Barriers Unique to African-American Women
The purpose of this section is to examine the career experiences of African American women managers in private sector corporations. Although the major focus of the study was African American women, included is a comparison sample of White women managers to allow for a fuller understanding of racial differences in women's career and life experiences. The research addresses several interrelated questions aimed at understanding the influence of race and gender in women managers' lives. In this section, I concentrate on the research findings related to work place barriers.
The Monthly Labor Review conducted a research project in exploring this area. The research was done using a two-part data collection method. They conducted life history interviews with 80 African American and 40 White women managers in the Northeast and Southeast. The women held jobs in a wide-range of industries including retail, finance, entertainment and travel, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, consumer products, insurance, publishing, and computer services. A majority of the interviewees were in middle-management positions although there was good representation in upper-level management. Among the job titles represented were: senior vice president, national director, director, treasurer, vice president, superintendent, national accounts managers, and managing director.
The second part of the data collection consisted of a national survey of women managers. The random survey, completed by 302 African American and 480 White women managers was divided into eight sections covering areas ranging from current job experiences (including race and gender dynamics at work) to family and social life. The average age of the subjects was 40.
These survey findings strongly indicate that race makes a difference in how women managers experience their careers and the barriers they encounter to advancement. Even though the African American women had the same educational background, and in fact more work experience, than the White women, they did not receive the same benefits from these investments. They were at lower levels of management and had received fewer promotions. In other words, if one controls for education, there are still barriers to upward mobility.
One barrier to their advancement is being placed in positions with less authority and less challenge. This finding is bolstered by the fact that African American women managers were more likely to hold staff jobs compared to line jobs-positions that have a direct impact on a company's bottom line. These staff positions do not give African-American women managers an opportunity to develop, hone, or demonstrate critical managerial skills necessary for those jobs on the path to the top. Nor are these positions pipelines to upper-level general management responsibility. Thus, African American women managers can find themselves plateaued in jobs that do not lead to advancement.
The data also indicated African American women were less likely to be accepted by White colleagues, both male and female. Being accepted into organizational networks is important to long-term advancement. African American women are often excluded from these networks and are marginalized and isolated in their work settings. They do not have the opportunities associated with being accepted as a full member of the organization. Consequently, access to mentoring is limited. Without mentors and sponsors, they must learn to succeed in spite of exclusion from the mainstream of organizational life. In this respect, African American women are doubly disadvantaged. To compensate for a lack of cross-race mentoring, they can only hope to establish such relations with other African American women and men in their organizations. However, senior African American men and women may be scarce, making such relationships impossible to establish.
A final barrier was race and gender dynamics in the work place that result in African American women being very conscious of their double minority status. One pervasive feeling was that they had to outperform their White male and White female colleagues to succeed. This puts African American women constantly under the pressure to be superstars to combat stereotypes labeling them as inferior and incompetent. African American women still suffer from a token status in many organizations. Their abilities and skills are downplayed by their White supervisors, and unlike their White women colleagues, they perceive themselves as working under the shadow of being hired only because of their race and gender.
In contrast, compared to African American women, the White women in the research reported feeling accepted into White male networks. To a certain extent the White women in the study had assimilated and their acceptance was positively related to their advancement. On the other hand, African-American women rarely had the chance to become part of the mainstream. This finding highlights a key difference between the experience of African American women managers and White women managers: White women may be more socially and culturally acceptable in White male-dominated organizations than African American women and men.