After suffering racist abuse during her formative years, Angelica Ojinnaka spent most of her working life concealing part of her identity.
"I was called a multitude of different animalistic racial slurs — told to change my skin in different ways," she explains, but deliberately avoids repeating the exact words that were used or detailing the violence she experienced as she says it remains traumatic.
Ms Ojinnaka, 25, who was born in Australia to parents who migrated from Nigeria, says after that painful high school experience, she would try to behave less stereotypically "African", and appear "whiter".
She says she would do things such as straighten her hair and change the way she spoke.
"For years, African people have been called gangs, or [labelled as] having gang mentality, or not being in environments that are professional, even though we very much are [professionals]," she says.
"I used to think that 'oh, well, maybe I will have to take away the parts that are less of my cultural identity just to get a job or just to get in the door'.
"I had to be less 'African' to fit in — I feared my identity for a long time."
This is called "code-switching" — the way in which someone, consciously or unconsciously, adjusts their language, behaviour and/or appearance to fit into the dominant culture.
And according to a new report from the Diversity Council Australia (DCA), it is common in Australian workplaces.
DCA surveyed almost 400 self-identified "culturally and racially marginalised women", defined as women who are black, brown, Asian, or any other non-white group and who face marginalisation due to their race.
The survey, undertaken between October and November last year, found most of them code-switched because they feared that if they did not, they would be overlooked by their managers for jobs and promotions.
The participants reported that "leadership models used for assessing talent in Australian organisations were inherently biased towards what the Diversity Council refers to as more masculine Western or 'Anglo' leadership styles which value extroversion and self-promotion".
This, the report said, "has the effect of inadvertently excluding culturally diverse women from consideration for senior roles".
It found 83 per cent of participants reported experiencing pressure to act, look, and sound like existing leaders (who are most likely to be white men) and 69 per cent reported having to "act white" to fit in and 66 per cent to "act white" to get ahead.
'White-adjusting' comes at a cost
Turkan Aksoy was part of a smaller focus group that the Diversity Council used as part of its survey.
She was seven years old when her family migrated to Australia from Turkey, and recalls code-switching for much of her early work life.
"I definitely did a lot of code-switching, which I refer to sometimes as 'white-adjusting,'" says Ms Aksoy, a former Big Brother contestant who currently works in the community sector.
"Some of the things I would do, for example, is, work on my accent — minimise my strong accent.
"I would also colour my hair, sometimes wear contact lenses. I'd whiten my skin, dress in a much more Western fashion. And that was just to sort of fit in and to be part of our community."
But the impact she says was that it left her feeling more "isolated and excluded".
"I wasn't quite aware of my feelings — I was just doing it more for survival purposes, because I wanted to make sure that I could expand and grow within my career pathway," she says.
"It wasn't until in my later years that I realised that when I was white-adjusting or code-switching, I was actually letting go of my own cultural practices, my own identity."
Being a 'chameleon to fit in'
Rozalina Sarkezians was also part of the survey focus group.
She has worked in the health industry for 25 years but is now self-employed.
She says in previous jobs, she felt pressure to try to fit into cultural norms held by her senior Anglo-Celtic managers.
"I felt like I had to be a chameleon and change myself to fit into this [dominant] culture," she says.
"To change myself by attending these Friday night drinks that didn't quite sit well with my authentic self, to fit into a particular culture and fit in a particular way so that I would get a promotion."
Ms Sarkezians says she also felt she had to take on additional workloads, compared with her peers, to be recognised by senior management.
"I didn't find that others in similar roles to me in junior marketing roles had to do that," she says.
In fact, most of the women surveyed by DCA said they found it harder to progress in their careers because of their cultural or religious background.
DCA's survey found that 85 per cent felt they sometimes, often or very often had to work twice as hard as employees who were not culturally diverse women to get the same treatment or evaluation.
And 65 per cent felt they were ignored or not taken seriously by their managers because of being a culturally diverse woman.
It also found that 69 per cent of migrant women surveyed believed that being a migrant had limited their career options in Australia.
Sexism and racism persist in workplaces
DCA's report also asked women whether they had experienced racism and sexism in the workplace over the past two years.
It found that 61 per cent of the women reported experiencing racism at work in the past two years, while 48 per cent had experienced sexism at work over that same period.
Only 15 per cent of the women surveyed "agreed" or "strongly agreed" that there is no racial discrimination against them at their present workplace.
Ms Sarkezians says while she has not experienced racism recently, she was called a "wog" at previous workplaces.
"Luckily, we don't hear that often now — certainly not in my business," she says.
More than half of Australia's population were either born overseas or have parents who are migrants.
But the DCA survey follows a 2022 Women on Boards desktop audit of the boards of 232 non-corporate organisations across five sectors.
It found that while women comprised 46 per cent of board directors across the sectors, culturally diverse women (defined in that report as women with "non-Anglo Celtic" origins) accounted for 5.7 per cent.
The DCA data also follows an earlier report it and Deakin University carried out in 2017, which analysed the cultural backgrounds of leaders in publicly listed companies.
The Capitalising on Culture and Gender in ASX Leadership report looked at the cultural origins of female leaders in ASX companies at four key time points – 2004, 2009, 2013 and 2015.
It found that in those periods, when a narrower definition of "culturally diverse" was used — women without "Anglo Celtic" or "North-West European" origins — the figure of ASX directors who were culturally diverse women was 1.9 per cent.
And while just 1 per cent of all ASX chief executives were culturally diverse women (non-Anglo Celtic origins), this dropped to 0.5 per cent when the narrower definition of culturally diverse was used (women without Anglo Celtic or North-West European origins).
How workplaces can be more inclusive
This pressure to code-switch may in fact dilute genuine diversity in the workplace, according to DCA researcher and report co-author Virginia Mapedzahama.
"It doesn't actually address the systemic barriers … that are stopping them from getting into leadership, because what they're doing is they are adjusting their behaviour to fit in, rather than the barriers being removed," she says.
While it is hard for employers to know if an employee is code-switching, she says they need to recognise it happens and can take steps to ensure they are not inadvertently excluding certain categories of people from work opportunities.
"What we encourage our employers is to really do that racial audit to see what some of the barriers are that may exist, say in our hiring system, or in our promotion system, or in our reward system within this organisation," she says.
Dr Mapedzahama says while workplaces have been implementing policies to achieve greater gender diversity, it tends to favour Anglo-Celtic women.
"You tend to get a particular group of women who benefit from those [gender diversity] discourses … and they tend to be white, middle class, heterosexual, able bodied women — so there needs to be a broader discussion," she says.
The prototype of what a leader looks like — "characteristics that are associated normally with white middle-class men" – also needs to be challenged, and culturally diverse female mentors need to be identified.
"It's about who you know, what networks you're in, who you associate with at work … that exclude this particular group that we're looking at," she says.
"It's just really embedding in the DNA of the organisation itself, that women from racially marginalised backgrounds have access to things like sponsorship … [someone to] advocate on your behalf when it comes to promotion."
Angelica Ojinnaka says she does not feel the need to code-switch anymore – "those experiences actually have shaped me into really appreciating my identity in full", she says.
But she agrees that workplaces need to think more about how they engage and support culturally diverse and marginalised women and stamp out racism and sexism.
"Foster a sense of community and a sense that people can be themselves," she says.
"Whether it's [in] workplace policies or making the workplace safer, [changes are needed] so that people don't have to feel a sense of loss or be at risk of harassment or abuse because of their identity."
