(Illustration by Paul Wearing)
A common workplace problem confronts many women of color: Colleagues and managers ignore their contributions, don’t include them in social occasions, or repeatedly forget their name or mistake them for other staffers. Problems like these make it difficult for them to advance in their career or to feel that they belong.
A new paper lays out a theoretical framework for this “intersectional invisibility”—the phenomenon of being made to feel invisible along multiple, compounded, marginalized identity lines, including gender, race, age, organizational rank, and immigration status. The researchers examine how it happens and how women respond to these situations, from feeling shame to speaking up to trying to build connections with others to make systemic changes. The study provides evidence that this whispered-about issue is real but often unaddressed.
The authors—Barnini Bhattacharyya, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School, and Jennifer L. Berdahl, professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia—interviewed 65 women of color in the United States and Canada who worked in the corporate sector or the public sector (education, nonprofits, or health care). The researchers investigated how the women experienced work, how colleagues interacted with them, and how they responded to reported feelings of invisibility.
The researchers identified four types of invisibility that women reported experiencing in the workplace: erasure (their contributions were ignored or people spoke over them in meetings), homogenization (they were repeatedly called others’ names or confused for colleagues who were also women of color), exoticization (they were treated as foreign or unusual, sometimes with a sexual overtone), and whitening (they had their similarities to white people complimented and features of their nonwhite identities ignored).
The women responded to incidents of invisibility in ways that fell into three categories: withdrawal, approach, and pragmatism, which varied based on the individual woman’s status within the workplace in terms of age and professional rank. Higher-status women were more likely to confront a coworker about the incident and to see the issue as systemic and needing correction. Lower-status women, by contrast, tended to keep quiet and internalize feelings of self-blame.
The research stemmed from personal experience. When Bhattacharyya moved to Vancouver, Canada, from her native India to pursue her PhD, it was her first time living in North America and experiencing what it was like to be a woman of color in a place where most people were white. She immediately found that coworkers treated her differently, but she could not figure out why she seemed invisible to people she encountered in a professional setting. “I didn’t really have a language to articulate what was going on,” she says.
Friends chimed in with similar stories. A Korean female colleague, for instance, said that she was in a workgroup where coworkers constantly talked about being a family, but when they all got together for Thanksgiving, they forgot to invite her. Bhattacharyya wanted to understand the theoretical underpinnings of this problem, which seemed to be widespread. “I became really interested in whether this phenomenon was really valid,” she says.
The next step, according to Bhattacharyya, is working toward fixing this issue for women of color at work. “It starts with acknowledging that this is a real problem instead of dismissing it as an overreaction,” she says. “Mistreatment isn’t overt anymore in most white-collar spaces, but it’s systematic and ongoing for most subjects.”
One of the findings in this paper was that “in spaces where women felt safe, they were able to tell the perpetrator what happened,” and the person would often say they had not realized they were causing a problem for the woman, Bhattacharyya says. Executives can address the issue by helping women of color find mentors and, crucially, sponsors who can stand up for a woman when she’s not in the room. Previous studies have shown that “you need one person who’s going to champion you and speak up for you,” she says.
To fight invisibility for women of color, companies can also make sure that they are funding equity and inclusion resources, including hiring experienced diversity coordinators, instead of asking people of color to do this work without paying them extra, she says.
“Our research highlights the need to design more sophisticated practices around equity, diversity, and inclusion at work to create climates and conditions for dialogue, where radically honest conversations can occur in psychologically and socially safe environments that recognize structural barriers to women of color’s centrality and visibility in organizations,” the researchers write.
Barnini Bhattacharyya and Jennifer L. Berdahl, “Do You See Me? An Inductive Examination of Differences Between Women of Color’s Experiences of and Responses to Invisibility at Work,” Journal of Applied Psychology, February 2023.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.