Retaining Top Black Female Talent

THE CASE FOR DIVERSITY in the workforce is well established and backed by science. Savvy organizations are increasingly keen to capitalize on the promise that diversity brings across a range of dimensions. This may translate into more inclusive hiring processes, but what happens when minority talent makes it into the organization?

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, turnover among Black and other racial minority groups is a full 30 percent higher than among White counterparts, meaning that firms fail to realize full returns on their inclusive recruitment expenditure. “It’s not just about getting people through the door; it’s about hanging onto them once they get there,” says researcher Arielle Lewis 26PhD

For Black women, specifically, there’s a “dual risk” of stigmatization on account of both race and gender. It is more critical to ensure feelings of identity safety for Black women through cues that their workplace welcomes and values their contributions as individuals.

One such cue may be the presence of other Black women thriving within the organization; however, this may be a lot harder in practice, because of the chronic underrepresentation of Black women in professional organizations.

Lewis and her colleagues Evava Pietri and India Johnson advance a novel solution to this problem based on the notion of stigma solidarity

“Our theory is that a Black woman entering a workforce would expect a Latina employee to have similar experiences with racial discrimination and would, therefore, be able to identify with her. She’d also expect her to hold more positive views about Black women, which is key to enhancing identity safety.”

Using two experimental studies, Lewis et al. found that, while Black women believed both a White-Latina and Afro-Latina faced more generalized bias than a White female employee, they only expected the Afro-Latina to have faced the same degree of bias as Black women.

Importantly, though, Lewis et al. showed that when White-Latinas expressed their own previous encounters with racism, Black women expected more support from and identified more strongly with the WhiteLatina employees, which ultimately increased their anticipated belonging at that company.

“Our study shows that shared experience of discrimination can be a critical mechanism in forging identity safety for people coming into an organization from marginalized backgrounds, especially Black women dealing with the double stigma of race and gender,” she says. “Organizations and leaders interested in pursuing inclusive strategies around mentorship based on similarity also need to be sensitive to the differences and variability that exist within groups.”