When I entered the world of work, I realized for the first time that I was a racialized woman and that this represented a double obstacle.
I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, in Essonne, in a mixed family: my father is white and my mother, black. I was always pushed to be ambitious by my parents, regardless of color or gender. I was a good student at school, and I wanted to study law to become a lawyer. For a long time, I thought that there was no color and that gender did not matter, these issues having never been passed on to me.
When I was younger, I simply told myself that everyone had a different color, me not having the same skin as my parents, my brother also being of another complexion. My parents also had a gender-neutral distribution of tasks: my mother, an insurance office worker, worked a lot, while my father, a Catholic education manager, was more responsible for our education. These concepts were non-subject. I came to understand that they were far from being so in society in general; and in the professional world, in particular, where the fact of being a woman, mixed race moreover, comes with real obstacles. I had to learn to apprehend them and to live with them, belatedly.
During my end-of-studies internship with a former minister who became a lawyer, I remember that she warned me: “When you are a woman in this environment, there is a legitimacy that you have to conquer, because everything is more difficult. » At the time, it did not resonate yet. I saw, being interested in law and politics, the persistent inequalities between women and men but, for me, this very divided reality was that of an old world. There were a lot of girls on the college benches, at Paris-I, and I felt very protected there. But from my first experience, after graduation, it started to jump out at me.
Evil jokes
I worked for five years in Luxembourg, then in an Anglo-Saxon firm, where, if the issue of diversity was officially put on the table, the daily experience was very different. This reality continued when I returned to Paris. The environment of law, in a way similar to that of politics – spaces of money and power – is an environment of men, mostly white. No one is ever going to tell you that it’s not possible to fit in there because you’re a woman, but these are pernicious jokes, ways of organizing teams, remarks about the possibility of pregnancy …
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