Pictured above: Suki Xiao.
Suki Xiao is an ICF Associate Certified Coach and business owner on a mission to empower women of colour around the world. She’s created As You to help a diverse cross section of women leaders succeed in business.
Suki Xiao is a woman who finds herself in businesses without intending on being in business. A relatable story for many women looking to carve out careers on their own terms.
“My last corporate job was with Xero as an Agile Coach and I branched out to owning my own business because I wanted to focus more on personal career coaching.
“Now I have the niche business of coaching women of colour, and all because one of my clients encouraged me to become the best Asian woman coach globally.
“Since that encouragement, I have delved into the challenges that Asian women and women of colour face in the workplace, and have held multiple community events with Xero’s sponsorship sharing stories that help these women overcome some of their unique business challenges,” says Suki.
Reflecting on these challenges, the coaching skillset she possessed, and the leadership experience she has gained over the years, is how Suki birthed the first ever Aotearoa women of colour leadership programme Accentuated. NZBusiness sat down with the certified coach for a chat on empowerment and what it means to be a woman of colour in business in New Zealand.
What are some of the biggest challenges you and other women of colour face in getting ahead?
As a woman of colour in business, and in a business that focuses on minority rights and development, it means that I face the challenge of not sharing the same backgrounds as my potential funders who are generally white although my customers are women of colour.
My understanding for why women of colour need tailored leadership development is both a challenge and what sets me apart. The pushback is strong, whether that is in invalidating the need for specific women of colour development or in not prioritising women of colour ahead of more majority “diverse” groups or easier to comprehend “front-of-mind” inequity like women.
As for women of colour getting ahead in corporates or organisations, the biggest challenge is the lack of representation. When we move up the career ladder of any organisation at the moment we get a steep drop off of the number of women of colour represented. The “Champions for Change Diversity & Inclusion Impact Report 2020” shows ethnically diverse people represent 38 percent of the New Zealand working population. However, at the manager level, the representation drops to 28 percent and at the board level it is a mere 10 percent. That is only one in four ethnically diverse staff making it to the top and these are not even the statistics for women of colour, who face both the challenges of gender and culture.
With a lack of representation, it brings several challenges for women of colour. Firstly, the pressure to conform, i.e. to be like the majority, to be like whoever is the prototype that will succeed in an organisation, who generally do not look, sound, behave and think like them.
Secondly, the lack of representation at the top means we lack powerful networks. We see this really often with lots of employee-led networks in government and in the private sector. However, people from diverse backgrounds that make up and lead these employee-led networks generally do not hold high senior positions. So even when we have networks, our networks are not as powerful.
Thirdly, the lack of role models. Because we are so seldomly represented at the top, we cannot see ourselves there to believe that we can make it to the top as well.
Last but not least, the challenge of being stereotyped. This is a huge one because when we have a majority of the workforce who are not aware and do not understand the challenges of ethnically diverse staff and the ratio for leaders who are not like us is even greater, it is easy for those stereotypes to continue. For example for Asian women, the stereotype is to be the submissive head-down hardworker. We are unlikely to get promoted if we stick to that stereotype and at the same time, we are also punished for going out of that stereotype if we are more assertive, we can easily be taken as bossy, aggressive or too ambitious.
How does your business help change this mindset?
My business addresses these challenges in two ways. Firstly, we work with aspiring and established women of colour leaders to build their authentic leadership identity and confidence. This, so that they don’t feel the pressure to conform, and can embrace their uniqueness and make use of their perspectives as superpowers and influence the world the way they want. We made a video about participant experience at our last graduation of Accentuated, check out what they have to say:
Secondly, we are also developing an allyship programme currently with Te Tiriti and Te Ao Māori woven in. It is important that we work with both the minority groups as well as the majority groups because the majority does hold the power in the system and we need them as allies to be curious, to understand and to take actions to address inequities. Some of these inequities present themselves in the hiring process, some in how we promote and sponsor individuals while there are also inequities in our expectations of a “good” employee in the workplace. So raising the awareness of the challenges and inequities and making use of our positional powers as allies is really important for changing the representation statistics for staff who are “different”/diverse.
What conversations need to be had at a national level to ensure women of colour succeed more?
I think the number one conversation we need to have is how aware are we of our biases. A simple exercise we can practise is if we were talking to a business owner who is a woman of colour, imagine if you were talking to the same person on the same topic but the person is a white man. How would you feel about your business interaction and relationship with them and what would be different?
International Women’s Day 2030, what will we be celebrating?
I hope in 2030, we can actually celebrate the statistics for women of colour shifting at the top of the leadership table. I know in the US, the statistics have not changed for decades: At nearly every step in the pipeline, the representation of women of colour falls relative to white women and men of the same race and ethnicity. According to LeanIn and McKinsey’s latest report released in October 2023 on “Women in the Workplace”, currently only one in 16 C-suite executives is a woman of colour in the US, whereas women occupy one in 4 C-suite positions.
I also hope that we can move the conversation on from women equality to focussing on and understanding intersectionality and inequities that are experienced by people with multiple intersectionalities, like women of colour.
