How diverse is your team?
When I worked at the stock exchange, I noticed a not so subtle division of engineers into an ‘A’ team and a ‘B’ team. And as far as I could see, the immigrants or minorities were in the ‘B’ Team, irrespective of brilliance. Being black, I was initially on team ‘B’ but when I got to team ‘A’ everyone was so shocked to see me. I was the only black person there, ever. The other team members constantly asked me about being black. I never realized that they had never met anyone that was black.
Theodore Winters, an African-American male portfolio manager for a mutual fund company
