Microaggressions in the Workplace

This week’s post focuses on two short novels or novellas: Assembly by Natasha Brown and Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi. Despite their brevity, each work is packed with interesting anecdotes of implicit bias in the workplace, structural inequalities, and social isolation. While last month’s non-fiction book, The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Implicit Bias, by Jessica Nordell explained the science of implicit bias in our society, Assembly and Diary of a Void present fictional illustrations of how those biases can manifest, particularly in the workplace.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, literary fiction can increase creativity and mental agility, and help readers conceptualize realties outside their own. As such, these two novels provide examples of common microaggressions and implicit biases that we can all be on the lookout for in our real-life work, regardless of our profession.

In the two fictional stories that I discuss in this post, both female protagonists experience a slew of microaggressions and instances of implicit bias in the workplace. Although the behaviors and actions that they experience are unlikely to be intentional or conscious behaviors on the part of their coworkers, they have a harmful and discriminatory impact, nonetheless. Each individual behavior can be viewed as minor, unintentional, or accidental, but in the aggregate, these experiences are hugely impactful.

In last month’s post on Nordell’s book, I also discussed how knowledge of implicit bias and microaggressions can help investigators assess the objective “reasonableness” of these types of claims. Allegations that follow commonly established stereotypes, trends, and forms of implicit bias are more likely to be objectively reasonable (and, thus, more credible).

The examples that follow from Assembly and Diary of a Void illustrate common forms of implicit bias experienced by women and/or women of color in the workplace. These examples match common notions of stereotyping and implicit bias, and the books’ two protagonists even share many similar experiences, essentially “corroborating” the other’s experience, and pointing to larger social patterns.

Fictional representations of these types of experiences allow us to understand their real-world prevalence and impact in different ways. Indeed, many complaints of alleged harassment or discrimination are likely to include some instances of implicit bias, and building our awareness of these processes allows us, as investigators, to better assess such claims.

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Diary of a Void centers on a Japanese woman working for a Tokyo company that produces paper-cores. Early in the novel, the protagonist, Ms. Shibata, comes up with a spur-of-the-moment idea to tell her coworkers and employer that she is pregnant, and cannot make them coffee because the smell triggers her morning sickness. As the only woman in her department, certain tasks, such as making coffee, are implicitly imposed on her, a phenomenon which we can observe, surely, in many non-fictional workplaces across the world.

Ms. Shibata not only makes coffee for her coworkers and their guests; she also answers all incoming calls, makes copies for anybody who asks, purchases supplies, sorts through package deliveries and distributes them, replaces the paper and ink in the copy machines, unloads the paper shredder, throws out the rotten food in the break room fridge, and cleans the Microwave, tasks that have all been relegated to her implicitly and unofficially as the only woman in the department.[1]

She picks up the trash: “Everyone kept their heads down. Of course they did. The dirty cups weren’t their responsibility. I bet the cups had never even crossed their minds”; and hands out snacks and client gifts: “We often got gifts like this from our clients. And they always wound up on my desk. Some of the men were giving me glances, as if they were expecting something. Wait, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were waiting for me to go desk to desk, handing out snacks and little spoons.” Indeed, as soon as the Microwave seems a little dirty, a (male) coworker will say to her, “Hey…Microwave?” Ms. Shibata tells the reader, with a touch of dry humor, “My name’s not Microwave… Nope. [Coffee]’s not my name, either.”

In these examples, the reader can see how Ms. Shibata’s coworkers are likely not even conscious of their behaviors: “I bet the cups had never even crossed their minds.” These examples also match common knowledge stereotypes and associations of women as better-suited for domestic or secretarial work. Although each of Ms. Shibata’s coworkers is likely unaware of their behavior, the impact of all these issues, in the aggregate, is devastating. As a result, Ms. Shibata is left working two full-time jobs rather than the one she was hired for, coming home from work late at night with little time to take care of herself. That is, until she decides to make a change.

The novel proceeds to follow Ms. Shibata’s faux pregnancy journey, with each chapter titled “week 6,” “week 7,” and so on, reflecting where Ms. Shibata would be in her pregnancy if she were indeed pregnant. As she is excused from her numerous unofficial tasks, she starts leaving work at a reasonable hour; she cooks dinner for herself, spends time languishing in the bath, goes to concerts, and makes new friends at a “mommyrobics” club. She suddenly has time to enjoy her hobbies, take care of her health, and create a community of friends and acquaintances, all the things that she was desperately missing before.

While Ms. Shibata’s “diary of a void,” in the most obvious sense, is the account of her growing abdominal “void,” the metaphorical void can also relate to her intense isolation as the only woman at her all-consuming job; the search for meaning that she is suddenly faced with when she “becomes” pregnant and is relieved of her extracurricular job duties; and even the paper cores that her company produces: “And inside the core a void. Ready for whatever story was going to fill it.”  The void, essentially, is the free time and space to cultivate a life and identity outside of work, spared of implicit discrimination: “Ready for whatever story was going to fill it.”

Diary of a Void is its author’s first publication. Yagi is an editor at a Japanese women’s magazine and lives in Tokyo.

Assembly by Natasha Brown

 Assembly tells the story of a Black woman living in London who is preparing to attend a party at her White boyfriend’s parents’ home. Written in clear dialogue with Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway, Assembly’s unnamed protagonist – who has also recently been diagnosed with cancer – embarks on a first-person account of existential introspection, beyond the literal plot of the novella.

Like Diary of a Void, Assembly focuses on themes of isolation and microaggressions in the workplace; however, Assembly’s musings on race, class, national identity and “assimilation” – “Always, the pressure is there. Assimilate, assimilate…” – go well beyond those of Diary of a Void. On one hand, Ms. Shibata and Assembly’s protagonist have similar experiences in the gendered microaggressions they experience at work. Like Ms. Shibata, Assembly’s protagonist’s coworkers implicitly expect her to make their coffee: “Midafternoon, there’s a comfort break… One man gestures at the espresso machine, says he doesn’t know how it works: which button to press, where to put the pod. When is the receptionist coming back? The others concur, they don’t know either. They ask me, perhaps I know… I make their coffees. And if they’d like, add frothed milk to the top.” Assembly’s protagonist’s boss, Lou, also relies on her for administrative and secretarial tasks, outside of her job description: “Lou slides on to my screen. The PA’s offline, his email says, and we need Monday-morning flights to New York. Merrick wants us at the Americas onsite. I close my eyes – exhale – at the implication. I want to tell him no, tell him to get his own fucking ticket… Now isn’t the time to be difficult, I know, and I’ll have to book my own ticket anyway (inhale).”

On the other hand, however, Assembly’s protagonist also experiences distinct microaggressions relating to race, or the intersection between race and gender, that Ms. Shibata did not experience in Diary of a Void.[2] For example, when the protagonist in Assembly considers resisting Lou’s inappropriate request for her to purchase his plane ticket (above), she fears being labeled as “difficult,” a harmful stereotype frequently associated with Black women.

At another point in the novella, Assembly’s protagonist narrates her experience giving a presentation at work: “At the onsite, we review the latest figures, the overall trends, the key drivers of those trends, or – perhaps, the steps to determine the key drivers of those trends. I sit with right ankle over left, knees together, shoulders back, arms on the table, hands soft. Prepared. When I speak, I am to-the-point with measured pace and an even tone. Backed by the data. Illustrated with slides.” Later, she describes the intense weight of double standards and presumed incompetence: “But it’s there. Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There’s no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread. From the buzz and jingle of my alarm until I finally get back to sleep. Dread. Weighing cold in my gut, winding up around my esophagus, seizing my throat. Dread.”

Here, the protagonist’s experiences can also be understood as “stereotype threat,” or the worry about being perceived through the lens of stereotypes. Nordell explains: “If the stereotype is of incompetence, stereotype threat creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. One study found that women treated with subtle discrimination suffered performance deficits, while those treated with overt prejudice did not. Another found that seeing instances of subtle bias had a greater negative impact on African Americans’ performance than did viewing overt prejudice.” Various clues throughout Assembly tell us that the protagonist is in fact a high-level, successful professional. The stereotype threat and implicit bias that haunt her at work, however, appear paramount in the evolution of her story, despite being seemingly incongruence with the realities of her qualifications and performance. 

Similar to Ms. Shibata, Assembly’s protagonist’s experiences with bias (in the workplace, and in society at large) affect every aspect of her life, and take a costly physical toll on her body, with her cancer diagnosis serving as a metaphor for the existential impact of these experiences on her whole being. While Assembly’s protagonist contemplates her mortality, Ms. Shibata nurses a fake pregnancy – both women’s experiences within the workplace and within society at large are firmly tied to their individual, physical being. While instances of implicit bias can sometimes feel invisible, or can be written off as minor, unintentional, or inconsequential, these novels demonstrate the physical, life-altering realities of these experiences in the aggregate.

Indeed, Nordell’s book on implicit bias points out: “Some researchers have concluded that subtle bias can have more detrimental consequences than overt bias because its ambiguity demands more mental and emotional resources. A person can’t be sure whether they were passed over for a promotion because of discrimination, or some other reason, and they are left questioning their own perceptions, a sort of internal gaslighting.”

This internal gaslighting is reflected again in the end of Assembly, when the protagonist makes the decision to leave her cancer untreated: “The doctor said I didn’t understand – / I recall Lou, eating lunch at his desk while Philando Castile’s death played out between paragraphs on his screen. He held his burrito up above his mouth and caught falling beans with his tongue as he peeled the foil back from soft tortilla. The doctor had said I didn’t understand, that I didn’t know the pain of it; of cancer left untreated. I’d wish I’d acted sooner, she said. Pain, I repeat. Malignant intent. Assimilation – radiation, rays. Flesh consumed, ravaged by cannibalizing eyes. Video, and burrito, finished. Lou’s sticky hand cupped the mouse and clicked away.”

Here, the protagonist contemplates her doctor’s words – “you don’t understand” – in the ironic context of her own life experience, often misunderstood. Simultaneously, her boss, Lou, bears witness to images of intense police brutality with the quotidian nonchalance of an ordinary man eating a burrito. In this powerful stanza, Brown weaves together two known milieus of extreme racial bias – the highly disproportionate killings of Black men by police in the U.S., and the intense gaslighting and underservice of Black women in healthcare. Both topics are discussed at length in Nordell’s book on implicit bias. [3] 

Brown’s brilliant debut work is written in lyrical, poetic prose, with numerous degrees of symbolism, philosophy, and analysis packed into each short stanza. Brown studied mathematics and then spent a decade working in financial services before publishing Assembly, her first book. Her second book Universality was recently released in March 2025.

[1] Nordell states, “Research suggests that gender stereotyping increases as the number of women in an organization drops.”

[2] Nordell writes: “As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has pointed out, focusing on a single category of identity at a time, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or religion, excludes and even erases the experiences of many groups; analyses of race or gender discrimination by themselves cannot, for instance, accurately capture the experiences of women of color… One American Bar Association study found that while White women and Black men in law experience a similar amount of discrimination, Black women experience more discrimination than either of them do. Black women also face greater harassment at work than any other group.”

[3] Nordell’s work spends several chapters discussing implicit bias in American police brutality, and analyzes in depth Philando Castile’s tragic death in 2016 at the hands of Minnesota police during a routine traffic stop.

She also discusses the experience of Black women in health care: “Indeed, Black women alone in the United States are three to four times more likely to die of complications from childbirth than White women.”