On Being the Only One in the Room

I want to say something plainly before I say it carefully: the experience of being the only person of colour in a room, repeated over years and across different contexts, does something to a person. It is not devastating. It is not paralysing. But it accumulates. And the professional world has not yet developed a comfortable language for what that accumulation costs, or for what it means to perform professional excellence while simultaneously managing the low-grade labour of being, in some rooms, a category as much as a person.

I am a senior associate at a large firm in Sydney. My parents emigrated from Ghana in the 1980s; I grew up in Western Sydney, attended a selective high school, did well enough at law school to receive a graduate offer, and have spent the subsequent years doing what ambitious lawyers do — working hard, taking on stretch assignments, building client relationships, and progressing through the seniority ladder at what my performance reviews describe as an above-average rate.

I am writing this because the diversity discourse in Australian law firms has a quality that I find, in equal measures, genuinely heartening and somehow beside the point. The statistics are improving. My firm has signed on to the Law Council's diversity commitments, has gender targets embedded in its partnership consideration process, and recently launched a reconciliation action plan. These things are real and they matter. They are also, from where I sit, somewhat removed from the texture of what it feels like to do this work every day.

The accumulation

Let me try to be specific without being ungracious, because I want to describe a pattern rather than indict individuals.

There is the client dinner at which you are introduced to a new client who, despite your title and the context, addresses most of their subsequent questions to your white colleague. There is the partnership meeting — you are not yet a partner, but you attend as a senior associate — at which a comment is made about "cultural fit" in relation to a lateral candidate, in a tone that suggests the speaker has not considered how the phrase might land.

There is the junior colleague who is surprised, pleasantly and transparently, to discover that you are the lead lawyer on a matter they have been assigned to. The surprise is not hostile. It is simply revealing.

None of these is an incident. None of them is something I would raise with a manager or note in a formal complaint. Each is, individually, a relatively small thing. The question that I find myself returning to is: what is the sum of relatively small things, over a career? And who is doing the accounting?

What firms are getting right

I do not want to be misread as cynical about institutional effort. The conversations happening now in Australian law firms about diversity and inclusion are genuinely different in character from those that were happening even five years ago. Senior partners who once treated these questions as compliance exercises now seem to engage with them as real questions about the kind of institutions they want to lead. That shift is not nothing.

The firms that are doing this most effectively are, in my observation, the ones that have moved beyond the metrics. Tracking the number of lawyers from underrepresented groups is useful; doing nothing beyond the tracking is not. The firms making genuine progress are those that have examined the informal structures — the sponsor relationships, the assignment allocation processes, the client entertainment culture — and asked honestly whether those structures produce equitable outcomes for lawyers who don't map neatly onto the traditional profile.

Sponsorship, specifically, is the mechanism I would most want to see take root. Mentorship — being told how to present yourself, how to navigate the culture, how to position yourself for advancement — is valuable and I have benefited from it. But sponsorship, in which a senior lawyer actively puts their own credibility behind you in rooms where you are not present, is a different and more powerful thing. It is also, candidly, rarer.

What I would want people to understand

I do not need sympathy. I need what my white colleagues receive without needing to ask for it: the assumption of competence, the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations, and the experience of doing my job without part of my attention always on how I am being perceived.

That is, I recognise, a more demanding request than it might sound. It requires the people who do not have to think about this to start thinking about it — to notice the dynamics in the room, to ask whether the assumptions they are making are accurate, to be willing to sit with some discomfort.

The law has always had something to say about equality and fairness — it is embedded in the profession's foundational self-conception. The gap between that conception and the daily experience of lawyers from underrepresented groups is, I think, the most honest indicator of how much further the profession has to travel. Naming it clearly seems like a reasonable starting point.

Author is using a pseudonym.