This was pretty much my first real corporate job after graduating university. I joined a large enterprise IT company and started off in a supporting sales role. The company realized in most other departments they didn’t have much of a contingency plan as all their employees were from the same generation and approaching retirement at the same time. A role opened up on a technical support customer facing team to which I applied and got the role. I am from a visible minority and I’m female. My manager was also female , but the rest of the team has been all male for over a decade, most of whom were about 15-20 years older than me and had been working for the company for several years . As with many large corporations, company layoffs occurred often. During one of those times, a male coworker who was 20 years older said that I was safe because I’m female, young and a visible minority.
This made me feel both deeply upset and angry because I read it as “I’m employed because I check diversity boxes” not because the company sees value in my work or that i’m actually qualified. Needless to say I spoke to my manager at the time and she said yes you were hired because you’re female and you were hired because you were the best person for the role. As a younger employee, I was very eager to learn and establish a career for myself, hearing that comment from the more experienced team members made me question my abilities and value and did strip away some of the confidence I had which landed me the job in the first place.