Privilege walk
random thoughts on role models, belonging and expectations
A long time ago in my tenure at Facebook, I participated in a leadership training about biases and one exercise was called Privilege Walk. You have likely seen it somewhere online. All participants stand side by side on a line, the moderator starts to make some statements and ask everyone, based on their answer, to take a step forward or a step backwards.
The principle is very simple: it is to illustrate very visually the uneven distribution of privileges in a group even though if taking a snapshot of the day of the exercise, all the participants look very similar. In the case of this exercise at Facebook, we were all senior leaders at one of the top technical companies in the world.
This exercise touched me very deeply, and it was surprising to me how it did so. At each step I took back, I felt a sense of relief because for the very same time in my career, I would be seen for who I really was: someone who came from a place in Brazil where household income is 2.65 minimum wages (or about 653 dollars per month in today's exchange rate), who did not have access to much beyond basic education up to high school. Everything else I had to wrestle for. I learned English on my own, I learned my profession without finishing formal education. Somehow out of sweat and luck I made to that room but I wasn't the same as those people who studied in the best universities and attended all of the extra curriculum classes as they grew up.
I also felt a sense of acknowledgement for the very first time in my career because to me, sometimes it felt so so hard and it felt as if I would break and that I should give up, but I never did. In silence, listening to all these sentences coming out of this guy's mouth, I would replay memories of my life in my head. Memories of the toughest moments I had lived up to that point.
By the end of the exercise, I was by far the person further to the back of the room, by several steps (in fact I had to stop stepping back because I reached the wall). We regrouped, the moderator asked in a circle “How did this make you feel?". Some of the guys which were towards the back responded something like “It felt really great to see how far along I've came”. When it was my turn to say something, I bursted into tears and said “It has been so fucking hard”. I didn't mean the exercise, I meant my path, my career.
I felt so different to all these people. I always had, in fact. But now it was crystal clear that it wasn't about a feeling, I was different, because of who I was, because of how I grew up, and most importantly, not because of my choices, but because of things which were much beyond my control.
With time and self awareness, I started to find my own voice and feel more comfortable under my own skin in my role as a leader and in those rooms of people unlike me, but it is a continuous process and I doubt myself many times a day, most of the days.
The one thing this exercise taught me is that even in groups that seem homogeneous like this one: “all Facebook senior leaders”, there are many stories, many struggles, many paths that each person took to get to be there.
This diversity makes the group stronger, and we should look forward to it, but at the same time, we also need to be curious about each other to learn that this diversity in fact exists otherwise we might just be another one in the room to everyone else.
Being a woman makes me obviously different to most but the rest of my “baggage” isn't as obvious neither someone else's to me. I must remain curious.