‘Death by a thousand cuts’: Visibly and culturally diverse women’s experiences of racial microaggressions in STEMM organisations

In this paper, we use an intersectional framework to explore how gender interacts withother aspects of identity, such as race, ethnicity and/or culture, to structure themicroaggressions experienced by visibly and culturally diverse women in academia, industryand government. We focus on these women’s experiences to disrupt the normative erasureof race from the workplace diversity context. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviewswith women in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM)organisations who self-identify as women of colour and/or women from culturally diversebackgrounds (henceforth women of colour). While women of colour share manyexperiences with white women, their challenges cannot simply be subsumed under gender.Rather, race and gender intersect to create overlapping and interdependent systems ofdiscrimination and disadvantage. Racial microaggressions can have a devastating impact yetmay be invisible to members of the dominant racial group – those most likely to be womenof colour’s peers and managers. White managers and peers can act as allies to women ofcolour by respecting and amplifying women’s concerns