Return To Office Mandates Hurt Women Of Colour, But Australia Won't Talk About It
'It's like working on eggshells', says Josie*, a 25-year-old woman of Filipino heritage, when asked her experiences of working in an Australian office environment. 'Because I work in an white-dominated industry, I feel like I have to be very careful about what I say and how I say it, especially to avoid being branded as an aggressive, outspoken brown girl,' she says. By working from home, Josie speaks of feeling less pressure to constantly monitor how she is presenting herself. As doing so offers less in-person interaction, she's relatively insulated against the racism born in offices.
The women that I spoke to also expressed having to produce a level of output that wasn't expected of their white counterparts, making working from the office a frustrating experience. Leah*, a 34-year-old woman of Chinese descent, spoke of becoming more aware of her role as the 'quiet, reliable Asian girl' when in the physical confines of her white colleagues. 'There's this expectation on me to keep my head down,' Leah tells Refinery29 Australia. 'Working in an open plan office means that I often hear my white coworkers gossip about things completely unrelated to work,' she says, adding that it was 'frustrating' to see how much more time they had in their day. Working from home, she said, allows her to feel 'less on edge', while giving her the space to complete her work.
Remote working can also offer a break from having to present themselves in ways that are grounded in white, western culture. One 28-year-old woman, Zoya*, of Pakistani heritage, for example, spoke of receiving unwelcome comments from a colleague because she tended to wear trousers to work over a skirt. 'One of my coworkers was like, 'why don't you ever wear a skirt? Are you a lesbian back home or something?'' Having grown up in a culture where it wasn't common to expose her legs, Zoya has found working from home a welcome escape from comments about how she presented herself, adding that her company's claims to be 'multicultural' didn't really square with the reality of being at work.
Given the reprieve that remote work arrangements offer to women of colour, it's disturbing that almost nothing on the topic has featured in the Australian context, even though it's been discussed extensively in the US, the UK, and Canada. It's an absence that's especially egregious when research from 2024 shows that two out of three women of colour in Australia experience discrimination in the workplace, a number that is up from 10% in 2021, with racism being the predominant type of discrimination they experience.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the experiences of women of colour in offices continue to get worse is a dearth of racial literacy in Australia that, of course, bleeds into the contours of office life. While Australians usually talk about race euphemistically, to 'multiculturalism' and 'CALD', we rarely talk directly about the specificity of how people of colour are discriminated against: the specificities of how we move through the world and are impacted by it. This is baked into us from an early age, with a 2021 study finding that kids are steered away from talking about racism, stunting racial literacy from a young age.
The result of not talking about race, both on an interpersonal and government level, is that conversations like this aren't broached, and no one is thinking about how to make workplaces work for us. Thanks to a national acknowledgement that blitzing remote work arrangements disproportionately impacted women, Peter Dutton admitted he made a mistake. But the Aussie approach of thinking about an amorphous mass of 'women' isn't working. An approach to workplace equity that doesn't acknowledge the unique and specific challenges that women of colour in Australia experience is at best, mostly benefits women who are white. At worst, it's actively doing women of colour harm.
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