JWJI Colloquium featuring Adia Harvey Wingfield

From the venue:

Talk Title:
Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Maintains Racism

Once mainstream, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become increasingly controversial. Yet whether companies proclaim their support for diversity or run from the term, racial inequality persists in many workplaces. Even when support for DEI was at its peak, Black workers were slower to be hired, earned less than their white colleagues, stalled out at midlevel positions, and rarely advanced to the top ranks of organizations. Why do these disparities persist?

In this talk, Adia Harvey Wingfield answers this question by documenting how sociological dynamics of work continue to thwart Black employees’ progress. Following narratives of seven Black workers in fields ranging from academia to medicine to entertainment, she discusses the unexpected ways that recruitment, promotion, culture, and other basic aspects of work are themselves major drivers of racial inequality.