"At a business dinner a very senior manager reached across the table and snatched the dessert that was placed in front of me. He commented loudly that if Obama wins, the team would need me to stay healthy and get all the new business. I was shocked and insulted. Was my health not important before? My experience and intelligence should be all that counts. If they thought I might have an advantage in a new administration, did they ever think about the advantage they've always had?" -- African American female
Are the historic presidential primaries - the first woman, the first African American, the oldest - indicative of the fact that we live in a post civil rights era? If a woman, an African-American and a 72-year-old can be viable candidates for the most important job in the country - quite possibly the world - certainly there must be a level playing field in workplaces across the United States, right?
In August 2008, the Level Playing Field Institute conducted a nationally representative study of over 1,000 working adults concerning the impact of the presidential contest on race, age and gender relations in the workplace. When asked to suggest specific steps their employers could take to foster better working relationships across groups, the most popular response - stated by 24% of respondents - was that employers should treat people fairly based on performance and merit, irrespective of race, age or gender.
Despite the popularity of this response, it was cited with very different commentary depending on the race, and less so by the gender and sexual orientation, of the respondent. Heterosexual, Caucasian men cited fairness in the context that 'minorities' receive favoritism due to enhanced sensitivity to protected classes and to meet quotas. As one respondent noted, "Women and minorities expect special treatment or want favors instead of just working hard and relying on merit to be promoted." Another stated that, "White people are treated much worse than people of a different race."
People of color, and to a lesser degree women and LGBT respondents, also cited favoritism - but this time they pointed out that Caucasians receive preferential treatment and/or that people of color, women and LGBT are disadvantaged due solely to any one of their demographic characteristics. As an African American respondent noted, "[Employers should] treat/promote based on merit, rather than gender, race and who you know. Blacks and other ethnic groups usually have to work twice as Caucasian workers."
So who's right? If we're a post civil rights society, what accounts for these widely diverging views?
Many people feel the workplace is an inappropriate venue to discuss politics, race, gender, sexual orientation and/or age issues. To me, Clinton, Obama and McCain present a historic opportunity for us to engage in meaningful dialogue about biases and the state of race, age and gender relations. The Survey showed that employees are eager to engage in such dialogue - 25.8% of employees have heard more conversations about race, 20.5% have heard more conversations about gender and 18.2% have heard more conversations about age since the aforementioned candidacies.
When I read several comments from the Survey stating that if Obama or Clinton became president, the future of any other woman or black president would lie on their shoulders, I was reminded of an incident that occurred in my office at Lotus when I was the first employee relations director over 20 years ago. A senior manager stormed into my office after an African-American employee allegedly made a mistake and said, "See, I told you we shouldn't have hired her." To which I replied, "When a white guy messes up, you never come into my office and say, 'We shouldn't hire anymore white guys.'"
Double standards are just one of the ways in which evaluation based upon performance and merit can be inherently biased. We all agree that merit and performance should be rewarded above all else, but how we evaluate candidates and what we consider merit worthy are laden with our own biases.
Just because we have a Black presidential candidate doesn't mean that we live in a post civil rights era. Perhaps Ben Jealous, the incoming president of the NAACP said it best at a recent reception. When asked why the NAACP is needed if a Black man can run for president, he replied that the organization's acronym is NAACP not NAAACP - it stands for the advancement of colored people not the advancement of a colored person.
