Chapter 4
Empathy as the Foundation for Inclusive Leadership
Developing empathy toward women of color's experiences is essential for inclusive leadership. Yet this proves challenging in America's segregated society, where white Americans report that 91% of their core social connections are other white people. Without regular contact with different people, it's difficult to empathize with unfamiliar experiences.
Tulshyan introduces "cognitive empathy"-understanding that others experience the workplace differently based on their identities and associated stereotypes-and "empathic concern" (compassion) as vital components that drive action. Research shows empathetic organizations benefit from greater employee trust and engagement, with 60% of employees willing to take pay cuts to work for empathetic companies.
However, power and empathy have an inverse relationship-those with privilege often struggle with empathy because they haven't needed to rely on understanding others. Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki emphasizes that while many view empathy as an inborn trait, it can be cultivated with practice.
Practical steps for developing empathy include active listening (giving full attention without interruption), seeking shared experiences while avoiding assumptions of sameness, and reading fiction featuring characters different from ourselves. As activist Patti Digh notes: "The shortest distance between two people is a story."
Women of color experience "microaggressions" (or "exclusionary behaviors" as Tulshyan prefers)-subtle everyday slights that serve as painful reminders they're perceived as outsiders. While seemingly innocent, these comments have a cumulative effect that can cause diminished self-worth and mental health challenges. Recognizing the harm requires empathy, especially from those whose majority status protects them from such questioning.
Chapter 5
Shine the Light, Then Get Out of the Way
Being inclusive means creating opportunities for women of color to surface ideas, advocating for them, and ensuring they receive proper recognition. Tulshyan shares the powerful example of Marilyn Monroe using her celebrity privilege to help Ella Fitzgerald, who was denied performance opportunities at the prestigious Mocambo club due to racial discrimination. Rather than sharing the spotlight, Monroe promised to sit front-row every night if the club booked Fitzgerald. This strategic use of privilege launched Fitzgerald's career without Monroe overshadowing her.
Credit and recognition are vital for career advancement, yet women of color often face systemic barriers to receiving both. While the cultural narrative suggests hard work naturally leads to recognition, women of color are frequently denied "glamour work" that leads to visibility and promotion, instead being assigned "office housework" that keeps organizations running but doesn't advance careers.
Meetings often exclude women of color when not designed inclusively. Research shows men speak more frequently and longer than women, while women (especially of color) get interrupted more often. Effective techniques include interrupting interrupters with phrases like "I think she hasn't finished" or "Please wait your turn." When women of color's ideas are ignored but later repeated by men ("hepeating"), allies can amplify their contributions by repeating ideas with proper attribution.
Research shows high-visibility projects disproportionately go to men, with men's projects having double the budget and triple the headcount compared to women's. Leaders must intentionally recommend women of color for career-making opportunities and cultivate relationships with diverse high-potential employees. While three-quarters of senior leaders pick proteges who look like themselves, individual commitment to sponsor high-performing women of color can spark meaningful change.
To be truly inclusive, leaders must ensure women of color get glamour work with proper credit while not being saddled with office housework-those routine administrative tasks that keep organizations running. Leaders should audit who currently handles office housework, then create rotating systems so these tasks don't consistently fall to women of color.
Chapter 6
Creating Inclusive Hiring Practices That Work
Hiring for "culture fit" is among the most exclusionary practices in modern workplaces. When companies led predominantly by white men hire for "fit," they're essentially hiring for sameness. Despite 84% of recruiters looking for culture fit, Tulshyan advises hiring people who add to your culture rather than fit into it.
Affinity bias-the tendency to prefer people who share our identities-is rampant in workplaces. Tulshyan challenges leaders who claim no qualified people of color made it through their processes by asking whether they truly believe only white people are qualified or whether bias affected their process.
Transparency in job listings is crucial for inclusion. Organizations should clearly explain the entire interview process, timeline, and salary range upfront, which creates fairness for candidates without insider connections. To build diverse candidate pools, employers should refuse to review resumes unless at least 50% come from nonwhite, non-US, or nonmale backgrounds.
Homogeneous interview panels perpetuate hiring bias against women of color and candidates with non-Anglo-Saxon names. Creating diverse interview loops improves candidate experiences and hiring outcomes-companies like Intel, Accenture, and Cisco require diverse interview slates, with Intel reporting a 13% increase in diverse hires over two years.
The practice of asking for salary history perpetuates inequality for women of color who may have been underpaid in previous positions. Instead, organizations should determine compensation based on what the job commands and current market rates, not variable rates based on candidates' past salaries.
Tulshyan shares the story of Sarah, a highly skilled Latinx software developer who declined a job offer with a 20% salary increase because the company lacked an inclusive culture. Research supports this decision-39% of millennials would leave their current employer for a more inclusive one, and 80% say inclusion is important when choosing employers.
Chapter 7
The Pay Gap: More Than Just Numbers
In our capitalist society, wealth directly correlates to perceived worth, suggesting that consistently underpaying women of color implies their contributions are valued less. Global pay inequality remains pervasive, with women earning just seventy-seven cents to every dollar men earn in the same roles. In the US, for every dollar white men earn, Asian women make eighty-five cents, white women seventy-seven cents, Black women sixty-one cents, Native American women fifty-seven cents, and Latinx women fifty-four cents.
Women of color face compounding barriers to fair pay, with employers often justifying wage gaps using factors that shouldn't matter for identical work, such as college prestige or salary history. Educational disparities due to systemic racism create a cascading effect: Black and Latinx women gain less financial benefit from college education, are offered lower starting salaries, and are excluded from high-visibility projects that could showcase their potential.
The 2020 viral hashtag #PublishingPaidMe exposed staggering pay disparities in book advances. Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, a Black woman, had to "wrestle" for a $100,000 advance after winning prestigious awards, while white debut author Chip Cheek received $800,000. These advances represent not just immediate payment but publishers' investment in marketing and publicity, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of a book's success.
While economist Linda Babcock's 2003 book "Women Don't Ask" highlighted how women's reluctance to negotiate salaries contributes to gender pay gaps, newer research reveals a more complex reality. Women actually ask for raises as often as men but don't receive them due to entrenched gender biases. For women of color, the situation is worse-they're 19% less likely than white men to receive requested raises. Black candidates specifically face penalties when negotiating, as they're expected to negotiate less than white counterparts.
To address pay inequity, organizations must conduct thorough pay audits with data disaggregated by both race and gender. Adobe demonstrates what organization-wide commitment to pay equity looks like. After a two-year study and adjustment process, Adobe achieved global gender pay parity by 2018. Their approach involved clearly defining jobs before making comparisons, reviewing job classifications, and realigning employees to accurate categories.
Chapter 8
Creating Psychological Safety: The ADAPT Framework
Psychological safety describes a work environment where employees can speak up with ideas, questions, and concerns without fear of retribution. Dr. Amy Edmondson's research shows that for knowledge work to flourish, people must feel able to share concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas without fear of being demoted, fired, or labeled a troublemaker.
This is especially challenging for women of color who must navigate preconceived stereotypes when calculating interpersonal risks of speaking up. Four key warning signs indicate a psychologically unsafe culture for women of color:
1. Lack of safe mechanisms to report bias
2. Women of color being penalized for speaking up
3. White comfort being prioritized while employees of color are penalized for speaking about issues affecting their communities
4. Lack of advocacy for women of color
The ADAPT framework offers immediate actions organizations can take to create psychological safety centered on women of color:
**Analyze employee engagement data**: Organizations should specifically measure psychological safety and belonging in employee surveys, with particular focus on Black women's experiences. "Black women will tell you what hurts most in your organization because they're the ones living with it disproportionately."
**Develop a code of conduct**: Organizations need transparent, specific guidelines focused on reducing bias and creating psychological safety. These should be concise, detail what constitutes unacceptable behavior, and involve women of color in their creation.
**Accept failure**: Organizations should normalize failure through practices like "fail fests" or "failure event analysis" where teams discuss and learn from mistakes. For underestimated employees especially, cultures that accept and learn from failure drive greater belonging and innovation.
**Propel and fund ERGs**: Employee Resource Groups should be involved in strategic business decisions, not just relegated to party planning or cultural heritage months. Organizations must adequately fund ERGs rather than making them "beg" for small budgets.
**Team tenets on DEI**: Teams can develop "tenets" to resolve recurring conflicts between competing priorities, providing clear guidance on how to handle situations where inclusion might conflict with business expediency.
Chapter 9
Technology's Role in Inclusion: Building a Better Future
The homogeneity among tech creators has allowed biased technology to proliferate unchecked, creating systems that often fail to serve diverse populations. MIT technologist Joy Buolamwini's groundbreaking research discovered facial analysis software wouldn't detect her Black face unless she wore a white mask - a finding that exposed fundamental flaws in how artificial intelligence systems are trained. This is just one example of technology replicating existing biases. Photo-labeling software has tagged Black people as gorillas, Google searches for "unprofessional hairstyles" return images of Black women with natural hair, and healthcare algorithms favor providing extra care to white patients over equally sick Black patients. These biases extend to voice recognition systems that struggle with non-American accents and automated resume screening tools that have shown preferences for traditionally male names.
Women of color tech entrepreneurs face significantly greater barriers than their corporate counterparts, particularly in accessing capital and networking opportunities. Though women of color start nearly 80% of new small businesses in America, only 4% are in technology - a stark disparity that reflects systemic barriers to entry. Women entrepreneurs receive just 2.2% of venture capital, with women of color getting less than 1% and Black women a mere 0.2% of funding. This funding gap persists despite research showing that diverse founding teams often deliver higher returns on investment and are more likely to develop products serving broader markets.
Creating an inclusive tech industry requires a multi-faceted approach, starting with actively recruiting and advancing women of color as both employees and entrepreneurs. Companies must implement comprehensive mentorship programs, create inclusive workplace cultures, and establish clear paths for advancement. Beyond hiring and advancing women of color, technology leaders have unique opportunities to build ethical, inclusive products by prioritizing diverse data sets, collecting feedback from diverse voices, and intentionally looking for biases that may otherwise go undetected. This includes implementing diverse testing groups during product development, creating advisory boards that reflect varied perspectives, and establishing robust mechanisms to safeguard against bias, hate speech, and harassment.
The financial sector must also evolve, with venture capital firms needing to diversify their own ranks and investment criteria. Some promising initiatives include dedicated funds for underrepresented founders, alternative funding models like revenue-based financing, and accelerator programs specifically designed for women of color in tech. Success stories like Black Girls Code, founded by Kimberly Bryant, and Blavity, created by Morgan DeBaun, demonstrate the immense potential when barriers are removed and opportunities are made accessible.
Chapter 10
Global Inclusion: Beyond Western Perspectives
The inclusive leader must understand that DEI issues transcend geographic and cultural borders, manifesting differently across societies while sharing common roots in systemic inequity. While terminology like "woman of color" may not translate directly in many contexts, both misogyny and racism are universal issues profoundly shaped by complex histories of colonization, slavery, and neocolonial capitalism. In every society, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, we can identify dominant-group women who have greater access to wealth, education, and leadership positions, contrasted with nondominant women who experience economic insecurity, higher rates of gender-based violence, and persistent workplace disadvantages.
Colorism-bias against darker-skinned individuals-is a pervasive global phenomenon that inclusive leaders must recognize and actively combat. This enduring vestige of colonialism and white dominance disproportionately harms women of color while privileging white-skinned women. In Asian countries from China to India, the skin-lightening industry generates over $8 billion annually, with lighter-skinned women considered more desirable for marriage, employment, and social advancement. Similar patterns emerge in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, where skin tone often correlates directly with social and economic opportunity.
Simply applying Western-centric DEI approaches globally is destined to fail. Instead of cultural competency, which inherently retains the problematic notion that one's culture is dominant while learning about "exotic" others, leaders should practice cultural humility. This means approaching different cultures with the foundational premise that we don't know everything, investing significantly in local experts with lived experience, and deferring to local customs when appropriate. For example, in Middle Eastern contexts, gender inclusion initiatives must consider religious and cultural norms, while in Japan, addressing age discrimination might take precedence over racial diversity.
"Inclusion" carries different meanings across global contexts-in individualistic Western societies, it often celebrates and highlights differences, while in collectivist Asian societies, standing out may not be viewed positively, where concepts of "belonging" and group harmony often resonate more strongly. Organizations must develop context-specific DEI strategies rather than what Ruha Shadab calls "copy-paste from the west." This might mean focusing on caste discrimination in India, ethnic minorities in China, or indigenous rights in Latin America. Successful global inclusion requires understanding local power dynamics, historical contexts, and social hierarchies while building programs that respect and respond to these nuances.
Effective global inclusion also demands attention to intersectionality across cultures. For instance, a woman's experience in Japan might be shaped not only by gender but also by age, education level, and marital status, while in Brazil, racial identity, class, and regional origin might play more prominent roles. Leaders must recognize these complex intersections while developing targeted interventions that address local needs and priorities.
Chapter 11
The Future Is Ours to Create
True inclusion requires a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize and distribute power-moving from competitive, zero-sum thinking to actively sharing power across all identities and experiences. Drawing on Nilofer Merchant's transformative concept of "onlyness," we must recognize that power isn't finite or limited. Each person occupies a unique position in time, space, and circumstance that gives them distinctive insights and abilities to create meaningful change.
Traditional systems have long rewarded and mythologized the exceptional individual-typically the lone wolf archetype embodied by white men-while requiring others to conform to established norms or risk exclusion. This manifests in everything from promotion practices that favor dominant communication styles to funding patterns that overwhelmingly support familiar faces and ideas. Building truly inclusive workplaces requires privileged leaders to actively redistribute power and focus on justice-oriented solutions. This means not just acknowledging but actively working to undo historic systemic barriers and creating new systems designed for genuine equity.
Women of color, who already constitute the largest demographic group globally, are increasingly forging their own paths when traditional routes prove exclusionary. From launching independent ventures to creating alternative professional networks to pioneering new leadership models, they're demonstrating the innovation that emerges from the margins. Examples abound across sectors-from tech entrepreneurs building platforms for underserved communities to educators developing culturally responsive teaching methods to activists pioneering intersectional approaches to social change.
The expansion of influence and leadership by women of color represents our best hope for effectively addressing today's most pressing challenges. Their lived experiences navigating multiple systems of oppression have generated crucial insights for tackling complex problems like climate change, pandemic recovery, and rising inequality. These perspectives are essential for developing solutions that work for all, not just a privileged few.
The metaphor of turning from seeking the spotlight to embracing the sun captures this paradigm shift perfectly-moving from a scarcity mindset where only a few can shine to recognizing abundance where everyone's light strengthens the whole. This requires reimagining success beyond individual achievement to collective flourishing, where leadership means creating conditions for others to thrive rather than competing for limited recognition.
