Posted on: Monday, December 13, 2004

Women of color share concerns

By Sue McAllister
Knight Ridder News Service

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The questions raised at a conference in Mountain View recently were not the kind you'd expect from a meeting of executives from large tech companies.

Do Asian women hamper their own ambitions by patiently waiting for recognition and not asking for bigger challenges? Are black women perceived as threatening when they really know their stuff on the job? Are Latinas who speak with accents perceived as being less competent? Are white women so afraid of making cultural mistakes that they don't make alliances with their black, Asian and Latina colleagues? And, finally, can corporate America be made more accepting and more accessible to women of color?

"Our experiences are vastly different from those of our Caucasian sisters," said Claudette Whiting, senior director of diversity for Microsoft. "We experience double outsider status" in corporate America, she said.

About 140 women — most of them Asian, black, Latina or of mixed race and employed by big corporations — gathered at Microsoft's Mountain View campus to discuss the issues women of color face on the job and in trying to advance their careers.

The Multicultural Town Hall meeting, organized by Working Mother magazine, included attendees from Agilent, Cisco, Deloitte, EMC, Gap, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sun and other companies. It was the first to be held on the West Coast, though Working Mother has held similar events in Chicago, New York and Boston.

"We want to create change, and we want that change to happen at the corporate level all across the United States," said Carol Evans, president and chief executive of New York-based Working Mother Media.

Participants broke into small groups twice, once segregated by ethnicity and once in mixed groups, to discuss the barriers women of color face in their careers, and what can be done about them.

Those conversations — which were notably more personal and candid than those at the average professional development seminar — were considered "off the record," but each group summarized its discussion for the group later.

Among the remarks:

• "Our cultural upbringing is a barrier in itself" sometimes, said Noni Allwood, senior director for women's initiatives at Cisco, speaking for the group of Latinas. Frequently in Latino cultures, women's roles are in the home and with children, and there's an idea that men's advancement is more important than women's, "the 'iron-shirts and-stand-by-your-man' thing," Allwood said.

• "Sometimes when we do come to the table fully equipped we are perceived as a threat" rather than collaborators, said Zain McKinney, an audit partner at Deloitte, speaking for the black women present. The group also talked about the feeling that white employees are promoted without having to work as hard to prove themselves as black employees do.

• "We've been raised to be patient and sometimes we let that impede us, because we're too patient and wait too long before we go ask for greater opportunities," said Cynthia Chin-Lee, a senior technical writer at Sun Microsystems, speaking for the Asian women's group.

All the groups stressed the need for companies to encourage networking and mentoring opportunities for women of color. In a poll taken early in the day, 53 percent of attendees said the first thing companies should do for women of color is hold managers accountable for their advancement.