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Re-envisioning Inclusion: Explore Covering In-depth, with Kenji Yoshino, Professor, NYU School of Law; Author
There are four axes of covering, and you’ll see my weakness for alliteration here because all of them begin with the letter A. So there’s appearance, affiliation, advocacy and association. And let me define and give you an example for each one just to fix ideas.
Appearance-based
Appearance-based covering has to do with how much you modulate your self-presentation to the world. So one classic example of this would be age-based covering. So that even if people are willing or can’t help but admit their age, for example, on an employee intake form you would write down your age, they make enormous efforts to cover the fact that they don’t belong to what is seen to be the ideal age span. For men, the kind of power bracket is probably in your 40s or 50s. And so what you see is people covering in both directions – that, according to our survey, respondents that were younger than that would bend over backwards in order to engage in forms of appearance-based covering, like wearing glasses or dressing more conservatively in order to look older than they were; on the other end of the spectrum, people who are on the older end of the spectrum, baby boomers, would make an enormous effort to look younger, both in their self-presentation by dying their hair, for example, but also in the ways in which they spoke, you know, that many of our respondents said, I actually study, right, magazines or television shows in order to keep au courant with what is kind of hip or trending, right, so that I’m not dismissed as somebody who’s a dinosaur. So those would be forms of appearance-based covering based on age.
Affiliation-based
Affiliation-based covering has to do with negating stereotypes and engaging in behaviors that are not affiliated with your group or stereotypes about your group. So the most common answer that we got with regard to affiliation-based covering comes from women not talking about their children. So one way in which women cover is to either make their pregnancies invisible or their child care invisible.
Respondent after respondent in our survey said, whenever I leave work to go take care of my kids, I always say I’m leaving in order to make sure that a client is being served or I say, you know, I’m going to my own doctor’s appointment. But I never front my kids to my colleagues because all of the research shows that there is, what Stanford Professor Shelley Correll calls, the “motherhood penalty”. In other words, women who say they have children get a negative hit at work, whereas fathers who say, men who say they have children get a bounce at work.
Women have traditionally been seen as caregivers, so when they say at work “I have children”, the immediate unconscious bias that gets triggered is, why aren’t you at home taking care of your kids? You’re in the wrong place. Whereas, because men have historically been the breadwinners in the workplace, when a man says “I have children”, the unconscious bias that gets triggered is actually a positive one that says, oh, we have to pay you more because now you’re not just a bachelor, you know. You’re actually a provider for this family. And so because of this one of the ways in which women cover their affiliation is by making their child care responsibilities a non-issue in the workplace. And obviously that has a grossly disparate impact on women because men aren’t doing this and women are.
Advocacy-based
When we move on to advocacy-based covering, which is the third dimension of covering, this has to do with how much you exercise voice or just stick up for your group. One of the things that we often came across was that people who were, say, veterans would often hear anti-military comments or anti-military jokes. Jokes figured very largely in this and would have to decide every time whether or not to challenge the joke or whether or not to stand down and live to fight another day, as one of our veterans put it. This can be death by a thousand cuts, that jokes or comments may not seem like a big deal, but cumulatively they have significant impacts on people’s self-esteem, people’s sense of belonging inside of a community.
Deeper notions of advocacy-based covering have to do with how much you’ll advocate for somebody when that person is not in the room. What advocacy-based covering means is that that is less likely to happen because people worry that if they stick up for somebody in their own group that that will be viewed as favoritism and everybody’s credibility will go down, both the sponsor’s credibility will go down and the mentee’s credibility will go down. And so they don’t advocate for people who would otherwise be their most natural allies.
Association-based
Finally, association-based covering is how much you hang out with people in your own group, and what we saw repeatedly was that individuals, particularly on ethnic grounds, felt extremely uncomfortable associating with people of their own ethnicity. One of the more heartbreaking examples of this from my perspective was individuals saying, I am an African American, but I am very uncomfortable being seen around other African Americans, even when they are assigned to my own team, because when we are seen together someone will walk by and make a really opprobrious comment that you would think would simply be unacceptable or would not happen in an educated 2014 workplace. But our respondents said people make comments along the lines of, is this an NAACP meeting or are you starting a revolution or are you plotting something?
So let’s just review, right, that these are individuals who are assigned to the same team, who should be interacting with each other, but the association-based covering demand is being made on them is so strong that they’re very, very conscious. And this even goes to timing when you arrive at an event relative to somebody of the same ethnicity, where you’re seated vis a vis somebody of your own ethnicity, that simply was not an issue when we dug into the data for Caucasians.