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“Roll up your sleeve.”
It’s 2016, and I’m in my first week of a new job at a small, relatively unknown publication. My editor has decided to take us on a “field trip” to a nearby bookstore, and he’s spent most of our walk insisting that I’ll face difficulty in the industry we cover because it is male dominated. I don’t react much until he stops and insists, “Roll up your sleeve.”
I comply and fold the satiny material over. He rolls up his own cuffs and holds his chalky arm against my brown one. “See the difference?” he says. He lurches forward to continue our walk, mumbling something about racism and how he’ll protect me.
I’m Carine Abouseif, an editor at The Globe and Mail, and that day two years ago, I stood with my mouth open as the man walked away from me. I had never been so brazenly reminded that I did not belong. I’d been proud of myself for landing several jobs and a prestigious internship straight out of journalism school. But I’d jumped at this, the only full-time permanent position, because (as a first generation immigrant with a smaller parental safety net than many people my age) I needed the security. Instead, after two weeks of comments like these and many, many fearful, indecisive moments in the office bathroom (How would I pay my rent? How would I justify leaving? Was it all in my head?), I quit. I quickly scrubbed my resume of the experience and started fresh.
It wouldn’t be the first or last time I was singled out for my race or gender at work. And stories like this aren’t unusual: We know that women, and women of colour, are plagued with such experiences when they are in the minority (for example, in sectors such as tech).
But we don’t need to rehash arguments about whether these cases are real and whether we should be paying attention to them – we’ve had those discussions before. Instead, we need to talk about how we recover from these incidents, or rather how we don’t.
Even in the best case scenario – when the woman reports the incident and the perpetrator is held accountable – very little positive attention is paid to what she needs to help her move on.
For some, these undermining comments become embedded in how we see ourselves, and how we think others see us.
It’s no wonder then that so many women feel like imposters in their professional fields. The term “imposter syndrome” has become trendy, with various publications offering up listicles on how women can “defeat” it. But very few have looked at the ways the complexities of women’s identities compound these feelings: They rarely consider factors such as race, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or socioeconomic standing. (Though Alexandra Kimball’s memorable essay on trying to become a journalist without much money is sure to resonate with millennials attempting to enter various professions these days.)
Thankfully, the New York Times’ Kristin Wong went there this month when she spoke to the authors of a new study. “This is not a unique feeling,” she paraphrased one of the researchers, “and it hits many of us at some point in our lives. But some researchers believe it hits minority groups harder, as lack of representation can make minorities feel like outsiders, and discrimination creates more stress and anxiety when coupled with imposterism.”
One of the answers, perhaps, comes in how we react to power dynamics in the workplace. We often tell young women to just be confident or be more assertive, but these behaviours don’t happen in a vacuum. Any reasonable person, when undermined enough times, will begin to believe she doesn’t belong. And, even when you move past the problematic environments, to ones where no one would dare ask you to roll up your sleeve, it’s easy to carry those feelings of being shut out with you, and it feels instinctive to protect yourself by staying quiet. Others still, like Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast co-host Bridget Todd, will work twice as hard as their male counterparts to prove their worth.
Because of this, I am thankful to the editors, managers, colleagues and teachers – female and male – who have helped me recuperate whether they’ve known it or not, who’ve reminded me to be proud of my work, even when I didn’t feel like it. I am trying to be that person for others.
In the meantime, the study authors suggest a few “imposter-slaying” tactics. My favourite is to join a group where people have similar experiences and interests. I have that: a Facebook Messenger group of friends in my field where I can post about a new slight and get the appropriate outraged GIF and an offer for a pep talk over coffee.
What else we’re reading
By now my M.O. is pretty obvious: I like people who are willing to be vulnerable. That’s why I’ve been enjoying The Financial Diet, whose co-founder Chelsea Fagan talks openly about how her anxiety led her into debt. TFD is part of a relatively new guard of blogs, books and YouTube channels on financial advice for millennial women, by millennial women. And, as a bonus, Fagan is a fantastic chef who documents her (cost-effective) creations on her Instagram account.
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