The Cost of Being Underrepresented

Allie Nimmons:

Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech Podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:

Hi, Allie.

Allie Nimmons:

Hi, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Frechette:

I’m good. When we miss a week because of whatever reason, travel or sickness or whatever, I actually miss saying that to you like, hi, Allie. I know it’s silly, but I like it.

Allie Nimmons:

It feels like a little bit more special because I haven’t heard it in a while.

Michelle Frechette:

There you go. Exactly. So I’m glad you’re feeling better.

Allie Nimmons:

Yes.

Michelle Frechette:

Good to see you.

Allie Nimmons:

So I have a little cough, but I’m definitely feeling better than I was last time we recorded. That was the first few days of my cold, and it was just like I was dying. I feel better.

Michelle Frechette:

You were muting yourself more than you were actually talking because you had to cover the cough with that mute button.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:

For sure.

Allie Nimmons:

And I’ll try to keep that up this time. But yeah, definitely feeling better.

Michelle Frechette:

Good, good, good. Well, I was thinking about things this week, so I traveled this weekend and I’ve traveled a lot this year. I’ve traveled to a bunch of different word camps. I’ve traveled for family last year too for various reasons. And I got to thinking about how, and for other reasons too, and I’m going to talk about all of it, but how expensive it is to be a disabled person and how privileged I am to be in a position to be able to pay for the things that I need. Because for example, wheelchairs and scooters and mobility devices aren’t always covered by insurance. And so if it’s not, that’s an expense, right? So the scooter that I’ve been using that people have seen me around at word camps, et cetera, I got that on Facebook Marketplace, it was used. I think I paid 200, $250 for it.

I have got my money’s worth out of that thing for sure, but I need something that’s a little more robust. It doesn’t like to do hills, things like that. So I’m actually looking to purchase a new scooter soon, and I don’t want to just get another used one on Facebook marketplace because it’ll do what it does. But to buy a new one is like three, four, $5,000. They could be up to $15,000. Now, I’m not going to buy a $15,000 scooter, but it’s going to be several thousand dollars and I have the money. I have some money from my dad’s estate, that kind of thing. I’m not asking for handouts, but I’m just putting it out there that it is an expense that people don’t always think about. Everybody assumes that insurance is going to cover everything, and that isn’t always the case. My cane broke recently and I had to buy a new cane.

Is a cane expensive? No, but it’s 20 bucks, another 20 bucks through Amazon, those kinds of things. And I can’t just go grocery shopping by myself because I need to grocery shop seated. Then I need to get the groceries from the cart into the car, from the car into my house and put away, and that’s not something I’m able to do. So thank goodness that we have all these things like Instacart where I can order groceries online. By the way, there’s no impulse buying when you order your groceries online, but order my groceries online. And there’s an upcharge always, right? So the same… what the price is on the shelf is not what the price is in Instacart. And then there’s the delivery fee, and then there’s a tip. So I’m not going to be the person that doesn’t tip somebody for doing my groceries.

Of course I am, and I only order my groceries maybe every three to four weeks. So it’s a big grocery order. The tip is a minimum 50 bucks. So I’m paying somebody else to do my grocery shopping for me, which other able-bodied people, they could do that for convenience, but they don’t have to. So there’s more fees that I’m paying as a disabled person. I’m a plus size person. So if I want to fly on most airlines, I either have to spill over into the seat next to me and be an inconvenience to both me and the person next to me or purchase two seats or upgrade to a higher level. That again, is another expense. And so all of the things that come with being a disabled person are inherently more expensive. And I pay somebody to clean my house because I can’t get down on my hands and knees.

I can’t sweep and vacuum and some of those other things. And so I am now paying somebody every other week to come in and clean my house, and that’s another expense. So being disabled is not an inexpensive venture, and not everybody is in a privileged position to have the kind of job that I do to be able to afford those things. So I just wanted to kind of bring that out. And then I got to thinking, and we did talk a little bit, we try not to talk too much before the show. I think people know that because we want our conversations to be not the second time we’ve had them, but I got to thinking that it’s not just disabled people that have this kind of taxation on them for doing that. And so you brought up a couple other things that we could dive into as well, but I did want to bring that up as a topic. What do you think?

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah, totally. And I want to preface this conversation too, because I know where you’re coming from and I can reach the point that we’re trying to make, and I feel like some other people might not be able to. This is not us sitting and complaining to be like, “Oh, it’s so expensive to be a minority. It’s so expensive to be underrepresented. Please feel bad for us, blah, blah, blah.” What we’re trying to explain is that there are barriers for certain people that you may not know about because you’re not in that position. And those barriers can create additional challenges. So when Michelle says it costs to be disabled, that also means that to make an assumption about if Michelle says, “Oh, I was going to go do that thing, but I can’t afford to,” that doesn’t mean that, oh, Michelle doesn’t… that’s not a space for you to make a judgment about how Michelle decides to spend her money or how much she’s paid.

That is an opportunity for you to acknowledge that there’s a challenge here, right? It’s an opportunity for you to acknowledge that in a lot of the cases that we’re going to talk about, the world has been built intentionally to make things more difficult for people for various reasons. A lot of this is sort of pointing out injustices of, well, why is it more expensive? That’s what I want to get down to, and that’s what I want people to come away with is why is it this way? Why does it have to be this way? How can I as somebody who doesn’t deal with this, is there a way that I can help things to not be this way for other people? So I wanted to preface by saying that because I think a lot of people might come at this the wrong way, and I don’t want-

Michelle Frechette:

No, for sure. I mostly think about it as a insight into other people’s lives, and it’s easier to have an understanding about what other people experience in their lives if somebody has allowed you to glimpse into some of those things. And that’s kind of the reason I bring it up for sure.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah. And when we talk about… we’ve talked a lot before about underrepresented people having a higher emotional and mental tax on them a lot of the time. A lot of times we are more tired, we are just more run down. We don’t have the energy, we don’t have the spoons to jump through all of the hoops that people might set up for us when we’re talking about things like hiring or filling out applications or all these things. And part of that is you’re thinking about all of these other challenges that you have to deal with of like, “Well, I have to make sure I have enough money to do the things that I need to do,” because you said this before, and I think it bears reiterating, the things that we’re talking about, these aren’t choices, right?

Michelle Frechette:

No.

Allie Nimmons:

When Michelle started talking about this before we started talking, before we started recording rather, I immediately thought about what people call the pink tax. And it’s the idea that things out in the world that women need to buy that have “male equivalents” are typically more expensive. And I think about razors, I think about hygiene products. I mean, the fact that essential things like pads and tampons and other feminine products are so expensive and so heavily taxed and so marked up, even though those aren’t optional, those aren’t for fun. They’re not luxury items. They are healthcare. They are medically like necessary. You can get massively serious infections and get really sick if you’re not taking care of things in that way. So the fact that those things that are targeted at women are so much… Even pens.

I remember a couple of years ago there was that whole big meme about Bic was selling pink pens for more money for women that were more expensive and they were smaller. That was a selling point as they were smaller for our little feminine lady hands. So it’s like you’re trying to charge me more money for a product that is less of a product. You use less material to make this, but because it’s pink, you’re charging me 5% more or whatever. So on average, in a lot of these ways, women have to spend more money on the things that they need than men do, or sometimes the things that they want than men do. And that’s ridiculous. And I’m sure there are all sorts of theories, marketing wise, and why companies decide to do this. It makes me wonder if in a lot of cases, and this is an assumption, if in a lot of cases, maybe the woman in the family is the one going out and doing the shopping, and so if she sees the things that appeal to her, she might grab that thing instead of whatever the other thing is.

All I know is I buy men’s razors because they work better and they’re cheaper.

Michelle Frechette:

And they work. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:

And they work, right? I also think about how in America, I can really only speak for this country, it is more expensive to be black. And I found an article, I’ll put it in our show notes on a website called the internationalmonetaryfund.org, which I’d never heard of this website before, but it’s really interesting. And I have an article where they talk about the cost of racism over the course of the history of this country and how so many very specific decisions were made and are still being made in order to minimize the amount of wealth and generational wealth in particular that black Americans can accumulate.

So for example, the benefits of the post-World War II GI Bill were mostly denied to black people in order to enforce racial segregation. Redlining, which is a concept where basically federal housing administration had a policy that refused to insure mortgages to black neighborhoods. So basically, for a long time, if you’re a black, you just could not buy a house, and it shut black Americans out of living in a lot of the more common areas where wealthy people lived. So even if you were a wealthy black American, you just could not, they wouldn’t accept your application for a mortgage. And a lot of these things play into the black white wealth gap that exists. I mean, there are things like education, the fact that black children were intentionally poorly educated and put into worser schools. And so they have fewer things like financial literacy to be able to build their own wealth. And according to this article, there was a report in 2019 that revealed that on average black families have 10 times less wealth than the average white family.

And to have less wealth means a lot of things, right? Part of what that means, and I read this recently, I was telling Michelle about it before, I read recently about the concept of it is more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, which kind of doesn’t make sense on its face. But the example that they used, which really helped me to understand it, is that if you do manual labor for your job and for your job, you need really good boots. Maybe a really, really good pair of work boots costs $100, and you don’t have $100 to spare, you don’t make a lot of money, you don’t have generational wealth, you don’t have that money to spare. So you have to buy $25 boots, which will get you to where you have to go.

But in a couple of months, those boots fall apart. So now you have to buy another pair of boots. So if that $100 pair of boots could have lasted you a good two, three years, that means that in that two or three years, you spent $100 on boots, for the poor person who has to spend $100 a year on boots.

There’s a disparity there in how much you have to spend, which is a fascinating financial concept to me that I never thought about before. And I don’t have any numbers in front of me, but typically on average, underrepresented people, disabled people, women, people of color, queer people make less money. We’re paid less. We are often not hired as frequently at really well paying companies or well paying jobs. We have a harder time finding work, so we spend more time unemployed, ranking up debt, ranking up overdraft fees, and so on. And so when you look at it from that kind of macro lens, unfortunately, there is a correlation between being poorer and being underrepresented, even though those two things are not… being underrepresented doesn’t automatically mean you are poor.

Michelle Frechette:

But there is a correlation in a lot of respects.

Allie Nimmons:

There is a correlation in a lot of respects, and it is more expensive to be poor.

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah. Here’s the other thing. So good food, as in healthy food is more expensive typically as well. So if somebody has to make their money stretch for food, they’re not buying as… in order to buy more food, they have to buy lower quality, less healthy food, which means that then they’re also not eating healthy for themselves. So it will over time cause more health issues, which then brings also more expenses, especially if they’re in low paying jobs without health insurance, which is why we see people from lower economic areas in the emergency rooms because they can’t afford to go to a doctor, and emergency rooms aren’t allowed to turn you away. So the whole system is broken in so many ways.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette:

It just really is.

Allie Nimmons:

The medical part of things is a whole other side. I mean, I grew up… This is, I find it funny now, and if you’re listening, you are allowed to laugh even though sometimes I tell people this and they’re like, “Ooh,” when I was young, whenever my mom and I moved somewhere new, which we moved a fair amount when I was a kid, whenever we moved somewhere, because as a child, we never had health insurance. I didn’t go to regular doctor’s appointments unless something was really wrong. I would go to the dentist. I had regular dentist appointments, but I wasn’t getting checkups or whatever.

So every time we moved somewhere new, my mom would sit me down and she would say, “Okay, you cannot get sick and you cannot get hurt because mommy doesn’t know where the hospital is in this neighborhood. So if you get sick or you get hurt, I’m not going to know where to take you.” And my little six year old brain, I’m like, “Oh my God, okay. I have to be really careful.” And that was her way of trying to not necessarily make it fun, but not scare me necessarily, and not have to tell me, “Hey, I can’t afford if you get sick.” That’s kind of heavy for a child. But I always knew that we didn’t have that kind of access. And in her mind, she was like, “If you break your leg, I will be in debt forever. So you cannot do that.” Right? So I was a very careful, I’m going to sit inside and read a book sort of a kid rather than I’m going to go outside and ride my bike sort of a kid because I was scared.

Michelle Frechette:

Right. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:

So all of these things compound and they affect, and I mean, there’s a long history in America with black people and the medical community. It is a thing that black people are afraid to go to the doctor. There’s an inherent sort of mistrust of western medicine. It’s very strange. And we could do a whole podcast just on that, but you’re right. That means that over time things compound.

And so instead of… I had a friend recently who, he’s in his sixties, and people had been telling him for a really long time that they probably thought he was pre-diabetic and that he should go to the doctor. And he always had all kinds of reasons for not wanting to go. And he recently ended up in the hospital and now can’t really take care of himself anymore because the diabetes got to such a point that it has completely ravaged his body. And so much of that sort of a thing, because now it’s like he has to find all this money to take care of himself, whereas you’d like to think that if he had had money for preemptive measures, he now wouldn’t be in this situation. And it’s hard to talk about this stuff because it’s not 100%, we can’t look at it and say, “Every single black person experiences this,” or, “Every single disabled person experiences this,” but the correlations and the patterns are so strong and are very uncomfortable to talk about. People don’t like talking about it. And so it doesn’t really get fixed or addressed, or…

Michelle Frechette:

I think a lot of people, especially white people won’t know this. I just sent you a link that we can include later, but it was, I believe, well into the 1970s, that doctors, and there are still some doctors that think that black people experience pain differently or don’t experience pain compared to white people. This is a Harvard review that I just sent you, that there were beliefs that black people had thicker skin, so it didn’t hurt as much that because their skin was darker, they couldn’t burn, those kinds of things. I remember when my daughter was little, the first time she got a sunburn, she had not grown up getting sunburned like I did. She came to be like seven years old, and she’s like, “Why does my skin hurt?” And I was a good mom, I put sunscreen on her, but kids sweat it off and they swim. So just to be fair, don’t come at me. But I knew enough to put-

Allie Nimmons:

Little white kids get sunburns all the time.

Michelle Frechette:

Right. But I did put sunscreen on her. I was not one of those people that thought, “Oh, she can’t burn.” But she was just dumbfounded. And I was like, it’s taken her this long to get sunburned. I can understand to some degree. I’m not justifying why some people would think, “Well, you have more melanin, so you can’t get sunburned, so therefore maybe you don’t get burned at all.” I’m not saying I agree with it, but I can understand sometimes where some of those notions would come from considering it took her seven years to ever get a sunburn. But the fact that medical professionals felt that way and believed that way, and that’s why we have… and that’s one of the reasons, there’s so many reasons. There’s so much more maternity mortality for black women than it is for white women. More black women die in childbirth than white women, and it’s because of this differential in how we treat people of different ethnicities and of different abilities and different underrepresented statuses, and there is so much taxation.

It’s not just what money I pay a person to go do my grocery shopping for me through Instacart. It’s a whole systemic thing that permeates so many different levels of… and so many different groups and underrepresented groups that I think that people who have privilege don’t ever even think about. And I just really wanted to bring up the topic today just to like I want it on people’s radar. I want people to think about things like that, that when you ask somebody to do something, are you asking them to do it from your position of privilege expecting that they have the same tools and resources that you do? Or maybe to think about the fact that not everybody has that same set of tools and resources that you do because you are in a better place of privilege than they might be? It doesn’t mean they’re not capable, but it also doesn’t mean that they have all the tools and resources to accomplish it.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah, it’s definitely something to think about in so many aspects of our lives. I remember being in high school, and I went to a magnet school that was situated, happened to be situated in a very low income, predominantly black community. And so it was strange because the surrounding areas and the surrounding schools were worse schools, higher black population. My school, a lot of my classmates would drive 40 minutes every day from the white part of town, better part of town to come to this magnet school.

And so I remember being in high school and all of my friends that came from Weston would after school on the weekends, they would want to go out and go to the mall or go to the movies or whatever, and there was always a section of have and have nots. And it was always very visually clear of who had and who had not. And it’s like I think about potentially being a parent in the future, and we talk a lot on this podcast about professional topics, work topics, how things apply to the workplace and so on. But this is such a universal thing that it applies to kids.

I think about potentially having kids in the future and having to deal with this for them if they are dark skinned or if they’re a girl or if they are disabled, having to explain to them that, “Yeah, your life is going to cost a little bit more. And it’s just something that you’re going to have to understand, and hopefully other people will have some understanding that, or you might just have to explain to your friends in high school why you can’t afford to go to the movies every single weekend.”

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Allie Nimmons:

It’s such a strange part of life.

Michelle Frechette:

For sure is. For sure is. So I guess the whole point is not, I don’t want anybody feel guilty. It’s not about that. It’s not about feeling pity or sorrow for other people. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me just because I have to be a little more creative in the way that I get things done. It’s just about raising awareness and other people thinking about what they ask of others, and making sure that they kind of check their privilege at the door to make sure that what they’re asking from others is something that they have the resources to do.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah. Ooh, I was thinking today about the whole I don’t see race thing.

Michelle Frechette:

Oh, yeah, I remember that conversation. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:

And this is another reason why deciding to not see race is harmful, because you’re choosing to overlook one of the many challenges that… and I mean the whole I don’t see race can account for, I don’t see gender, I don’t see ability, I don’t see whatever. I just see the person and it’s like, “Well, that person has a lot of challenges, and you should acknowledge those challenges and act accordingly.”

Michelle Frechette:

Absolutely. 100%.

Allie Nimmons:

Totally. Totally. This was a really good topic. Thank you for the idea.

Michelle Frechette:

My pleasure. Well, I was listening to our most recent webinar and it was on disability, and so I was listening to that yesterday when we published it and thinking about some of the things that people brought up there and the needs that they have, which got me thinking about needs in my own life, which kind of brought it all full circle to today. So if you haven’t checked that out yet, go to our website and give that webinar a listen, and it’s the one with Understanding People with Disabilities in Technology.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:

I just butchered the name, but you’ll find it.

Allie Nimmons:

Yeah, you’ll find it. Came out yesterday. It’s episode two. I’ll put that in the show notes as well for a quick link.

Michelle Frechette:

Awesome.

Allie Nimmons:

But yeah, thank you so much for listening.

Michelle Frechette:

Yeah. We’ll see ya.

Allie Nimmons:

It’s been another great week, and we’ll see you next week.

Michelle Frechette:

Bye.

Allie Nimmons:

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