Black graduated women in the workplace in France. Experiences of exclusion and marginalization

The colonial past of France promotes the coexistence of different cultures and backgrounds in the workplace. How are employees with various socially situated characters, like Black women graduates, integrated ? Despite the assertion of the republican equality, they experience exclusion, marginalization and racism which take the form of discrimination in access to employment, occupational status, in contracts, salaries and in daily life at work. They are particularly vulnerable to the effect of gender, origin, age and disability. In order to unveil these discriminations at work, semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2008/09 with 10 women of Caribbean and / or African origin, aged from 28 to 56 years.  Their community with the author mostly convinced them to participate in the survey. These ten "case studies" can demonstrate that due to their ethnicization, Black women graduates face specific challenges in their careers and have to develop individual coping strategies. This paper highlights management practices, social communication, forms of leadership and decision making as they are subjectively perceived and experienced by theses minority women in the French public and private sector. Carried out in the field of occupational psychodynamics, these case studies are also based on empirical sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies and management studies, and aim to contribute to knowledge on ethno cultural diversity in the workplace. This paper also relies on the feminist "standpoint theory", which postulates an "epistemic privilege" of minorities whose experiences of oppression can build a critical and methodological theory of the social world. For this new principle of objectivity, the identity strategies of resistance are answers to the constraints that deny the identity and needs of the selves. The symbolic violence of stigmatizing social representations is examined at three key moments of a career: access to employment, social relationships at work and the exercise of executive functions