Deepa Purushothaman

2022

A Diversity, Inclusion and Equity leader and she speaks extensively about race and gender issues. Deepa is currently writing a book with Harper Business called Inclusion Delusion focused on new concepts of power to help WOC rise. She is a WAPPP Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School where she concentrates on research and strategies to combat systemic racism in corporate structures. Deepa was a senior Partner at Deloitte where she spent over 20 years working with clients in the Telecom and Tech sectors. She also helped grow Deloitte's Social Impact Practice and she served as a National Managing Partner of Inclusion and the Managing Partner of WIN, Deloitte's globally renowned Women's Initiative.

Behind Corporate America’s veneer of inclusion, it has never really fostered true equity, especially for women of color.

Women of color get pushed and pulled at each step on the corporate ladder. Entry-level WOC are trying to learn how to fit and adapt and do not always have the power to make their voices heard. Mid-level WOC are caught wanting to grow and make a difference but can become jaded by the lack of change they’re able to inspire. And senior-level WOC are often the loneliest, the most embedded in their companies, and have the most pressure to conform.

Many women of color have scars from climbing the corporate ladder. Did that really just happen?  Do they realize what they just said?  Oh, they weren't expecting ME to show up! On top of that, there aren’t enough friends or allies we can turn to because so many of us are “the first, the few, the only,”  unique in the rooms we enter and, in the places, we stand as women of color at work.

As women of color, we need to unearth our individual power. It is not power that comes from outside accolades, it’s power that comes from inside of us. It is power amalgamated from our culture, from our lived experiences, and from the traits that we uniquely bring forward as women of color. It is power we define for ourselves. And it is unique to each of us.

After we find our individual and innate power, we feed it by finding others, creating community, and building collective power to sustain us at work and in life. This is how we survive as WOC in structures like Corporate America that were not built for us or by us, and it's how we change the systems around us.