Once your business gets to a certain size, the cracks start to emerge.

Things you used to do in a day take a week.

You deserve a customized solution, and that's Net Suite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular

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You're listening to women at work from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Emily Kaulfield. I'm Amy Gallo and I'm Amy Bernstein.

Organizational change is often slow so it makes sense that progress toward racial

justice in the workplace would be a protracted undertaking and

that transforming any company whose culture is systematically favored white employees

into one that gives equal opportunity to everyone would take time.

We tell ourselves to be patient and that our patients will eventually pay off.

But as we wait for company leaders to make good on the promises they made earlier this year, discrimination

continues to hurt lives and careers. Women of color are often paying the price

for our patients. In this episode we're focusing our attention on how four black women make sense of the progress,

or lack of progress, in their organizations.

Their descriptions highlight the gap that often exists between high-level intentions and meaningful impact on people's lives.

My name is Valerie. I work for a convenience store chain. My store is in a tiny little suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I am a supervisor there, so I'm not technically a boss, but I am the manager on duty when I work.

I'm in business school right now.

My job has a partnership with an online university that does one class at a time for five weeks and it's completely online

and it's really working out for me but the best part by far is that my job pays for

...