This Is What It’s Like To Search For A Job As A Black Woman

In 2011, I was confident to enter the workforce after graduation. I had followed all the advice to set myself up for success, including completing five internships. Much to my surprise, however, I ended up going on over 100 in-person interviews in eight months before finally landing my first job offer after graduating.

Many college graduates who received their degrees between 2007 and 2011 know how hard it was to enter the workforce during a horrible job market. However, there is another factor that made a difficult job market even more of an uphill battle for me: being a black woman.

As the rate in which black women obtain degrees increases, only 8% are employed in the private sector, according to the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance’s recent report on the status of women in the workforce leadership. The report also showed that college-educated black women and men are given fewer full-time employment opportunities since the Great Recession, with 55.9% working in an occupation that did not require a degree, leaving them underemployed with lower wages and college debt.

Ify Walker, of the talent-matching company Offor Walker Group, summed up the challenges unique to women of color in her #DearBlackWomen post on LinkedIn. Her post explained that for us, our job searches will “take longer than is just” the length of our job search due to the pronunciations of our names, the feeling of never being good enough based on interview feedback, and watching people get jobs who are less qualified. Walker’s LinkedIn post reminded me of those times when I walked into offices and watched facial expressions change when they saw that I am a black woman. It reminded me of the multiple times I changed the pitch of my voice and found ways to make sure people were comfortable around me so that I could fit in.

The toll that the job search has on black women can be daunting. Just ask Morgan Jerkins, an Ivy League grad and journalist who recently shared her job-search struggles on a Twitter thread. She tweeted:

After I graduated college, that year was probably the worst year of my life. I felt like giving up writing every single day. I couldn’t “have potential” or be “good.” Good is for the white women. I had to be fucking extraordinary, and it almost destroyed me. I never want another [person of color] to go through what I went through. I thought my light was dimming all the time. I felt worthless in so many ways.

In three tweets Jerkins summed up what it feels like to be a black woman on a long road to fair employment and wages.

WORK TWICE AS HARD AND BE TWICE AS GOOD

From childhood, black girls and boys are told by our parents that we have to work twice as hard and be twice as good in order to get the same opportunities as our white peers. Once we enter the real world, we learn that twice as good isn’t okay, we really have to be extraordinary.

This ingrained feeling is supported by the data: the Economic Policy Institute analyzed the wage gap between black women and white women, and found that black women are in fact working harder to get less. “Black women work more hours than white women, and have increased work hours by 18.4% since 1979, and continue to increase their annual hours and weeks worked per year,” the study showed. Despite the increase of hours work each year, black women are paid only 63% of what white men make, and 17% less than what their white women counterparts bring home.

I was prepared to work twice as hard, but I wasn’t prepared for the bias that would mean that I couldn’t even get my foot in the door to start working.

THE PROBLEM OF CULTURE FIT

There were times that I made it to the final round of interviews, only to be told that I wasn’t “a good cultural fit.” Although companies claim that they are striving for diversity and inclusion to help solve their homogenous workforces, the phrase “cultural fit” left me puzzled because no one would really say what they meant by the term. Although my resume proved that I could fulfill the job duties, hiring manager after hiring manager saw my blackness, and perhaps even my mild manner of speaking, and deemed that I was wasn’t a fit for their culture.

According to Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent and a regular Fast Company contributor, the phrase has been used by interviewers to reject candidates and has become the embodiment of unconscious bias. “A lot of organizations don’t provide adequate training to their hiring managers and recruiters on how to recognize and account for unconscious bias in the interview process,” Schmidt told me.

“To say, ‘I’m not going to hire someone based on cultural fit,’ for that to really have merit, you have to have a clear definition on what your cultural values and pillars are, and what designates fit,” he explained. “Most companies don’t even have that to say what their fit means because it’s a nebulous big thing that they can’t really quantify.”

FEELING LIKE YOU AREN’T ENOUGH

“I would hear things like she’s too smart or we really don’t know if she has the presence that we need or the polish that we need,” says Walker of the feedback her executive search firm has received from some companies about black women candidates. But Walker says the candidates were left feeling like they had done something wrong. “No one was telling black women, ‘It’s not you. It’s them [the organizations].’ You think that not getting a job means you’re a failure when you are not.”

While black women picked themselves apart for not getting the job they wanted without clear reasons why, organizations were left not knowing that unconscious biases were taking place. “Organizations want to fixate on the myth of the pipeline problem and not wanting to lower the bar, when the bar that we see lowered consistently is the bar for white leaders,” Walker says.