Graduate Speakers Colloquia: Gray Areas: How Workplace Patterns Maintain Racial Inequality

Once mainstream, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has become increasingly controversial. Yet whether companies proclaim their support for diversity or run from the term, racial inequal­ity persists in many workplaces. Even when support for DEI was at its peak, Black workers were slower to be hired, earned less than their white colleagues, stalled out at midlevel positions, and rarely advanced to the top ranks of organizations. Why do these disparities persist? In this presentation, I answer this ques­tion by documenting how sociological dynamics of work continue to thwart Black employees’ progress. Following narratives of seven Black workers in fields ranging from academia to medicine to entertainment, I discuss the unexpected ways that recruitment, promotion, culture, and other basic aspects of work are them­selves major drivers of racial inequality. 

Adia Harvey Wingfield is the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences and Assistant Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis, where she co-directs the Office of Public Scholarship. Professor Wingfield’s research examines how racial and gender inequality persist in professional occupations and has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Annual Review of Sociology. She is the author of several books, most recently Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It, which was listed as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s best books of 2023. Professor Wingfield is also the recipient of multiple awards, including the Richard A. Lester Award from Princeton University, the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association, and the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She has written for The Atlantic, Slate, and Harvard Business Review, and is currently a contributing writer for Forbes.com. Professor Wingfield is the 116th President of the American Sociological Association, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.