The Black Ceiling : How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace

America's preeminent law firms, investment banks, and management consultant firms are known for being difficult workplaces. Between long, stressful hours on the job, low odds of promotions, often-unrewarding work assignments, and "up-or-out" personnel practices, most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years of starting.

But life in these firms is especially difficult for Black professionals, who leave elite firms more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their white counterparts. As a result, they remain highly underrepresented in senior positions. Amid increasing calls for diversity in many workplaces, why are these institutions still so bad at maintaining, cultivating, and promoting Black employees?

Author Kevin Woodson is a sociologist and JD, one who knows firsthand what life at an elite law firm feels like as a Black man. By examining the experiences of more than 100 Black professionals in elite corporate law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms, Woodson offers a revelatory new assessment of workplace inequality in high-status jobs. Black professionals say their biggest obstacle in the workplace is not explicit bias. What they identify instead is "racial discomfort"-social alienation and stigma anxiety.

Woodson shows how this country's larger history of segregation and discrimination influence the micro-interactions between individual workers, generating firm-level patterns of inequality, with far-reaching implications for efforts to understand and overcome racial inequality in the workplace. In calling attention to the racialized nature and impact of many seemingly innocuous and insignificant aspects of professional life, Woodson illuminates the impact of certain everyday practices and arrangements in reproducing racial hierarchy. The project helps explain the inadequacy of unconscious bias training and other current approaches to take on workplace inequities. Racial inequality in the workforce is not just a matter of racial bias. To more fully understand and address the dynamics that so consistently undermine equality and inclusiveness in elite firms and other employment contexts, we must look beyond bias, to a broader set of challenges.