Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing

This resource first appeared in issue #77 on 05 Jun 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Diversity, Becoming A Manager: Remote

Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing - Karla Miller, Washington Post

Office spaces aren’t equally welcoming environments to all of us. Here Miller points out that for many potential team members, distributed work can mean less of the constant low-level stream of bullshit they’d normally experience in a predominantly white and male workplace.

This point:

Working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as […] being mistaken for another colleague of the same race (a problem solved by having names displayed in video meetings)

apparently really registered with a lot of readers on twitter, and it’s a point that I had literally never thought about.

Reading this, I wonder if hiring in an increasingly distributed manner will also help recruit from groups that experience this sort of tiring nonsense all the time. We typically have small tight-knit teams, and team members from a lot of different demographic groups might well feel concerned about joining the team as “onlies”, the only member of that group. Will offering distributed work de-risk that choice enough that it would help improve diversity of our teams with new recruits (while of course leaving the work of equity and inclusion?)