Companies have amped up their rhetoric about equity and inclusion, many churning out diversity statements. But Vinita’s guest today says their promises to promote anti-racist cultures without action plans can lead to greater blocks to success for racialized employees. Sonia Kang is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management - and one of Canada’s leading experts on identity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
We’ve all heard the buzzwords: Equity, diversity, inclusion.
For some, these terms evoke social change but for others, they conjure empty promises on a glossy corporate brochure or a workplace’s ineffective policy statement at the bottom of a job listing.
In 2020, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, worldwide protests against anti-Black police brutality and racism prompted corporations across the world to rush to address anti-Black racism with statements of solidarity and, in many cases, affirmations of their commitment to anti-racism in the workplace.
But University of Toronto Professor Sonia Kang says that without action plans to back up those ideas, those statements can actually lead to greater blocks to success for racialized employees and job seekers.
Join us and listen to Don't Call Me Resilient as we speak with Prof. Kang to discuss tokenism and how institutions uphold institutional racism. Kang is a Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity and Inclusion and host of the podcast For the Love of Work.
From performative allyship in the workplace to resume whitening practices in job applications to the grey area between being a diversity hire or the first racialized employee, explore the many facets of tokenism and how we can challenge and reshape the institutional practices that keep racialized employees from succeeding in the workplace.
You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and use #DontCallMeResilient.
The unedited version of the transcript is available here.
DCMR S 4 EP 1 Tokenism Transcript
MUSIC Something in the Water by Zaki Ibrahim
VINITA From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vinita Srivastava.
SONIA KANG The thought of confronting a co-worker who thinks that you're there as a token when it's ambiguous, when you don't have that really clear information and evidence can really wear at a person. And that's where you get to burnout. You want to leave the company, you're looking for something else. You really don't feel like you belong.
VINITA SRIVASTAVA I was living in New York City working at the New York Times. This was about ten, 15 years ago, and I saw a job posting for a journalism professor. It looked like a dream job. I looked up the university and I quickly found that they had never hired a person of colour to be a full time professor. So I applied and I wrote my application based on my research and my practise, which is based on my experience. I'm queer, I'm a feminist. I'm Desi, I'm brown, I'm an anti-racist activist, and I'm highly critical of colonialism. So at my job interview, the hiring committee said they were really excited for my presence. They didn't say this part out loud, but I'm sure they thought that I would help them move into the 21st century. But when I got there, things were really challenging. I was completely isolated. I felt like I didn't belong. And I mean, really, how could I was the first person of colour ever hire there. And I could go on and on. It was really a terrible experience. And I'm really glad that I'm no longer there and that I've landed at this place that's much more supportive and a much better work environment for me. So I actually have a story like this from almost every place I've worked and I've heard hundreds of stories like this from others as well. At the crux of these stories is the desire for a job that showcases our talents to feel like we belong in the workplace. And also we don't want to get those all knowing looks, you know, those looks that we get from our white colleagues that imply that the only reason you're here in this place of excellence is because you're a minority hire. And what I'm talking about is tokenism. Joining me today is Sonia Kang. Sonia Kang is an associate professor in the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. She is the Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity and Inclusion and the Special Advisor on Anti-Racism and Equity at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. She's the host of the podcast For the Love of Work. In her research, Sonia has been digging into things like corporate diversity statements, the phenomena of resume whitening, and the importance of belonging in the workplace. Welcome, Sonia.
SONIA Hey, thanks for having me on.
VINITA So while we were producing this podcast and doing the research, one of our producers talked about a struggle that she had recently with people telling her she's only gotten to where she has gotten because of her race and not because of her merit. How can one tell if you're a token hire?
SONIA I would say, first of all, that being a token or tokenism really means that you're there not necessarily because of who you are. But more so to make the company look good. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're not qualified to be there. It just means that all things being equal, the company was really interested in you so that you could fill that role and really give them the appearance that they are interested in diversity. They're bringing on lots of different employees from diverse groups, and in the future they're ready to diversify. If you think that you are a token hire, sometimes people feel these thoughts like, I don't belong here. People are going to figure out that I'm not good enough to be here. And typically, people would call that imposter syndrome. I don't love that. I think that imposter syndrome makes it seem like, you know, it's not real, that it's just something that you're making up and it's not based on any truth. What really is happening there is people are picking up on the subtle and not so subtle cues that you were talking about in your example, where you're getting signals from people that you don't really belong, that you're only there because of whatever identity they're interested in checking a box on that day. And that's your reaction to that. And feeling like an imposter is extremely tiring, right? You're constantly having to prove yourself over and over again, not only to your co-workers, but also to yourself. Paying attention to those thoughts is so important. That's why I don't like the imposter syndrome rhetoric, because we're taught like - No you are good at life and just ignore it and you'll get over it in time. But we need to pay attention to those thoughts and pay attention to the root of them. And I think most of the time we would find that they're coming from our reaction to things that are actually happening and not just in our heads.
VINITA So do you have any advice for our producer? Like, what might you say if your co-workers call you a token?
SONIA So that's a really tough one. And I will say that hopefully that kind of experience is more rare than those kind of subtle cues. The kind of subtle cues of like, hmm, okay, do you really know what you're doing? If someone really explicitly calls you out as a token, in some ways that's almost easier because you know what you're dealing with. Yeah, there's no ambiguity there. And then you can really address that head on. You could even bring it up with whoever hired you. You know, this is the perception that the team has and kind of leave it in their hands to solve that. The more difficult thing is when people aren't explicitly saying that, but they're second guessing everything that you're saying. They're double checking all of your work. It's that kind of subtle undermining that becomes so difficult I think for minorities to deal with in the workplace because they've been gaslit for so long. Those are the kind of experiences that kind of needle at you. The thought of confronting a co-worker who thinks that you're there as a token when it's ambiguous, when you don't have that really clear information and evidence can really wear at a person. And that's where you get to burnout. You want to leave the company, you're looking for something else. You really don't feel like you belong.
VINITA Yeah, I guess that's when you get the sort of mass resignations that we've...
SONIA Yeah.
VINITA been hearing about, too. Sonya, can you relate at all to my story? Do you have one of your own?
SONIA I go into this Ph.D. programme and, you know, my family's Indian. I grew up in the Indian cultural context where you don't really necessarily want to be questioning your elders all the time. Right. That's not a prized attribute of like a kid that's growing up in that context. Right? So I go to grad school and all of a sudden we're in this super weird place where you have these first year students being expected to ask questions and bring up criticisms of these professors. And I remember, like just feeling so stressed out, like physiological stress, like I couldn't hear, I had the ringing in my ears. Like, my heart is beating super quick.
VINITA Oh, no.
SONIA I really internalised that. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I am so dumb. I have nothing to contribute here. I have no questions. And then my advisor would be like, Oh, you really need to start asking questions like, da da da da da. And in that moment that said to me, You don't belong here. You're not as good as all the other people who are able to come up with these questions and put their head up and just ask them like it's no big deal. Looking back on that now, I can see how that environment wasn't set up to, you know, really support people like me who weren't used to that kind of practise, who weren't used to that kind of setting, where all of a sudden we're equals somehow allowed to be critiquing each other. I definitely see that a lot with students even now, and I think it can be particularly different from people who are coming from cultural backgrounds where they've been taught the exact opposite thing or from different identity groups where they haven't always felt safe speaking up and they've learnt over time not to necessarily express their opinion, not to stand out.
VINITA Hearing you talk makes me think there's probably so many things that people come with when they come to the job. Why does having a diverse workforce benefit a company?
SONIA The most common answer would be what's called the business case, where people would say: "Diversity is so great for all of these different outcomes, like creativity, performance, productivity. Diverse teams just do better and they're better able to serve the population that they're trying to benefit." I would say that's like a starting point, but we can't hinge the entirety of diversity and inclusion on like, it's going to help you make money because what happens if it doesn't help you make money? So I think we really need to move to more of a moral case like this is the right thing to do. No one should be made to feel like they don't belong in a space. And that's why, you know, the movement towards trying to build inclusive workplace cultures is so important. That's why we should care.
VINITA Sonia, you talked about being culturally challenged. How did that experience help you become who you are today?
SONIA Once I was a professor, I had my own students and then I saw how much power I had over their experience. I could really make this amazing for them, or I could make it the worst experience ever. I don't want there to be a tension. I don't want them to feel like they're being measured, like solely by their productivity or performance. I really care about them personally. I feel like these same decisions could have been made like back when I was in grad school. And that's the hope as those more diverse people are moving through and getting into those positions where they're responsible for creating a good environment and culture. They're remembering those experiences and creating the environment that they would have thrived under, creating an environment where everyone can feel like they belong. Sometimes happens as a reaction to not feeling like you belong yourself, which is sad that it has to happen that way.
VINITA So after George Floyd's murder, corporations rushed to address anti-black racism and some places released anti-racist statements, and others talked about hiring more black and other underrepresented groups. And you've done a lot of research on resume whitening, where job seekers change characteristics about themselves on resumes like names and cultural clubs. In a time when corporations say they're actively trying to diversify their staff, do you think this practise of resume whitening is changing?
SONIA With the resume whitening work that my colleagues and I did, we created a series of resumes that were virtually identical. They just differed in how obvious the person's race was. So we had one resumé where it was very hard to tell that the applicant was not white, so their name was not connected to any kind of racial marker activities and clubs that they had been members of. There was like no mention of different identity groups and then. We had resumes that were progressively more and more obviously coming from a black applicant. So we manipulated the name, the different clubs that they're a part of, like the Black Students Association, an award that they had won. And so our measurement there was whitening, right? So whitening was like, how white did the person who was sending in the application seem? And what we found is when we sent out those resumes, I think we sent out 4000 resumes across 16 different cities in the U.S. What we found was that when the resume was coming from someone who seemed white, they were 2 to 2 and a half times more likely to get a call-back than when it was obvious that the applicant was black. And this is again the exact same resume, so nothing else is different. What's interesting about those results, in terms of your question about diversity statements, is that we sent half of those resumes out to companies that had a diversity statement. I think we did this back in 2016. Half of the companies that we sent them to did not mention diversity at all. And what we found, unfortunately in that is that there was no difference between companies who had a diversity statement or didn't have a diversity statement in terms of that discrepancy between call-backs for the black employee or the black applicant versus the white applicant. So what's really scary about that is that when applicants see a diversity statement that tells me like: "Oh, I can be myself here, yes, I don't need to whiten. I can use my real name, right? I can put all my real experiences. I can be myself." So the problem with that is if you are, you know, putting out these diversity statements, that's a signal. And the problem is if those companies are sending out that signal, but then people are going to be discriminated against anyway. Then you're actually setting them up for more discrimination.
VINITA Wow. Yeah, I'm shaking my head. I'm just like I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.
SONIA So to your question about what's happening now here in Canada, we have something called the Black North Initiative, where multiple different companies signed on to it and they were going to increase representation of black employees at higher levels of the company. The Globe and Mail recently did a did a report kind of following up on that to see, you know, how that looked. And a lot of companies didn't even reply. Right. Which suggests like they didn't make progress. And then small number of companies did make progress. Some had not made progress. So I think like the result that we found, you know, way back before any of this kind of reaction to the murder of George Floyd kind of encouraged, more and more companies to have diversity statements, I don't think it would be that different now. I don't think that companies have really necessarily like solved this problem with those diversity statements. Right. They might have the diversity statements, but they're not necessarily, you know, putting in the practises that will actually help them to meet the values that they're putting forward in those statements. And so that's where the work needs to be done, right? And actually, like changing the systems, changing the processes, that is going to help you to actually do the things that you say you're going to do in your statement. And I think a lot of that is because think about who's writing those statements, right? Like it's going to be people who are either in positions of power in the company or even like maybe an external consultant who like draft something off or it's not necessarily connected to the experiences of employees who are like on the ground experiencing that culture and really know what that culture is like.
VINITA I think you're starting to point a little bit to some of the solutions, like how do we hold our employers accountable?
SONIA So there are definitely like mechanisms for employees to write about their experiences at workplaces like Glassdoor is one example. And I think that, you know, as the worlds becomes like smaller and people are kind of like networking with people who are in their same, you know, career path, maybe working at different companies. I think employees really do talk about this stuff like employee experiences at work. The feeling that they got at work I think didn't used to be talked about as much when people were just, you know, like going to work. You just do your work, you go home, like whatever. It seems like things have really shifted where we really care about how we feel at work and we really care about what how our specifically how our company is making us feel. And so people definitely talk about that. If you look at, you know, something like Glassdoor, a lot of what's written about there like for sure you're going to have like salary and like whatever more basic things. But a lot of what's written about there is the experiences that people have had, particularly I think amongst minority groups. So whatever the underrepresented minority identity might be, having that community of people that you can trust to tell you about their experiences is really important because you're going to listen to those experiences. So I think what will happen or what is probably happening is that companies that aren't doing a good job of this are going to have people leaving. They're going to have a hard time recruiting people. So it's really going to hit them, I think on that kind of like h our side, it's just a matter of are they going to pay attention to that and react or are they going to be fine with just hiring? Like, I don't know, like only like white men or something, you know. So like, are they going to react? Like how much do they really care about it? I will say, though that so I do some teaching with executive education at Rotman. A lot of my interactions with people who are in those executive positions are like super promising.
VINITA What are some of the ways that companies or employers can promote this kind of psychological safety that you're talking about?
SONIA So one of the other things that I talk a lot about is allyship. So allyship is another one of these buzzwords where everyone's like "Yeah, totally. Like, I want to be an ally. Of course I'm an allky right?" But that is also extremely ideological. It's like, you know, based on an attitude, based on a feeling, not so much based on behaviour and actually doing things to give people more access to the power that you might have or, you know, put people into positions where they're going to be able to show their own competence and, you know, maybe get a promotion or get recognised for some achievement. And so I think planning ahead, this is something called implementation intentions, where often the things that we want to do, we don't end up doing because we don't think about a concrete plan. We have the intention, but we don't ever think about how to implement it. So like anyone who's ever had a New Year's resolution knows what that's like. We're like: "I'm going to work out every single day." And then you work out one time in February and like never again, and that's because you haven't set yourself up for success. It's the same with allyship, right, where you might want to be an ally. And then let's say you're in a meeting and you notice some of the cues that you were talking about the beginning, this like subtle kind of undermining or, you know, not trusting the opinion of a of an underrepresented minority colleague. And you're just like stunned. You don't know what to do in the moment. You don't say anything about it. Maybe 20 minutes later or an hour later, you're like: "Oh, that's what I should have said at that moment." Yes. And I am sure people have that experience all the time. And so I think like one concrete thing that companies can do is get people who are in those positions of power to create those implementation intention. So it's like real plans of what exactly are you going to do to protect your employees when they're experiencing, you know, discrimination? When you see bias happening around you, how are you really going to be an ally? What are you really going to do, like with your body, with your words, in order to, you know, be an ally?
VINITA One of the things that we were talking about, Sonia, it's this idea of feeling like we're applying for that job and that you really have to be in...In order to get that job, you have to be sort of ten times better than everybody else. You know, this idea of I have to be just super amazing and, you know, I've talked about it myself, but this idea of just wanting to be mediocre sometimes, like, can I just let it go? Can I just drop it? This idea of needing to be super excellent and I don't know if you've thought about that yourself, but it's something that we've talked a lot about in our team here.
SONIA Mm hmm. Yeah. No, this is real. So this idea of, like, the requirement of exceptionalism for minorities. I think in some ways that also contributes back to tokenism. What we're talking about at the very beginning of this is even when you are excellent and you are exceptional and you're welcomed into those spaces, people don't recognise that excellence and that's where that need to constantly prove yourself comes from. There's research on this, you know, showing that, for example, women when women make mistakes, people notice those mistakes more than when men make the mistakes. They have to do more to recover from mistakes. There is research that shows that ..so these groups who call them "prove it again" groups where basically every time you do something, you have an accomplishment. You kind of like go back down to a baseline. You have to prove it again. Prove it again. You know, like you have to just like keep on proving your worth in those spaces. And I think even when you are excellent and you have the feeling that you're a token, then that feeds back into the need to be excellent. Right? And exactly what you're talking about, I can't just be mediocre because I have to prove that I belong here. Yeah, obviously that's not fair. Obviously that creates more work for employees from underrepresented groups. So definitely that's a real experience. There's actually interesting work by one of my colleagues, András Tilcsik. He did work looking at ratings of women and men. Teaching ratings of women and men. And they did kind of a natural experiment where a university had a like a performance rating scale for students that they would fill out for their professors. And it was a ten point scale. And there was a gap that existed where men were being rated higher than women. Like, not surprising.
VINITA So no surprise there.
SONIA No surprise there. So what they what happened was at that university, they actually changed their scale and then moved that scale to be out of six. And all of a sudden, that gender discrepancy was no longer there. And so the way that my colleague András and his co-author, Lauren Rivera, thought about that is that that number ten, right, is really or like 100, you know, in our culture, that's really, really connected to like perfection, excellence, genius. These things that we really these kind of ideas that we really connect to men specifically. And so for a woman to get a ten was so much harder than for a man to get a ten. But when they move the scale to be at a six, all of a sudden six is like kind of arbitrary. There's no like, there's nothing really, like, special about sex. Women were getting, you know, higher scores. So stuff like that I think can help. We see this even of a self reading. So when women and other minorities are rating themselves, they are more harsh than when white men are rating themselves like they give themselves lower scores. And so knowing that, I think, you know, managers need to be aware that like, you know, you need to take those self ratings with a grain of salt. That can't be the only thing that you're looking at. You have to look at kind of the whole picture of what's going on with someone. Really think about the kinds of biases that could come into any of those stages so that you're not creating that like, you know, the prove it again kind of environment where you have to be exceptional and where mediocrity for some groups is like what excellent is for other groups.
VINITA Mm hmm. I love that that's so helpful to think about. Thank you so much for that. Okay. How can we hold employers accountable? And then what are the some of the ways that companies can promote psychological safety?
SONIA One of the ways I think companies can shift the way that they're doing things now is really by rethinking the kind of systems and structures that are in place to, for example, hire people or, you know, determine who's going to get promoted or advance or be chosen for, let's say, like a training opportunity. So right now, the way that that happens is people have to, let's say, like put themselves forward or be put forward by someone else. So they have to kind of like opt in to that. Right. So we know there's so many problems with that. We just talked about the self evaluations, evaluations of other people. Right. And so someone who is, you know, a really great candidate who happens to be from a minority group, they're not necessarily someone who's going to be top of mind for, let's say, a promotion or some opportunity. So with my former graduate student, Joyce Yee, who's now a professor at UCLA, we did a bunch of work looking at how we can change that structure so that it's not the case that people need to kind of opt in to those opportunities. We switched it to an opt out. So an opt out being where everyone who's at a stage where they can be considered for let's say a promotion is in that application pool. And then they always have the opportunity to say like, actually, no, I don't want to be considered. But, you know, they're they're in there. They have the opportunity to opt out if they want. Otherwise they'll be considered. In doing that, we were able to eliminate the gender gap that traditionally exists in these kind of competitive selection processes. The interesting thing about that is that that's really like a system level structural intervention. So we didn't say to women like "Women, you need to apply more." Or we didn't say to the hiring managers like: "You need to hire more women." It's simply like a structural change that creates that kind of like safe system where even if bias exists because like it's very hard to get rid of bias, even if that bias exists within that system that you've set up, it's going to have a much harder time affecting the outcomes. And so I think that's another way to create this this like feeling of psychological safety is that, you know, like the system is being kind of changed in a way, modified in a way that is going to kind of like eliminate the power the biases have. Whether those biases are there or not, you're kind of protected by the system. And that's why, like, you know, all of these things, systemic racism, all kinds of systemic discrimination really need that kind of systemic solution. It can't be this individual level solution that we've been seeing so far. So I think that's another way that companies can really create that sense of safety is by like building it right into their structure.
VINITA I love that one. It seems it's one of those things that sounds so obvious once you hear it, but until you somebody suggests it or has done the research, it's not it's not very clear, because I guess that's the problem with doing things the way we've always done them. We don't really think about alternatives in the same in a way that a small tweak like that.
SONIA Mm hmm.
VINITA Makes such a huge difference.
SONIA Mm hmm. And especially, like, a combination of small, small things.
VINITA Yeah. Hearing you say it out loud, I'm like, yes, that makes... That makes so much sense. This happened in my company recently, and it's the same thing. Like, if anybody's interested in this job, then, you know, send in an email. And what you're saying is it could have gone the other way around.
SONIA Yes, absolutely. Because you have to think about like who's going to reply to that. We know from research that men have a much lower threshold for like thinking that they qualify for things like women really need to be sure. Like, you know, they fill all of the different requirements before they're going to put themselves forward. So that kind of system doesn't necessarily like set up women for success at all.
VINITA Fascinating. It's really interesting. Thank you so much, Sonia, for joining us today.
SONIA Thanks for having me. It was fun.
VINITA That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. We hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as we did. Do you have any simple ideas for how to improve your workplace? Send us a note on Twitter. I'm @writevinita. That's w r i t e v i n i t a. And tag our Producers at Conversation CA so they can join in. Use the hashtag #dontcallmeresilient. And if you'd like to read more about tokenism, go to theconversation.com. We have more information in our show notes with links to additional stories and research. Finally, if you like what you heard today, please help spread the love. Tell a friend about us or leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of the Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. The lead producer on this episode is Dannielle Piper. Lygia Navarro is the senior producer. Rahmatullah Sheik is our audio editor. The consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Our assistant producers are journalism students, Rukhsar Ali and Ollie Nicolas. Ateqah Khaki is our marketing and visual innovation consultant and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast? That's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.