{"id":778,"date":"2015-08-20T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=778"},"modified":"2015-08-20T09:00:30","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T13:00:30","slug":"women-carry-differences-into-organizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/women-carry-differences-into-organizations\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Carry Differences into Organizations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[Are you clueless about the ways differences shape the perspectives of your\u00a0coworkers? Author Tom Finn reminds us that while many differences\u00a0are visible, many are not, and our ability to connect with and support\u00a0each other may depend on understanding the histories we carry into\u00a0the workplace, often generationally. For example, I am white and a\u00a0secular Jew. While I do not practice the religion, being Jewish is an\u00a0important identity in my prism. I carry with me a history of my own\u00a0painful experiences of anti-Semitism from my childhood in Kansas.\u00a0I also carry with me the images of the holocaust in Europe that my\u00a0parents made sure I saw while I was growing up so that I would never\u00a0forget what happened to Jews. This combination of events that happened\u00a0before I was born and during my own childhood means that, even now,\u00a0I always scan my environment to see who else might be Jewish so that I\u00a0know whom I can feel safe with. Because I do not \u201clook Jewish\u201d or have\u00a0a recognizably Jewish name, I can take a long time to reveal this side of\u00a0my identity to new people until I get a sense of their attitudes and degree\u00a0of cluelessness. I have gotten feedback from coworkers that I can seem\u00a0standoffish when people first meet me. They cannot see this invisible\u00a0difference that is part of what makes me tick.\nMany of us carry in some current and some historical differences that\u00a0can make it difficult to connect with us. Some of us are from alcoholic\u00a0families or abusive families or are rape survivors, and we may find it\u00a0difficult to trust people\u2014but these are invisible differences. I find that\u00a0white women are often clueless about the long history of betrayal by\u00a0white women of black women during slavery times in this country,\u00a0about which many black women are still resentful. Many black women\u00a0feel unsupported by white women who do not join them to fight against\u00a0racial profiling outside and racial discrimination inside organizations\u00a0(among many other race-based injustices). They find it difficult to join\u00a0white women to focus on gender-based inequities when white women\u00a0do not make working against racial injustice an equal priority.\nAnother example of how we can carry history in comes from the\u00a0experiences of Chicanas and Latinas. We may not know that a second- or\u00a0third-generation US-born Chicana or Latina carries with her the\u00a0stories from her parents and grandparents of abusive and oppressive\u00a0treatment by whites that leave her ambivalent, at best, about expecting\u00a0or offering support to white women colleagues. And we may be clueless\u00a0about the shame still carried by a Japanese American colleague about the\u00a0internment of her family by the US government during World War II.\u00a0She may seem distant or difficult to connect with if we do not know how\u00a0history has shaped her prism.\nNot only do we carry in differences that affect our ability to connect\u00a0across groups, but differences within groups can affect us as well. For\u00a0example, a secular Jew like me can feel judged and rejected by religious\u00a0Jews. Women can also feel distanced from each other within groups\u00a0because of class-of-origin differences. For example, two African American\u00a0women attended a workshop I recently facilitated. One of the women took\u00a0a big risk in the group and made a statement about race that she knew\u00a0would be controversial. It was, indeed, controversial, and she took a lot of\u00a0flak from the predominantly white group\u2014alone. During the break I asked\u00a0the other African American woman why she didn\u2019t offer any support to\u00a0her colleague, and she said something like, \u201cShe\u2019s always had it easy and\u00a0thinks she\u2019s \u2018all that,\u2019 so I just didn\u2019t feel like helping her out.\u201d With a little\u00a0more conversation, it became clear that even though they were currently\u00a0peers professionally, their different class backgrounds\u2014one working class\u00a0and one upper-middle class\u2014created a reflex to let a coworker stand\u00a0alone, unsupported. I submit that class differences create this reflex within\u00a0many, if not all, groups. Class differences, colorism (where lighter skin\u00a0and \u201cgood hair\u201d are more valued), and other differences within groups\u00a0can create distance, even though group members outwardly appear to\u00a0share a common dimension of diversity.\n&nbsp;\nAn excerpt from my book,\u00a0<em>New Rules for Women<\/em>, available at Amazon (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/<\/a>).]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[116,131,188,207,221,225,286,418,466,480,529,567,611,634],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-excerpt","tag-competition","tag-culture","tag-ethnicity","tag-feminine-values","tag-friendship","tag-gender","tag-identity","tag-new-rules","tag-prism","tag-race","tag-sexuality","tag-teamwork","tag-woman-of-color","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}