Microaggression: What at first sounds like a small and insignificant misbehaviour of a single person can have a big impact on marginalised people. This is because microaggressions often add up in everyday life. They have a very negative impact on individual well-being. To make the work environment more inclusive, we need to take a closer look at microaggressions.

 

The term microaggression comes from social psychology and was first coined in the 1970s by the US psychiatrist Chester Pierce, who taught as a professor at Harvard University. He used it to find a term to describe the attacks of white people on the dignity of black people. For people who are the normative majority in the organisation (e.g. white, heterosexual cisgender women or men without disabilities), microaggressions quite often go unnoticed. And this is of course an obstacle to an inclusive work culture.

For marginalized people, such as Black people and People of Color, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, Muslim people or people with disabilities, this can look very different. For example, it is simply difficult for people without a wheelchair to realize that the office is actually only accessible via a staircase and that the building is therefore not accessible for them. Or it is unclear that the question "Where are you from, I mean really?" is exclusionary and racist. Or there is a lack of awareness that there are more than two genders and a person is assigned the wrong gender. 

 

Stereotype Threat - or: extreme pressure to conform

This lack of awareness of the majority society for different perspectives and needs leads marginalised people to make the greatest mental effort to fit in with the majority. This is a survival strategy to better manage the so-called Stereotype Threat: The fear of being judged on the basis of negative stereotypes or confirming negative stereotypes that exist regarding the group in which the person is placed. This feels threatening and has a significant diminishing effect on individual performance, as a study by the University of Ulm shows. 

 

How it feels

TheTime journalist Vanessa Vu describes her feeling in relation to a microaggression about the where-do-you-come question like this:

"You can think of it like pinpricks: A prick hardly hurts, but being pricked every few days makes the skin sore. And no one brings ointment. No one apologizes. No one asks what he or she can do for me. People complain about my pain instead, label it as an inability to discourse and talk about how they meant it."

I also know microaggressions from my own experience and I can therefore very well understand this feeling described by Vanessa Vu. People who are structurally less discriminated against must therefore learn what microaggression is and how they can change their behaviour. Because often a question or statement is well-intentioned, but still rips open a wound in the other person.

 

Examples of microaggressions are:

• Interrupting people in meetings or stealing ideas (this often affects women in particular)
• Simply ignoring contributions to the meeting or dismissing them as not important enough.
• Mispronounce the name marked as non-German several times or make jokes about it.
• make sexist, racist, homophobic and/or transphobic, ableist jokes (ableistism = discrimination practice about people with physical, mental or psychological disabilities).
• When heterosexual cisgender men ask a homosexual cisgender man to act "like a man" for once now
• Addressing a person with the wrong pronoun
• Women say that they should come down now and not be so emotional

• Comments based on stereotypes: When an Afro-German woman is told that she speaks good German, or also: "It's hot today, but you know that from where you come from".
• "For me, all people are equal" - well-intentioned, but ignores the fact that people and groups are structurally discriminated against on the basis of different personality traits.

• Privileges that are only allowed to certain groups (for example, training is only allowed to cisgender men, but not to cisgender women). 

• sexist comments about colleagues' clothes or bodies
• using a person's wheelchair as a bag rack without being asked (thanks to Raul Krauthausen)
• ...

List on Racial Microaggressions from the University of Minnesota (English language)

 

Stress at work is the breeding ground for microaggressions

Especially when it is particularly stressful in everyday working life, microaggressions can happen quickly. In stressful situations, the brain particularly likes to fall back on familiar, stereotypical thinking and prejudices because it is more resource-efficient. However, this makes new, less discriminatory behaviour more difficult. Stopping and reflecting for a moment in this situation can already help. Next time you will simply do better and this time sincerely apologise. 

After all, a packed workday is not a good excuse: because the pricks happen on the backs of the marginalised people. 

The psychologist Derald Wing Sue revived the term microaggressions a decade ago. He describes this mental challenge in a conversation with Deutschlandfunk radio like this:

"And that message, of course, triggers stress in the brain. That is, stress hormones or neurotransmitters, in the vernacular we say hormones, nerve messengers that represent stress, those are released and the brain sends signals and says, you can be destroyed. And because of that response from the brain, we can also talk about biological killing when it comes to racial microaggression."

This is exactly the opposite of inclusion. And it is also the opposite of what diversity strategies are supposed to achieve: That every person can contribute and realise their full potential and that they are valued for it.

 

 

Working together inclusively

For an inclusive work environment, it is therefore particularly important to take a closer look at the team's interaction and to listen to subjective perspectives. Because maybe everything feels optimal for you in your team - but maybe not for your lesbian colleague, because she feels, for example, that she is not allowed to show herself in this way. This does not mean that she is too sensitive. Rather, it means that you need to work as a team to make the company culture more comfortable for marginalised people and different needs. Microaggressions can vary from company to company. Maybe you can think of completely different situations. 

 

 

My idea for you is therefore:

1. Start collecting typical situations company-wide in a list.
2. Important: I don't recommend this if D&I is new to your colleagues, they need training first and there is still little openness at management level and in the corporate culture. Then it's time to move on to other topics. If you are wondering which ones, please contact us for your strategy .
3. Make this document available in a cloud so that people can write their observations anonymously. However, it must fit in with your corporate culture. 
4. Take an active approach as a team: conduct regular surveys about the well-being and sense of belonging in the team, talk about it and work with experienced experts like us - e.g. for an inclusion survey.