Welcome everybody. I’m Michele Heyward, founder of the Tech Company, PositiveHire. Today is a special type of broadcast directed for employers, and HR professionals, so they can understand what women of color stem professionals have in the workplace. Every Wednesday I come live to share with you a story or experience from a woman of color STEM professional in the workplace so that those in management and in human resources understand the issues that women of color encounter and why they leave employers. Today I want to disguise an instance where an engineer was a woman working on a team where she was the only woman of color. There are a couple other women engineers, but she was the only one of color and she is sharing a direct experience that she had with one of her coworkers. How it made her feel and what resulted from that incident. This particular engineer says, I was in a meeting with one of my coworkers.It says, they won’t get rid of you. You’re black and you’re a woman. Now mind you, there are no other people in this room. They’re on a conference call so there are no other witnesses to what was said, so she describes in her in her own words how it made her feel. When he said that to me, I knew I wasn’t valued. I knew I was only seen as an affirmative action hire. How was Ivan to get the respect of my coworkers if they only thought then the company had hired me because of the color of my skin and my gender. I was sitting there thinking he has been given a full team to do his part of the project. However, Iwas only given one person to help me execute the million dollar proud of the project that I had while he had over 20 people. Unlike him, I had two degrees. He had none. He had 10 years more experience, but yet he had no business acumen and had a difficult time engaging in and responding in professional ways when it comes to meeting with clients and other coworkers, many of the other females on our team.Okay.Didn’t feel comfortable being around us, man. Yet I had held my own until that moment. I knew where I could no longer work with this person because it would have become obvious to me. He did not see the value that I brought to the job. He did not see the value in me as a person and he did not see the value that I want to the company. How was I expected to continue to work with someone on a team when all he could see was my gender and my race. It was at that point in time when I knew it was time to move on. I could no longer work in an environment where I was not valued, respected, or included. It proved to me that this employer expected me to do as much as him with much, many fewer resources at the top. I just accepted it, but when he gave me that look and he said that I was there because I was black and a woman, I knew that it wasn’t just him in the company who saw me that way, so I decided to leave.This particular African American woman engineer had a direct experience, that made her reflect or how she was being treated not only by this white male coworker, but by the company overall. Meaning she was given less resources, a smaller team to execute a similar size project and was expected to get the same results, if not better than her counterpart.That particular comment made her realize that it didn’t matter how much she did. That is what they were going to see her ass, a woman, an African American, not as an engineer, not as anyone who brought value to the company. So she laughed. So I ask employers, when your women of color stem professionals leave the workplace, are you getting the accurate information about their experiences before they leave the workplace? Are you having discussions with them about what is going on as employees and their experiences day to day within an organization? Did they share with me? Maybe very different than what they shared with you, but what I can assure you is they leave because of the culture that they experience in the, if you’d like to know more about what Positivehire does to help
employers like you, be sure to leave a comment. I’ll be back next week for another Dear Corner Office segment.Okay.