Social Isolation and Exclusion
Social isolation and exclusion are quiet yet powerful forms of workplace discrimination. Learn how to recognize it and how to protect your career in this post.
With social isolation and exclusion the person discriminating attempts to limit how visible you are so that they can control the narrative and ensure others believe you are whatever they believe you to be. When this is happening you'll find your reputation under attack and your opportunities for growth limited.
Think this may apply to your situation? In this post we'll review:
Social Isolation: Discrimination that Attacks Your Reputation
Exclusion: Discrimination That Blocks Paths to Success
How Social Isolation and Exclusion Work Together
Why Documentation Matters
Social Isolation: Discrimination that Attacks Your Reputation
Social isolation shifts the opinions of others to fit a narrative of who the discriminating party believes you to be. The goal is to leverage the subjective bias of others and the power of repetition to convince your coworkers that you're a problem employee even if that's not how they saw you previously.
This is often carried out with subtle and persistent character attacks when you are not present to defend yourself or explain your actions. The discriminator highlights your mistakes - no matter how small - framing each as proof of a personal failing they've already decided you have.
What Social Isolation Looks Like
A new boss enters the workplace with a bias that women are less capable engineers than their male counterparts. You are the only woman on the team, but you are also one of the most experienced. Your work isn't perfect, but like others on your team, you quickly correct bugs when they are found by QA.
However, within weeks you notice that every time QA sends back your code with even a minor fix request your boss seems to notice and wants to discuss it. Worse, you've begun to hear that he's raising concerns about the number of errors in your work with other leaders and even your teammates. And then your boss makes a joke at your expense on a team call - telling someone to move fast, but not so fast they become sloppy like you. He followed this up by saying he was joking, but it still made you feel targeted and uncomfortable.
Afterwards you look at the logs and you're surprised to see that your work is not being sent back at a higher rate than your male peers. You realize if anything you have a lower rate of errors than most of your team. You try pointing this out to your boss, but they only respond by saying they didn't realize you were so sensitive and they won't joke around any more. As a result - you walk away wondering if you're the problem and imagining the criticism.
You continue to work and try not to worry about it since you know you have a reputation as a strong performer, but eventually you realize others are treating you differently. Your peers almost never come to you with questions anymore and you've noticed that when other teams approach you for work they're explaining what's needed as if you're a junior level employee.
It's confusing, because you've worked with many of these people for years and they know you well, but suddenly they all seem to be just as concerned about your ability to deliver as your boss. As this continues you find yourself feeling increasingly isolated.
By the time you're thinking about going to HR you're worried there is no one around you who will defend you.
How to Protect Yourself and Your Career
Since others are starting to believe the narrative your boss is spreading you'll need to protect yourself by capturing evidence of the criticism you are present for and can dispute.
Examples include:
Factual evidence of your performance
Criticism (including jokes) about your quality of work
Criticism (or lack of criticism) when others make similar errors
Witnesses present for criticism and feedback
The best way to dispute this is with your own evidence that makes it clear you are performing according to expectations. If you can prove that then you will just need to highlight examples of your boss citing problems in your performance where there is none.
Since you're not always present for the criticism you'll need to rely on witnesses who can confirm what your boss said when you weren’t there, but it's important to be aware that witnesses aren't always reliable. To mitigate this, try to go to HR with as many examples and witnesses as possible.
Exclusion: Discrimination That Blocks Paths to Success
If isolation is about tearing down your reputation, exclusion is focused on quietly eliminating your presence from rooms and conversations.
As this is done you'll have fewer opportunities to advocate for yourself, showcase your skills, or build meaningful connections. And if done consistently, exclusion can derail even the most promising career trajectory.
What Exclusion Looks Like
As your new boss attacks your reputation, they’ll also often take steps to limit your visibility. This can include:
Being left off of meeting invites and email threads
Being removed or not included with key projects
Having key responsibilities removed or reduced
In your place may be individuals who receive a disproportionate number of opportunities or individuals who are not as qualified.
When you ask questions about why you weren't included in projects that would have gone to you previously or are aligned to your skillset you're accused of being selfish or not being a team player.
Over time, you become less and less visible, which can lead to your peers and other teams not including you on projects also. This may initially happen because they think you're busy or uninterested, but as you disappear from visibility, they eventually just forget.
As a result, it's not only harder to defend yourself against attacks that suggest you're not as capable as you once appeared, you also have fewer people advocating for you.
How to Protect Yourself and Your Career
Since others won’t know why you’re not being included it will be up to you to document what is contributing to this reduced workload. Examples of what you should be documenting include:
Meetings and conversations you weren't included on
Projects and work you're removed from
Project you should have been assigned and weren't
Who that work went to and their workload
Conversations with your boss about assignments
By collecting this information you'll be able to not only show how you were systematically excluded, but also dispute any claims your boss tries to make that you're not contributing or 'pulling your weight.'
The one and only positive of this form of discrimination is that most of it can be tracked independently through team communications and calendar invites of meetings you were left off of. The goal is to show that there were opportunities and meetings that you could have been included on, but you weren't - which means it's just a matter of capturing the factual record.
Ideally you'll still want to capture at least one conversation or communication where you reference your concerns to your boss, along with their response, but there is less emphasis on this when your goal is just to show you're being excluded without reason.
How Social Isolation and Exclusion Work Together
Social isolation and exclusion reinforce and amplify the harmful effects of one another as your opportunities to show how capable you are have been removed just as your reputation is being attacked. As a result many employees find themselves either convinced they are the problem or at the very least that there's nothing they can do about the problem.
It's effective because it's discrimination masquerading as the truth. People may even initially recognize that the information feels or sounds false at first, but since they're inclined to believe what they're told, they may dismiss this as simply not having all the information. As these false claims are repeated, people get used to hearing them and begin to accept it as the truth especially because there's no other information to contradict it.
And unfortunately once others believe the negative narrative, it will be hard to convince them otherwise. The reason? People find it easier to believe that you are the problem than they find it to believe that their own personal bias was used to manipulate them into believing the false claims without question.
Why Documentation Is Important
Given how harmful it can be, it's always best to identify this behavior early, so you can proactively document and look for opportunities to remain visible and engaged.
By tracking each incident, you create a clear timeline that reveals a pattern of isolation and exclusion. Without this, not only may your escalations be dismissed, but the person discriminating could manipulate any concerns you've raised to label you as 'difficult,' 'dramatic', or 'not a team player.'
See the other posts in this series:
Series Intro: Is This Workplace Discrimination
Social Isolation and Exclusion (This Post)