Do white women managers mentor black women on their staffs?
Nkomo: When we talk to white women, many of them don’t feel comfortable as a mentor to anybody until they are firmly anchored in their careers. And I think at other times, when they try to reach out to black women, they don’t know how to. They often reach out in terms of, well, we’re all women. They don’t recognize that for the black woman the reality is different. Bell: That’s why we wrote the book. So often you hear that women all have the same experience. That’s not true. Gender makes a big difference, but race makes a tremendous difference. I think that there might be Latino women and Asian women who will resonate with parts of this book as well. Q: There was very little mention of corporate diversity programs in your book. Do these efforts matter? Nkomo: The black women saw it as one more committee and one more big conversation that ended up as nothing. Diversity is a term that’s trying to be polite. It hasn’t really dealt with the issues that we talk about in our book, the sexism
