America’s elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don’t advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a “Black ceiling.” Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn’t explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. One type of racial discomfort is stigma anxiety. In an excerpt from his new book, The Black Ceiling, Woodson begins to explain this phenomenon, drawing on his interviews.
Many Black professionals working at elite firms worry that their colleagues might treat them unfairly and thereby damage—or even derail—their careers on the basis of race. These concerns lead them to engage in a sort of racial risk management in which they constantly attempt to identify and circumvent potential threats of discrimination. In doing so, they utilize a variety of coping and defensive mechanisms. Some refrain from speaking in meetings out of fear that their words might draw unfair scrutiny. Others avoid sharing certain personal information during their informal encounters with White colleagues so as to not reveal any details that might call attention to their Blackness. Some Black professionals choose to act and speak in a style of formal restraint during interactions with White colleagues so as to avoid giving their colleagues reasons to question their professionalism and judgment.
These efforts help Black professionals mitigate certain risks, but they can come with a heavy price: attempts to avoid discrimination can be counterproductive and self-limiting, as they frequently entail considerable drawbacks. They impede Black professionals from developing career capital—resources such as premium assignments, relationships with powerful sponsors and clients, and reputations of excellence—that either signal professional success or improve their career prospects. Further, efforts to avoid discrimination can prevent Black professionals from conveying key attributes that are valued at their firms. Worse still, their adaptive responses may even be misinterpreted as personal failings or professional deficiencies of individual Black professionals rather than as reactions to legitimate concerns. For these reasons, Black professionals’ attempts to manage the risk of discrimination can lead to outcomes just as bad as those they seek to avoid. Put differently, rather than countering racial disadvantage, these efforts may actually compound it. In this way, conditions within these firms can beget racial disparities indirectly, even without acts of racial bias.
Stigma Anxiety
Black professionals feel compelled to take steps to avoid discrimination because of stigma anxiety, the unease that people with socially devalued traits—such as Black racial identity—feel about the possibility that others will treat them unfairly. In America, race is a source of particularly intense stigma. Black phenotypical traits and other markers of Black racial identity have long been subject to negative stereotypes and prejudices. Black Americans are presumed to be lazier, less trustworthy, less competent, and less intelligent than people from other racial groups, and these biases can subject them to discrimination and mistreatment in all realms of life, including employment. Accordingly, many Black Americans experience stigma anxiety and therefore devote considerable mental resources to identifying, and protecting themselves from, potential discrimination.
People experience stigma anxiety when situational conditions make the threat of mistreatment seem especially likely. It is akin to stereotype threat, the phenomenon in which members of stigmatized groups underperform on certain tests because their subconscious anxieties about group stereotypes diminish their memory capacity and concentration. At elite firms, stigma anxiety has three effects in particular that disadvantage Black professionals: racial stress, the psychological burden of constant vigilance against mistreatment; racial reticence, a phenomenon in which Black people choose not to speak up or out because they worry that colleagues will assess them according to anti-Black stereotypes; and self-concealment, in which Black professionals opt not to share personal details that they believe might increase the salience of their racial identity and discredit them in the eyes of their colleagues. Each of these aspects of stigma anxiety pose significant disadvantages for Black professionals working at White firms, undermining their emotional well-being and limiting their access to career capital.
Why Elite Firms Trigger Stigma Anxiety
Individual Black people feel more stigma anxiety in settings where situational cues and information suggest that they are likely to encounter discrimination, and elite professional services firms fit that description. Although direct evidence of bias and discrimination is relatively rare at elite firms, other more common conditions convey to Black professionals that they should not expect to be treated fairly there. The difficulties of Black professionals at these firms are no secret; racial disparities and allegations of discrimination have been widely publicized in voluminous newspaper stories, memoirs, and lawsuits. Empirical studies also have highlighted that some Black professionals perceive racial bias to be prevalent at their firms.
Against this backdrop, many Black professionals begin their careers already apprehensive about the discrimination that might await them. Brad, an attorney, explained that many Black law students adjust their aspirations accordingly, even before they have begun working at their firms: “I think the cat’s fully out of the bag now [such] that any Black associate going to a big New York firm knows the score. . . . It’s like every Black lawyer I know has an exit plan from their third year in law school. . . . Like no one when I was in law school was like, ‘yeah, I’m gonna go there and try to be a partner.’ No one.”
Egregious Disparities
The hopelessness that Brad described stems from long-standing racial disparities in promotions and attrition at elite firms. Brad explained why Black professionals sense that their careers will be limited by discrimination even before they actually experience any unfair treatment by positing that “looking up and seeing that people who look like you don’t get to the top of the mountain” conveys to Black junior professionals that they will not receive fair opportunities to advance. Another attorney, Lionel, reported that his former law firm had not named a single new Black partner in the decade since he began his career there, and he regarded this pattern as clear evidence of racial unfairness. He posited, “There has to be something nefarious happening at firms that explains how you start off in successive years with classes of 10 to 15 Black lawyers and yet still only end up with one Black partner for an extended time.” While few junior professionals of any race make partner at their firms, the consistent, near complete failure of these firms to promote any Black associates to partner alerts Black associates that their career prospects may be limited.
Selective Punitiveness
Many Black professionals attribute these disparities to racial discrepancies in how their senior colleagues assess professionals’ work performance. They recognize that racial biases can lead senior professionals to assume that Black professionals are less competent than their peers and therefore more likely to make mistakes on assignments. Such presumptions, in conjunction with confirmation bias—the tendency to notice information consistent with one’s prior beliefs while discounting evidence inconsistent with them—make senior professionals more likely both to notice their Black colleagues’ mistakes and to interpret them as evidence of incompetence. This possibility is a major source of stigma anxiety for many Black professionals; a number of interviewees worried that their senior colleagues might assess their work unfairly and react more punitively toward any perceived shortcomings.
These fears are not unfounded speculation or paranoia. Some interviewees had trusted colleagues and mentors inform them that they were at risk of such discriminatory punitiveness. Humphrey, an attorney, explained that a close mentor once informed him that he likely would be held to a higher standard than his White peers: “There was even a White male partner who relayed to me that there are White [associates] who had more margin for error because the comfort level was there for inappropriate reasons. The partner told me, ‘I don’t agree with it, I’m just going to tell you how it is. There’s no question—you can’t fuck up.’” Although this type of advice may help some Black professionals by impressing upon them the importance of avoiding mistakes, by leading them to perceive greater stakes for committing errors it can also exacerbate stigma anxiety.
Other interviewees came to perceive the risk of unfair work assessments through incidents they observed or learned about involving Black colleagues. Some spoke of seeing or hearing about specific Black professionals being precipitously “written off” for fairly minor errors while their White peers received greater leniency. Their accounts raise an important point: discrimination not only harms its direct victims; it also affects other Black professionals, increasing their stigma anxiety and causing them to recalibrate their perceptions about the fairness of their firms.
These concerns are bolstered by evidence from a well-known study in which the diversity consulting firm Nextions enlisted fifty-three law firm partners to read copies of a legal memo that had purportedly been written by a third-year attorney. All participants read identical copies of the same memo, but twenty-nine of the partners were informed that the memo had been written by a White attorney, and the rest were told that the memo’s author was Black. The partners who thought they were reviewing a Black attorney’s work product identified significantly more mistakes in the memo and gave it a much lower score than the partners who thought that the memo had been written by a White attorney, rating it 3.2 out of 5 compared to 4.1 out of 5. These findings substantiate Black professionals’ apprehensions that some senior professionals may be predisposed to evaluate their work performance more critically.
Impact on Black Professional Careers
Stigma anxiety is not always completely detrimental. In some instances, remaining alert to potential discrimination may help Black professionals avoid mistreatment by informing how they approach their interactions with biased colleagues. But predicting and managing discrimination is not easy. Discrimination at these firms tends to be subtle and covert rather than blatant, so the evidence of potential unfair treatment is at best highly circumstantial. White professionals usually hold their biases surreptitiously (and many may not even be aware of their own biases), so it can be impossible for Black professionals to know who is likely to treat them unfairly. Thus, Black professionals often must draw inferences from highly ambiguous information. In doing so, it is easy for them to reach inaccurate conclusions.
It is also difficult for Black professionals to know how best to respond to potential discrimination. Deciding whether and how to act to avoid or address discrimination is a complicated process that requires Black professionals to consider the possible benefits and costs of various strategies. And there is no way to know for sure whether any one course of action will lead to better outcomes than others. This racial risk management is tricky, and it puts Black professionals in precarious positions. Overestimating the risk of discrimination or underestimating the costs of a particular adaptive response can lead Black professionals to react to potential bias in ways that undermine their careers. When Black professionals decide not to speak up at team meetings, colleagues may misread this as conveying lack of interest or insight. When Black professionals choose not to share personal information, their colleagues may question their interpersonal skills and perhaps their ability to handle client-facing responsibilities. There are no easy solutions for addressing these dynamics, but recognizing and understanding them may be an important first step to limiting their impact.
Adapted and excerpted from The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace by Kevin Woodson, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.