How to take collective action for racial and gender equity at work

Addressing the persistence of racial and gender inequities at work requires bold strategies. With Shared Sisterhood, we propose that solutions focusing only on changing individual hearts and minds are incomplete. Individuals must be part of a solution, but organizational cultural change is more likely when those individuals build authentic connections across their differences and work together to achieve equity. To engage in shared sisterhood, you Dig into your own preconceptions about race/ethnicity and power, Bridge across differences to create authentic connections at work, and then act together to change your workplace for the better.   

Dig is a practice designed to help you surface your assumptions about racioethnicity and understand how those assumptions frame your perceptions of racioethnicity in the world. It is focused on your individual assumptions, emotions, thoughts, and perception about racioethnicity, which are likely informed by the contexts in which you were born, raised, and have lived. While doing your own Dig work, examining your emotions may lead you to uncover that there are systemic issues that have contributed to how you think and feel. Dig is a constant practice because our assumptions and perceptions may shift as we grow and experience different people, workplaces, and contexts. 

While everyone should engage in Dig, this doesn’t mean that we all start from the same place. Each of our journeys toward growth and knowledge about our identities and the power associated with them has been different: Tina learned about being Black and the power dynamics of anti-Blackness as a young child, and Beth learned about being White and the power dynamics regarding Whiteness as a college student. This significant difference in timing can affect workplace interactions: Black and other minoritized individuals may be more advanced in their understanding of racioethnicity and power dynamics than their White counterparts, a difference that affects their Dig journeys. Dig means always growing and learning and thinking critically to help us understand our own identities and the power structure that surrounds them.

Critical Steps to the Dig Practice

We have constructed a series of steps and questions to help you work through the process of learning about your social identities and how they fit into societal structures of power.

First, identify your social identities and how much you identify with each of them. When we do this exercise in workshops, we often have a worksheet with various spaces for participants to record their identities. You might include “woman” or “man” or “nonbinary.” Or “Hispanic” or “Black” or “Chinese.” You may also include identities like “Christian” or “Southerner” or even “fan of your favorite sports team.” Please be honest and write down what you actually think at this moment. Then think about which of those identities are most central to who you think you are. This will vary from person to person, and even across contexts. 

Next, research power and historical marginalization of each identity. Every social identity has a different relationship to status and power, and many of us are members of various groups of various levels of status or stigma in our society. This step is critical because it is often missing from the introspection that individuals can sometimes engage in as they learn about their own identities. But understanding power is a nonnegotiable component of Dig. Ask yourself about your identities—have other groups been marginalized by members who share an identity with you? How? When? Have other groups been privileged by your group’s marginalization? Be honest with yourself about how you feel about this, and about what you think. 

Often, people from privileged groups benefit from proactively seeking information to educate themselves about power dynamics related to their group. Knowledge gaps are almost inevitable and are a part of the learning process. The need to learn is nothing to be ashamed of. Taking a learning orientation toward your discoveries can help you to focus on the future instead of the past—but it is critical that when you Dig up a knowledge gap, you work to close it.

Research has suggested that White people often have three primary responses to learning about the power and privilege associated with their social (racial) identity: They deny and refute the existence of their relative power, they work to psychologically detach or distance themselves from their White identity to show that they “aren’t like those White people,” or they work to eliminate systems of inequity that privilege their group over people from other racial/ethnic groups. While we hope people choose the latter reaction, we know that is not always the case. 

It can be appealing to deny that you have a knowledge or experience gap, or to deny the existence of White privilege or racioethnic disparities. This denial often occurs when a revelation is unexpected or newly discovered. Recognizing this response is important because it can be a signal that you should listen more to others or go back to the first step above and Dig more deeply.

Defensiveness is also a common response to uncovering a knowledge gap. We may see someone blaming others for their own ignorance; “It’s not my fault that I didn’t know” is a common defensive reaction. Another defensive reaction is to denigrate those from historically marginalized groups as unworthy so that any disparities that were uncovered during Dig can be blamed on the “other group.” Part of the Dig practice is to be honest about any defensiveness you feel. 

Each emotional reaction is a signal and a cue. It doesn’t feel good to have us, or anyone, point out that your life perceptions or worldview might be biased in some way, or that you may hold identities that are associated with status and power in ways you did not know or understand. However, when we Dig, we must acknowledge our defensiveness and, rather than allowing it to alter the course of the discussion, we examine it. We interrogate ourselves by asking: Why am I defensive? What did I just read that made me feel this way? What emotions am I feeling right now? What am I thinking? 

We also see people downplay discussions about racism by embracing color blindness. In the most positive sense, saying, “I don’t see color” is an attempt to say that we are all human, that you value people because of who they are, not something as surface level and inconsequential as skin color. Unfortunately, skin color is not inconsequential in the society in which we currently live, no matter how much we wish it may be so. In essence, while the notion of color blindness may have innocuous intentions, in application it means power-blind. This blindness prevents us from acknowledging and closing knowledge gaps, and thus prevents us from the authentic connections we aim for in Shared Sisterhood. 

Building Bridges

While the Dig is focused on the self, Bridge is focused on others. Bridging across differences means that women become Sisters by focusing on the creation of authentic connections facilitated by the perspective gained during Dig. A Bridge is one connection between two points—or two people—and although that one Bridge can get you part of the way toward equity and justice, Shared Sisterhood is predicated on the idea that one Bridge will facilitate another and another, until there is a latticework of Bridges connecting women and others who share the goal of equity.

A Bridge occurs when people develop authentic connections across differences and those connections form the foundation for larger collective action toward equity. An authentic connection is when two people are able to express their internal experiences—their thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, ideas, and emotions—to each other and do so in a relationship characterized by trust, empathy, vulnerability, and risk-taking. While those four components do not have to be at the same level for both parties at all times, the goal is that both parties are willing to engage in such behaviors if needed or desired. Each time a pair of individuals connects authentically at work, they put down a layer of a Bridge—and the more the two individuals authentically connect, the stronger the Bridge between them becomes. Once a Bridge is established between two initial individuals, each of them can then reach out to others to develop additional bridging relationships and connections.

A Bridge is not the same thing as a friendship. A friendship is a relationship between two people who like each other, enjoy spending time and talking together, and are fond of each other, but a friendship does not necessarily entail addressing what you have learned during Dig: You can have an interracial friendship and never talk about racioethnicity or racism. In contrast, discussion about and consideration of racioethnicity and racism or any basis of systemic inequity is an essential component of the Bridge practice. Friendship may facilitate the Bridge practice and may be an outcome of the Bridge practice, but friendship is not a prerequisite for Bridge.

While friendship is not necessary to Bridge, value alignment is absolutely essential. Bridge connotes that both people are willing to pursue the dismantling of systemic inequities and address how those systemic inequities have permeated how they think about each other. Bridge is about trust, empathy, risk-taking, and vulnerability between two people so that they can link arms and pursue collective action based on their shared values. In that, Bridge partners become co-laborers in the pursuit of equity for all people, regardless of whether they would consider themselves true friends.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Adapted from Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work, out today, by Tina Opie and Beth Livingston. Copyright 2022 Tina Opie and Beth Livingston. All rights reserved.

Tina Opie, PhD, is an associate professor of management at Babson College and the founder of Opie Consulting Group, where she advises large firms in the financial services, entertainment, media, beauty, educational, and healthcare industries. 

Beth A. Livingston, PhD, is an associate professor in management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and has done executive education, speaking engagements, and consulting for companies and nonprofits such as John Deere, Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, Allsteel, and Hollaback.