Recognising and Addressing Microaggressions at Work

"Where are you really from?" "You're so articulate." "Can I touch your hair?" Individually, each of these lands as a small, often well-meant comment. Repeated weekly, from different colleagues, over years of a career, they add up to something else entirely. Microaggressions are the everyday, often unintentional slights that communicate a subtle message about someone's belonging — and finance teams, with their long hours, tight-knit engagement teams and client-facing pressure, are not immune to them.

What Is a Microaggression?

The term, coined in the 1970s by psychiatrist Chester Pierce and popularised in workplace contexts by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, describes brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to members of marginalised groups — based on race, gender, disability, sexuality, religion or other characteristics — often without the speaker intending any harm. Researchers typically group them into three categories: microassaults (deliberate, though often dismissed as "just a joke"), microinsults (unintentional comments that demean, such as assuming someone in a junior-looking role can't be the partner), and microinvalidations (comments that dismiss someone's experience, such as "I don't see race, I just see people").

What This Looks Like in a Finance Team

A few patterns show up repeatedly in accounting and finance workplaces:

• Assumed seniority. A client or colleague addresses the most senior-looking person in the room first, bypassing the actual engagement lead if she doesn't fit the expected profile.
• Name mispronunciation left uncorrected. A colleague's name gets consistently mispronounced or shortened to something "easier," without anyone checking whether that's welcome.
• "Compliments" that other — being told "you're so well-spoken" or "you don't seem like a typical accountant," which implies surprise at competence.
• Being asked to speak for a whole group — "what do people from your background think about this policy?" — placing an unfair representative burden on one person.
• Interruption patterns. In meetings, some voices get talked over or credited later to someone else who repeats the same point — a pattern that research on workplace meetings has found disproportionately affects women and junior staff.

Why They're Easy to Dismiss — and Why That's the Problem

Because each individual incident is small, it's easy for both the person experiencing it and bystanders to talk themselves out of raising it: "it wasn't a big deal," "they probably didn't mean it," "I don't want to make things awkward." That's exactly what makes microaggressions corrosive over time — the cumulative effect of dozens of small incidents is well documented in occupational psychology research as contributing to disengagement, higher attrition and lower psychological safety, even where no single incident would meet the bar for a formal complaint.

A Practical Framework for Addressing Microaggressions

1. Name it in the moment, briefly. A short, non-confrontational response — "what did you mean by that?" or "I don't think that landed the way you intended" — is often more effective than either silence or a formal escalation, and gives the other person a chance to self-correct.
2. Build in a bystander habit. Colleagues who witness a microaggression and check in afterward with the person affected ("I noticed that comment earlier — are you okay?") measurably reduce the isolating effect, even when they didn't intervene at the time.
3. Separate intent from impact in team norms. Make it an explicit team expectation that "I didn't mean it that way" is a starting point for the conversation, not the end of it.
4. Give managers a script. Untrained managers often freeze when a microaggression happens in front of them. A short, rehearsed response ("let's park that and come back to it after the meeting") keeps the room moving without letting the comment pass unaddressed.

Worked Example: A Client Meeting

A senior manager leading an audit engagement is repeatedly addressed as "the assistant" by a client contact, while a junior male colleague in the room is assumed to be leading. Rather than letting it slide to avoid friction with the client, the engagement partner — who noticed the pattern across two meetings — privately and briefly corrects the client afterwards ("just to flag, [name] is leading this engagement") and separately checks in with the senior manager. No confrontation happens in the room; the correction happens through a quiet, consistent word from someone with standing to say it, and it's followed up rather than left as a one-off.

Common Pitfalls

Two things routinely go wrong. First, treating every comment as equally serious — a heavy-handed formal process for a genuinely careless but minor remark can discourage people from raising anything at all, for fear of triggering something disproportionate. Second, putting the entire burden of addressing microaggressions on the person experiencing them, rather than building bystander responsibility into the team — the load should not fall solely on whoever is on the receiving end.

Building This Into Team Practice

The most effective teams normalise a light-touch, in-the-moment response as a shared habit rather than reserving it for formal HR processes — supported by clear escalation paths for anything that does cross into harassment or is part of a repeated pattern.

Why This Belongs in a Structured CPD Programme

Professional competence increasingly includes the interpersonal judgement to manage a diverse client base and team — and structured CPD gives professionals a documented, verifiable way to demonstrate they're actively developing that judgement, rather than picking it up informally and unevenly across a career.

How This Fits Into a Broader Compliance Programme

Left unaddressed, a pattern of microaggressions can escalate into conduct that meets the legal threshold for harassment under the UK Equality Act 2010 or Ireland's Employment Equality Acts, exposing firms to tribunal risk and reputational damage well beyond the original comment. Firms that can show a documented, consistently applied response — training, a bystander protocol, a clear escalation path — are in a materially stronger position if a pattern is later challenged than firms with no record of having addressed it at all.

FAQ

Is a single microaggression grounds for a formal complaint?
It can be, depending on severity and context, but most workplace guidance treats a single ambiguous comment as an opportunity for informal correction first, with formal process reserved for repeated or severe incidents.

How is a microaggression different from harassment?
Harassment is a legal term requiring unwanted conduct related to a protected characteristic that violates dignity or creates a hostile environment; many microaggressions fall short of that legal bar individually, but a repeated pattern can cross into it.

What should a bystander actually say?
Simple and brief works best — naming what was said, asking a genuine clarifying question, or checking in privately afterwards, rather than a lengthy public confrontation.

For more on building an inclusive finance team, see our guide to creating a diverse and inclusive finance team and our piece on unconscious bias in the workplace. Build these skills further with Learnsignal's CPD courses.