How to Avoid Microinequities

Slights, faulty assumptions or stereotypes that people may unintentionally subject others to can destroy morale and expose an organization to legal risk.

Prior to becoming chief diversity officer for commercial real estate developer Jones Lang LaSalle, Angela Roseboro was pregnant and preparing for maternity leave at another company. She said she noticed one of her peers get positioned in a way quite different from her own career path.

The situation hadn’t always been this way, so Roseboro invited her manager to lunch and brought the matter to his attention.

“Well, Angela,” the manager said, “It’s really too bad you got pregnant because we had such high hopes for you. Now you’re on the mommy track.”

This was news to Roseboro.

“That was the first I had ever heard of it,” Roseboro said of the “mommy track.” The 20-year veteran of corporate diversity and inclusion then asked for clarification.

She was told the mommy track is the point where a woman stops being serious about her career and considers starting a family and spending more time at home. Roseboro said she never saw herself on this path, nor did she think her pregnancy would be a barrier to advancement or that she would be singled out for it.

“He never said anything,” Roseboro said. “He just kind of changed the way he positioned people.”
That position was in the background instead of a position for growth, and eventually, the self-doubt began to set in. “Is it me?” Roseboro said.

Later she said her manager was remorseful and had no idea of the effect of his words, but it was too late — doubt already had taken root. She asked herself, “Did I do something wrong? Did I not deliver?”

But she had done nothing wrong. Roseboro was the victim of a microinequity, a term coined in the early 1970s by economist Mary P. Rowe of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a series of articles published between 1973 and 1989, Rowe defined microinequities as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard to prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be ‘different.’”

Such slights were the “cumulative, corrosive effect of many inequities,” Rowe said, concluding that microinequities have been the foundation for much of the discrimination in the United States.