Barrier-Breakers Get Personal At Women’s Retreat

One not-for-profit director was told she was a mouthy know-it-all for expressing her opinions. One business executive was asked to train a new hire for the promotion she was promised. One government staffer said she holds in so much frustration that she sometimes feels ready to explode.

As more black women assert themselves in business and politics, they’re feeling that kind of strain in the workplace. As trailblazers in their fields, they regularly face pushback to their ascension. But alone without a colleague to turn to, isolation can take its toll.

At a first-ever women’s retreat hosted by the African American Mayors Association (AAMA), black female leaders Thursday spoke candidly about the daily challenges — the microagressions, as a psychiatrist dubbed them — and the systemic barriers that don’t get talked about enough.

Seated at a roundtable at the Omni Hotel, elected officials and corporate managers talked about the need for more black women to participate in decision-making, maybe as the next mayors, along with the strain of often being the only representative of their race and gender who’s currently in the room. It’s the trouble with being at an inflection point, they said, in reversing decades of discrimination.

“It’s okay to be strong, to be imperfect and still get the work done,” said Natalie Cofield, the founder of Walker’s Legacy, a lecture series and online platform aimed at female entrepreneurs of color, who moderated Thursday’s conversation. The two-day summit is being held in New Haven because Toni Harp — the city’s first-ever female mayor — is the current AAMA president. (Click here for a story about opening night.)

The Shirley Chisholm Rule

Thursday morning started with discussion about how to get more black women into positions of power. One way: the ​“Shirley Chisholm Rule.”

Here’s how it works: In any job interviews, the top three finalists should include a woman of color. Named for the New Yorker who, in 1968, became the first black woman elected to Congress, it’s similar to the ​“Rooney Rule” that the National Football League has used since 2002 to require interviews with minority candidates for head coaching positions.

A’shanti Gholar, the political director at Emerge America, an organization that hosts 70-hour trainings for Democratic women to run for office, proposed the idea after seeing it implemented at her own organization. It forced Emerge America to take the extra step to find black female candidates, not just excuse a lack of diversity by saying they didn’t get any applicants, she explained.

“We instituted the idea to ensure diversity in hiring. That has to include all kinds: women, different races, different ethnicities, socioeconomics,” she explained. ​“Organizations can’t just talk about diversity; they have to be about it.”

That’s particularly essential in politics, where so often elected officials are voting on issues that concern black women without ever hearing from those constituents. ​“I want a person in the room who looks like me,” someone who isn’t just a token, one attendee said.

When that happens, politicians also get a more nuanced view of minority voices, added Cofield, as they recognize that black women can advocate not only for equity in criminal justice, transportation and education as a historically disenfranchised group, but also for reproductive rights as mothers or economic policies favorable to small businesses as entrepreneurs.

“It’s so important to have women of color everywhere,” she said. ​“If we’re over-concentrated in any one place, then we can’t look at this comprehensively.”

Burdens Of The Barrier-Breaker

But being the only woman of color in a world still dominated by white males can also be a overwhelming, the attendees acknowledged, as they candidly talked about challenges they encounter on a daily basis. Several said the stress led them to quit jobs or seek hospitalization.

(To encourage frank discussion, organizers asked the media not to name speakers without approval.)

One executive director at a not-for-profit said she she was the first black woman hired by a board unused to working with people of color. ​“Let me make room for myself here,” she told herself.

But she and board members quickly clashed. They told her, ​“You act like you know everything.”

Isn’t that the expertise you hired me to bring? she thought. They told her, ​“You look professional today.” It’s the annual meeting, she thought. How else am I supposed to look?

Despite the put-downs, she worked grueling hours, putting in 12-hour days for the organization. Her husband begged her to turn her computer off and sleep. She got her blood pressure checked monthly.

Eventually, she realized, ​“This is not going to work. I’m not proving nothing. I can’t stay.”

The woman added that she was lucky to have a husband with a paycheck, as so many single moms can’t give up. And that’s tough to feel so alone, added Cofield, coming home just to yourself.

A clergywoman said she too had to fight her way up to a position, over the opposition of male bishops. Along the way, she was also carrying the burdens of her own community, having buried dozens of young people killed by gun violence. Eventually, she needed to be hospitalized. ​“I didn’t realize, at that point, I was going to have a breakdown,” she said. ​“I was so stressed.”

One person summed up the feeling in the room. ​“So often, we don’t feel comfortable sharing that. We hold it all in, and we hold everyone else’s baggage, too,” she said. ​“We never get to say what we’re feeling. We need an outlet.”

Others emphasized mental health check-ins, saying black woman leaders should be open about their visits to therapists to break down the pervasive stigma against seeking help.

Mayor Toni Harp said she was ​“thrilled” to be hosting such an important conversation. ​“It’s really always good to hear we’re having similar experiences,” she said. ​“It’s good to come together, as women, to sustain one another.”