Network Swans: Against Discrimination in the Workplace – Economy


Suddenly there was a strange hand in her hair. Regina Sandig came to work one morning and had a different hairstyle, not a hair extension like before, but her natural frizzy hair. “May I?” Called a colleague and before Sandig could answer the woman grabbed her hair. “I was totally perplexed, it was one of those moments when you were speechless,” she says. “Blacks are still considered exotic, we have different rules.”

Crossing borders, microaggressions, discrimination – women with an immigrant background often experience this kind of thing at work or when looking for a job – and it slows them down, often despite the best qualifications. Many stories come to mind as sandy. For example, the one farewell after a successful internship. “Yes, Ms. Sandig, you brought a lot of color to our team,” said the boss. An embarrassed silence in the room.

Sandig decided to change something. Together with seven other women, she is part of the team of the Swans Initiative, which campaigns for a fairer job market for students, graduates and young professionals with an immigrant background, black women and women of color who have grown up in German-speaking countries. The Swans Initiative offers seminars and webinars, an application check, mentoring and coaching. And very important: Swans is a community in which the “swans” can exchange ideas and stay in touch with one another over the long term. Almost 400 women are now in the network. “When you talk to others, you can see that the problem is not me, that it is not about individual experiences, but that it is something structural,” says Sandig. “That saves energy that we can use for something else, for example to find a great job.”

But so far there have not been any offers of help that were precisely tailored to them. The eight women on the Swans team overlap several factors because of which people are discriminated against: immigration history, ethnic or religious background, a name that is not so easy to pronounce, and often they are also working class children and the first in their families who have studied. “Then you simply have a different demeanor than the orthodontist’s daughters,” says Martha Dudzinski, the initiative’s managing director. And then they’re women too. Some of the Swans founders received scholarships from the Deutschlandstiftung Integration, which helps young people with a migration biography on their career path – but at the meetings there, the men often took the floor. “We said afterwards that we would like to have a room like this – only without men,” says Dudzinski.

“Oh, you can speak German well”

Discrimination is often not explicitly meant to be bad, but it still hurts and shows that it is assumed that the other is not one of them, says Dudzinski. Those who are stigmatized in this way have a hard time at work, also because it can happen that one internalizes not belonging. There are often questions and statements like these: “Oh, but you speak German well” or “Oh, so your father lets you work?” or “May I touch your hair?” “There is always the undertone that your qualifications are denied or at least questioned,” says Dudzinski. “Anyone who always had the feeling of getting a seat at the table has a completely different attitude, a completely different self-image,” says the 32-year-old, whose family comes from Poland and who initially did not dare to start her studies promote the best internship positions. “We want to offer a space where you can understand, where you can let yourself go. And where you can overcome it.”

People with a migration background have many disadvantages at work – even though as many of them between the ages of 25 to 34 have a university degree as people without a migration background: 26.1 percent. According to the 21st social survey by the German Student Union, a little more than 215,000 women with a migration background and 421,000 women between 18 and 36 years of age had an academic degree in Germany, so there are a total of 636,000 highly qualified women with a migration background – potential swans. Nevertheless, they remain underrepresented in the academic job market. According to a study by the Bonn Institute on the Future of Work, women with headscarves, for example, had to apply 7.6 times more often for jobs with higher education than applicants with German names in order to be invited to an interview.

This not only harms the applicants themselves – but also the economy. A number of studies have shown that diversity and better economic results are linked. But most of the efforts to achieve diversity in the German economy are primarily about women – and even then only with moderate success, after all, other countries like the USA have significantly more female bosses. In February 2021, the job platform Indeed did not find any of the most frequent first names of managing directors of 318 190 GmbHs in Germany that could infer a migration background. Only ten women’s names make it into the first 70, only in 69th place does Ali appear, a first name that suggests an Arabic or Turkish origin. It takes a long search to find women’s names that sound like a migration background.

The Swans initiative is growing and becoming more and more professional. So far, the founders have been doing their work on a voluntary basis alongside their studies, work and baby, but it is hardly manageable. Starting in September, Dudzinski, who has previously worked as press spokeswoman for Mercedes, will take care of the Swans full-time. And the initiative will soon become a non-profit GmbH. Funding comes from the Robert Bosch Foundation, among others. The Swans also work with employers such as McKinsey and the international law firm Skadden. Sandig once attended a seminar on salary negotiation – an enlightening experience. “Before that, I had no idea that you could even negotiate a salary,” she says. “My parents could never do that.” Her parents came to Germany from Ghana and worked, among other things, as building cleaners and domestic help. Sandig was born in Germany, studied history and social sciences in Berlin and London and received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. Today she works as a trainee at the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt. “We all grew up here, fought our way through school, performed extremely well, and became academics,” says the 26-year-old. “When we entered the world of work, we all noticed that there are certain disadvantages that we have in common, that there are these foreign marks.”

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