Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Women have made measurable gains in the past decades for equity in the workplace, but certainly not enough progress if you ask today's speaker, Deepa Purushothaman.
In her TED membership conversation with TED's current affairs curator, Whitney Pennington-Rogers, Deepa points a way toward actionable change that protects and promotes women of color in the workplace. So people like Deepa, I 13 years ago, I had just made partner in my large global services firm.
Chapter 2: What progress have women made in workplace equity?
I was one of the first, one of the only. And I was celebrating in New York with a friend, someone I'd gone to business school with, a really close friend of mine. In the book that I wrote, I called him Walter. That's not his real name. We're going to call him Walter for today as well. And Walter and I were sitting in a bar in New York.
We were going to have a big dinner to celebrate our collective successes. He had just gotten promoted to partner in his firm as well. And the waiter had just delivered champagne, put two glasses in front of us, and we were toasting. We put the glasses down and I started to tell Walter, although excited, and it was a hard one process to get there.
Chapter 3: How can women of color advocate for themselves at work?
It's almost a year and a half process, you know, in addition to all of the other years of getting there to make partner. You have to audition and there's lots of steps to it. I was really excited, but I was also really nervous. I felt all eyes were on me. I felt like what I did next would really, you know, not only reflect on me, but would reflect on other women of color around me.
And so I was sharing with him I was nervous. And without skipping a beat, Walter turned to me and said, you have nothing to worry about. You are golden. You're going to skate by. You're a twofer. You check two boxes. Nothing to worry about. He said, but people like me, I'm a white man, I'm gonna have to work harder.
Chapter 4: What personal experiences shaped Deepa's perspective?
I'm gonna have to work harder to earn everything I get next. You're gonna be handed things. And I just remember feeling deflated. I went from this instant high and I'm sitting with one of my best friends and we're gonna have this great meal to just, I had the bottom fall out. And I couldn't put words around what I felt.
I felt pain, I felt shame, I felt confusion, and I felt my joy leaving in that moment. And I don't know that I got it back for the rest of the dinner. And what was so hard about it is Walter was a good friend. And I didn't have words for what I was experiencing, but I now, you know, I've thought about it a lot since then.
Now I know that some of what I was experiencing is what women of color face in the workplace. You can have the highest high and in the same moment, someone just says something or does something and it just doesn't feel right. It's just wrong. And it's just, you know, high and lows in the same moment.
And so we're going to come back to the Walter story later because there's a lot more to unpack there. But for now, I just want to leave that story with you to kind of set context for what we're going to talk about today. I believe, you know, Walter had no ill will in what he was saying. I don't think he even understood what he was saying, which is also part of the challenge in topics like this.
But it really affected me. I worried about not only. Walter, but I worried about what do other people think? Does everyone see me and think I got this huge role because I'm a twofer, because I checked two boxes, that it's not because of how good I am at what I do, but because of what I represent. You know, I've now come to learn I can't worry about that.
But at the time, it really weighed on me quite a bit. I left that job a few years ago. It took me almost three years between knowing I wanted to leave and leaving. And it took me three years because I felt such responsibility as one of the only women of color sitting at the seat. I felt not only responsible to myself, but to the women of color around me.
And I wanted to make sure that my leaving and my quitting and my exiting wouldn't reflect badly on my own, my own performance and my own capabilities, but wouldn't reflect badly on others who came after me, that people wouldn't say, oh, she couldn't hack it. And so I really sat in wanting to leave and not being able to.
And so what I started to do is I started to gather women of color, initially started one on one. And I wanted to figure out, you know, where does someone at a senior level go? With help of my now business partner, I did 12 dinners across the country with 20 or 30 women of color each.
What I heard was story upon story around microaggressions, around racism, around how women navigated spaces where they felt alone.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do women of color face in corporate America?
you know, in this journey that I'm on, because I really would like to be able to optimize, you know, my contributions, and I know that you can help me. I think we have to get more comfortable advocating for ourselves and finding ways that really allow us to gain more information, because you're right.
I mean, the other data that I found throughout the book is that women of color don't often get feedback, Black women especially, don't get feedback in any sort of level of detail that's helpful. So thank you for sharing that. Oh, my pleasure. I think Gina's example is so beautiful because the question I get is, how do I stand up for myself?
How can you advocate for yourself that isn't going to make people call you aggressive, right? Or too over the top. And, you know, in the book, I called it a little bit of Goldilocks. Like you can ask for things, but then you're also, there's backlash if you ask for too many things. And so it is hard. I think that's part of what we need to understand.
I think the other thing I would say is this is also about sponsors and mentors, you know, and finding people that can help you navigate and help you understand cultures and pull you along as well. And one of my biggest challenges used to be, I didn't see role models that look like me, right? I was a first.
And so I think one of the things I realized over time is I had to pick and choose from other people that were around me to kind of find a leadership style that worked for me. And some of my biggest advocates were white male leaders who I initially thought I had nothing in common with. And
Through conversations, through breaking bread, through finding other ways to interact with each other, we found commonality. And they really have advocated for me in huge ways. The book, it seems like in your writing of it, women of color were really at the center of it, were really a big part of how you framed this book.
I'm interested to hear sort of what the response has been from allies and people who are not part of that community. I think a lot of these concepts apply outside of women of color. I've had a lot of white male leaders reaching out, to be honest with you. It's still early. The book is just getting into people's hands. But the ones who have read it have found it shocking and surprising.
They always thought they were good allies. And so the information in the stories is really helpful to them. But they're also saying to me, work's not working for them either. And I think that's a really important concept. So people of my generation and younger white men, you know, want to raise their children, want to be home more, want to have more flexibility.
I think the setup of work is something that's not working for a lot of us. There's a thread throughout the book around permission. I think we all have to give ourselves permission and give each other permission to talk about things that, you know, we're told not to talk about, things we're taught to believe. And so much of what this book is about is rewriting success and rewriting leadership.
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