Who Deserves Special Treatment?
Mick dePaola Unsplash
At the beginning of the meeting, Gabriela announced to the room, “Just FYI, I’ve got a hard stop at 10:55. I’ve got my mentorship meeting at 11 and want to make sure I get there on time.”
Her teammate Bill said, “Oooh, mentorship meeting. It must be nice to get special treatment.”
Later, when Gabriela told me this story, she said, “It was all I could do to not roll my eyes at him. ‘You want the special treatment I get, Bill? You’re welcome to it. All of it.’”
Because what Gabriela knew, and what I want to unpack in this article, is that almost all of the “special treatment” she got at work wasn’t cool programs.
It was being treated as “different” and “less than” because of bias.
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Let’s start with the scenario invoked by the phrase “special treatment.” It has the flavor of something positive for the person at the center. Of being treated better. Maybe getting the better quality thing or having something thrown in for free. Of skipping the line or getting away with things that other people face consequences for.
Here, “special” is a good thing.
And at first glance, Gabriela’s being selected for a mentorship program might look like it fits into this scenario. As a female engineer, she was “special” enough to participate in this program, while her male engineering colleagues were not.
So the mentorship feels like a bonus. Like “special treatment” in the usual sense.
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But let’s take a step back and reframe the mentorship program. Why does it exist?
And why was Gabriela invited to take part?
Gabriela just wants to show up at work and be treated like everyone else. She’s the only woman on her team. But she doesn’t want that to matter. She told me, “I didn’t come to this company to work as a female engineer. I just came to work as an engineer. Period.”
But in her everyday work, Gabriela isn’t treated like everyone else. We can compare her experiences to those of her male colleagues who make up the rest of the team.
In meetings, people listen to what her teammates have to say. They don’t get interrupted, there is uptake for their ideas, and they get credit for those ideas. But for Gabriela, it’s different. She gets interrupted all the time. She often puts out a suggestion and no one acknowledges it and then a male teammate says the same thing a few minutes later and everyone says “great idea!” and gives him credit for it. (This may be cliché at this point, but it also still happens all the time.)
Her teammates sometimes forget to invite Gabriela to meetings, even if they’re directly relevant to her work.
Her teammates get offered juicy stretch assignments that teach them new skills and raise their profiles. Gabriela does not.
No one comments on her teammates’ facial expressions, but she’s been told a few times that she needs to smile more so she doesn’t look so angry or unapproachable.
No one has mistaken her teammates for cleaning staff or kitchen staff. When they go to the kitchen and hang out, they’re treated like engineers. She is sometimes handed dirty dishes or asked to restock something.
Her teammates get invited to talk on panels or present at all hands meetings. Gabriela does not.
At conferences and networking events, people ask her teammates questions about their work. By contrast, she gets unconsciously demoted all the time and run through the credential check.
“Are you here because your boyfriend codes?”
“Oh, you’re an engineer?”
“But you went to boot camp, right?”
“Oh, you have a CS degree? Really?”
“What coding languages do you know? You actually know them?”
Through these comments, she sees again and again that people presume she is technically incompetent.
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Gabriela has the same degree from the same department as two of her teammates, and even had a higher GPA than them. But their careers seem to be moving much faster. And one big reason is that the daily obstacles they face are far fewer. The messages they get every day are, “You belong here. You and your contributions are valued.”
The messages Gabriela gets every day (and I haven’t even come close to listing all the issues she told me about in our interview) are, “You’re not that important and you’re definitely not central. We don’t really care if there are obstacles blocking you from making contributions and getting in your way. You’re ‘special.’ And ‘different.’ But not in a good way.”
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So this is the context of the mentorship program and other “bias interrupters” that get put in place at work.
Gabriela gets “special treatment” every day. And that special treatment is bias.
So let’s stop calling anti-bias work “special treatment” and reframe it as “correctives.”
What are the obstacles faced by people like Gabriela, who just want to show up and do their jobs? And how can we remove those obstacles so they are treated equitably?
The more we can prevent bias from encroaching on people’s work experiences, the more we can create workplace cultures where everyone is seen, heard, and valued.
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