO represented this point when she described how she navigated a path to be herself:

“Find the sweet spot that merges who you are, so you are not trying to be someone else, but also makes you an effective leader. The day that I decided: ‘Screw it, this is who I am, this is how I talk, but I am going to be mindful of my audiences and stakeholders and make sure I am effective for them – that is when I found happiness and quite frankly more success as a leader, too.”

When your environment doesn’t embrace authenticity, it’s hard not to adjust your approach to contribute in a way that will be acknowledged. Given that it’s at your own expense, I feel compelled to raise a question that we'll explore more in Part 2:

What conditions need to be in place to help you say “screw it”, and find ways to merge your authenticity and effectiveness?

4. Being in a senior role has given you some room to breathe.

A number of you mentioned that your senior position gives you a channel and formal scope to have more influence in your environment, even if it’s not without challenges like resistance. You are no longer heads-down and “drinking from a firehouse”, trying to establish yourself in your profession. You can now focus on growing into more aspects of yourself as a senior leader.

One of you described a shift in using your voice in a way you did not before: 

“For the first time, I was stern with my manager,” said an executive director in financial services. “Maybe it’s my age and my new promotion. I want to be more clear. It’s new for me to not stay quiet. Now I feel confident.”

You now set the tone for your team, and see yourself in a broader context. That said, you’re also entering spaces that may have a pre-existing perception of you. As a non-profit executive director described it,

“[Now] I am the decision maker. I am setting the tone and the pace, which is very different from when I was a worker bee. At the same time, we are in spaces where people aren’t used to us. We don’t know what’s been said before we entered the room. Sometimes we have to spend time course-correcting existing beliefs.”

Your line of direct management, the culture of your organization, and the number of years you have been in a particular environment were all factors that came up as impacting your experience.

When you have it, room to breathe is a chance to lean more into what you value and believe, even as you navigate belonging in your context.

5. As you create belonging for others, you don’t always have it for yourself.

Your words revealed powerfully how you create belonging for others while driving the goals of your organizations and communities. One of the leadership challenges you face is not having that same sense of belonging for yourself.

For one founder/CEO, this holds true in her community of origin, with her employees, and with investors.

“When I get home, I am looked down on because of my education,” she said. “A lot of people don’t ever leave. If you leave and go to school, you’re looked at like an outsider.”

When she talks to investors, she finds herself immersed in a language different from what she’s been around. She’s conscious that she needs to be trusted by them to run a company.

She’s also found that when she brings her business education or lessons in leadership effectiveness to employees and partners who are of her background, 

“There’s mistrust, like: ‘Who are you, really?’ and ‘What is your identity, really?’” 

For some of you, what keeps you going the extra mile to create belonging for others is a sense of responsibility. However, the impact that has on you is not considered:

“I feel like if I’m not at the table, there are no voices,” said a medical director. “I feel I have to be there so there’s a minority voice. It takes extra time, I don’t get paid for doing the extra work, and I am always asked to do more.”

A former Fortune 500 CEO emphasized that diversity alone isn’t enough. You need inclusion: 

“You can have people on your teams, but who dominates the narrative? You have all the numbers, but at the end of the day, the good old boys bully others and talk amongst themselves, and other voices are not equally heard. If you stop at checking the boxes, it’s worthless.”

You create space for others to be themselves and feel supported. But when the environment doesn’t offer the same to you, how are you supposed to thrive? 

What will it take for organizations and communities to recognize the double-standard and choose to change? How will you support yourself independent of their choices?

6. You value leaders who lift others up.

It was not surprising to me that leaders who lift others up are inspirational to you. Lifting others up is how you lead, and how you aspire to continue to grow in your leadership. 

These leaders are direct, inspirational, and think bigger than themselves. They “truly, truly care” and take action to show it. You want to see more of this type of leadership.

Directness is an important aspect of feeling supported because you have growth mindsets and value personal accountability. A VP at a non-profit commented, 

“Yes, I need a cheerleader. But I need someone to be very real with me. Get me to the point of my own part of the mess. I don’t want someone to tell me I’m right. [Say] ‘you’ve got work to do, so what are you going to do?’” 

You referred to “inspirational” as being a leader who can get others to follow. You described that ability as enrolling people in a vision, and taking them along for the journey:

“They can really rally people,” said a VP. “No matter how stressful things are, they pause, be in the moment, and respect.”

Thinking beyond one’s domain of responsibility is also a sign of great leadership to you. You want the people who report to you to one day grow beyond you. The vision is vast: 

“They [leaders] want to contribute to society as a whole, not just their group,” said a senior corporate counsel. “They are raising the next generation of leaders. They feel an obligation to society.”

To you, lifting others up combines care and action. What I want your stakeholders to know is this: these women value lifting others up, so show them how you will lift them up, too.

From conversation to action.

If you read through the six conversation threads and thought, “It helps to know I’m not alone," I’m right there with you.

These conversations highlighted for me the degree to which we go through our experiences alone. And how much we wish that the organizations reading reports about women in the workplace took the recommendations seriously.

As Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) budgets continue to be cut, and artificial intelligence is inherently biased right now, the organizations that will stand out will be the ones who actively demonstrate that they value belonging. It might be an employer’s market, but talent is increasingly evaluating culture as part of their criteria for whether they want to join or stay at an organization.

We need recommendations on what to do while our organizations choose, or choose not, to learn and change. Why? Our positive impact won’t expand if we solely wait for change from others alongside advocating for it.

So how can you find empowerment within systems that are too slow or too myopic to change? This is where we need to center you, and empower you from within. The recommendations forthcoming next week in Part 2 expand on why and how.

To further the conversation, please comment below with your own experiences and perspectives. If you'd like to speak to Farah Hussain directly, please DM her or email [email protected]

Footnote 1: Field, E., Krivkovich, A., Kügele, S., Robinson, N., & Yee, L. (2023, October 5). Women in the Workplace 2023. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org.

Footnote 2:  All 22 women interviewed have degrees in higher education, with many holding graduate degrees. While more than one of them had spent time working abroad, only one spent most of her career outside of the United States. The focus of this piece is experiences in the U.S.

Footnote 3: Catalyst Inc. (2023, February 1). Women of Color in the United States (Quick Take). Retrieved May 26, 2024, from www.catalyst.org/research/women-of-color-in-the-united-states/