Systemic Discrimination : A Brief Note.

There are a myriad of mechanisms and micro-mechanisms by which people of non-European origin and women face a manufactured ceiling blocking their career growth. This ceiling in modern times is no longer produced by a direct attempt to discriminate against women and people of color based on their non-European origins or gender but rather it is generated by favoritism inherent in the good old white male network, by gender and cultural bias often unconscious, by appropriation, by careless pay gaps, by white-centered messaging and micro-messaging, by uneven access to key decision makers and decision making processes, opportunity-information denial and by distortion of reality through lenses that whitewash failures of the privileged network but magnify every minute shortcoming of the unprivileged. This is compounded by double standards: most liberal and flexible application of rules reserved for the former and strictest and least flexible interpretation for the latter.

It is often carried out by a network of white males who are not and do not consider themselves racist. They might have promoted women and people of color. They might point to their friends and partners of color, they might hold sincere liberal and even progressive ideas... and yet they can engage in and perpetuate white privilege. They can be engaged in systemic racism without realizing it. When confronted, rather than attempting to understand the depth of the problem, they might see it as a challenge to their authority, silence the opposition by exercising hard-power, they might pit one disfranchised person against another by hiring or promoting people of color or women against less compliant existing employees of the same or reviewing and discovering faults in performance of those challenging their authority. This cannot be emphasized more. Today, pressures for diversifying leadership is simply too great but there is always a choice and it is less "troublesome" to hire a diversity candidate from outside the company or promote a more passive person from within against promotions of those who fight to break the ceiling and challenge authority. This creates an environment where at least some favoritism for the good old network can endure.

The ceiling is manifest in loss of programs developed by people of color to their white counter-parts, by outright denial of credit, by disrespect toward their organizational authority, by uneven promotions, by reduction of scope of programs and by denying the leaders of color the ability to encapsulate programs via hiring or promoting direct-report people managers. The last is not the least; it is the most: as scope of programs and number of direct reports grow, without the ability to hire people and project managers, a portion of people and programs must be off-loaded sooner or later, thus preventing horizontal growth translating to vertical rise in the organization. This prevention is often obscured by imperative of resource allocation and re-organizations which are "best" for the company and its programs or clients. At times during such reorganizations members of the privileged network gain direct line-management promotions or indirect dominion over larger scale programs by encapsulation and external representation while the underprivileged is denied.

(The views expressed here are mine alone and reflect no other entity)