How Intersecting Identities Shape Your Personal Brand
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Description
Have you ever felt like parts of your identity are misunderstood or minimized? When it comes to personal branding, the impact of intersecting identities on how we’re perceived in our careers is often overlooked. As we celebrate Women’s History Month, it’s crucial to acknowledge the layers that shape who we are people, and how those layers influence our visibility, leadership, and professional growth.
In this episode of Branding Room Only, I break down the difference between intersecting identities and intersectionality, challenge the reality of limited perceptions, and explore the struggle of balancing authenticity with code-switching. Plus, I share actionable strategies to help you own your authentic personal brand fully in every space.
Chapters
1:00 – The difference between intersecting identities and intersectionality
2:23 – Perception vs. reality: How others define your personal brand
5:03 – The challenge of balancing code-switching with authenticity
6:12 – How this balancing act affects celebrations like Women’s History Month
9:20 – Strategies to own and leverage your intersecting identities in personal branding
Mentioned In How Intersecting Identities Shape Your Personal Brand
How to Assemble and Leverage Your Personal Board of Directors
Personal Branding Strategy Sessions
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Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.
PGE Consulting Group LLC is dedicated to providing a practical hybrid of professional development training and diversity solutions. From speaking to consulting to programming and more, all services and resources are carefully tailored for each partner. Paula Edgar’s distinct expertise helps engage attendees and create lasting change for her clients.
To learn more about Paula and her services, go to www.paulaedgar.com or contact her at info@paulaedgar.com, and follow Paula Edgar and the PGE Consulting Group LLC on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Welcome to The Branding Room Only Podcast where we share career stories, strategies, and lessons learned on how industry leaders and influencers have built their personal brands. Now, let's get started with the show.
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Branding Room Only, the podcast where we talk about all things personal branding, authenticity, and visibility. I'm your host Paula Edgar and today we're diving into a topic that's always present but feels especially front and centered during Women's History Month. That's intersecting identities and how they impact your personal brand.
As a Black woman, I think about my identity and how others perceive it pretty much every day. When we think about personal branding, we often focus on skills, visibility, and strategy. But what about the lens through which we see the world, and how the world sees us in return? That’s what we are going to unpack in today’s episode.
But before we dive deeper, I want to clarify something that’s important. There’s a difference between having intersecting identities and the concept of intersectionality. Intersecting identities means that each of us has multiple aspects of who we are, our race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, et cetera, that shape our experiences. These identities don't exist in isolation. They overlap and influence how we move through the world.
Intersectionality, on the other hand, is a framework developed by legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, to explain how different forms of discrimination interact to create compounded barriers. For example, being a Black woman doesn't mean I experience racism and sexism separately. It means that I experience a specific form of discrimination that is different from what white women or Black men face.
That's why we see disparities in leadership, pay, and representation for Black women that are unique to the way that racism and sexism intersect. While everyone has intersecting identities, not everyone experiences intersectionality as a form of compounded oppression/discrimination.
Now we have that down. When we talk about personal branding, this distinction matters. It's not just about how we see ourselves, but about how the world interacts with us based on our identities, and that's what we'll explore next.
First I'm going to talk about perception versus reality, like thinking about how others define your brand. Personal branding isn't just what we put out into the world, it's how people interpret it. Some people think it's even more about how people interpret it.
Sometimes those interpretations don't align with the full scope of who we are or what we do. I've seen this play out in my own career. For example, for the majority of my time as a keynote speaker and consultant, I've delivered keynotes and presentations on both professional development and diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI topics.
These topics have always been a part of my work. But over the years, I noticed something interesting. People tended to assume that my focus was primarily or even exclusively on DEI. Let me be clear. I'm proud to do the work that supports diversity and equity inclusion, it's important, it's meaningful, and it is again necessary.
I still often conduct sessions on inclusive leadership, on conscious bias and I frequently support ERGs and affinity groups, including many women's initiatives with my clients. But if you look at the last three or four years of my client engagements, in fact, the majority of my work has actually been focused more generally on professional development, especially my favorite topic, you guessed it, personal branding, but I also speak on relationship building, giving and receiving feedback, strategic self-promotion, goal setting, and career development generally.
Here's the thing, none of those topics are inherently about diversity. They are fundamental essential skills that everyone needs. But because I'm a Black woman, I think people assume that my expertise must be primarily in diversity work. That's the reality of intersecting identities. People project their own expectations onto you. Sometimes those projections limit how they see your expertise.
Just to be clear, here's the thing, I don't separate DEI from my work. If you've been on my website or heard me speak, you know I always say this, I present everything through the lens of diversity, equity, and especially of inclusion. Because when we talk about things like personal branding, networking, or feedback, we should think expansively about how those things play out across different identities.
Let's be honest, those are what people call soft skills, but they're really the concrete necessary skills that we need to succeed within our workplaces and our careers. There is nothing soft about knowing how to advocate for yourself, build relationships, or position yourself for leadership.
Let's talk about code-switching and authenticity, the balancing act that many people have to navigate. Let's talk about this. Many of us have mastered the art of shifting how we present ourselves depending on the space that we're in. I think it's a survival skill.
But here's the challenge. How do you create a brand that's consistent when different parts of your identity are received differently in different spaces? For Black women especially, there's often pressure to be “palatable” to find that just right balance of being confident, but not too aggressive, of advocating for yourself, but not doing too much.
But your brand should never be about shrinking—and I know mine isn't—it should be about fully showing up, even when people's expectations and assumptions don't match the reality. This is important because people ask me about the concept of authenticity all the time.
I think that you should never be inauthentic, but you absolutely have to be thoughtful about context and situations as you decide just how much you want to be in different spaces. But again, I'm not a fan of shrinking and I don't think especially women should. Let's now talk about how this impacts Women's History Month and some of the tensions that can be around celebration of this commemoration.
Every March, as many of you know, we celebrate the contributions of women throughout history. But let's be real, not all women experience progress equally. While we celebrate trailblazers always, we have to also acknowledge that narratives often center white women's achievements and overlook or downplay the unique struggles and successes of Black women, Indigenous women, Latinas, women from LGBTQ+ community, and others whose experiences aren't always reflected in mainstream conversations about gender equality.
This is something that I have seen firsthand in my work as a speaker and consultant. I frequently work, like I said, with women's initiatives and employee research groups at ERGs across different organizations and support their strategies, delivering workshops on everything from leadership development to, again, personal branding.
But often one of the key challenges that I hear about is complaints about a lack of engagement from women of color. Many women's initiatives unintentionally end up becoming and being perceived as centering the experiences of white straight women who are either mothers or intend to become mothers.
While those experiences are absolutely valid, they do not represent the full spectrum of womanhood. We are talking about intersecting identity. What about women who are single, women who are gay, women of color who are navigating both racial and gendered experiences, women who don't want or can't have children, women with disabilities, women from working-class backgrounds, women across the spectrum when it comes to socioeconomic experiences?
All of those identities shape how we experience the workplace, leadership, personal branding, and career success generally. Yet, while initiatives don't intentionally, hopefully, when they don't broaden the lens and think more about inclusion, many women don't feel seen or motivated to engage. That's just true.
As we think about how to convene to support and celebrate women during Women's History Month and all the time, we should be intentional about recognizing the full experiences of womanhood, not just one dominant narrative.
This circles back to branding always because just as workplaces struggle with inclusivity, individuals face the challenge of navigating who gets visibility, whose leadership is recognized, and whose contributions are amplified, especially that last part.
Women's History Month should be about all of us, but to truly live up to that promise, we need to ensure that every woman across identities, across industries, across experiences, sees herself reflected and valued in the spaces that she occupies. Of course, I'm never going to leave you without thinking about strategies for owning your brand and all of its intersections.
How do we own and leverage our intersecting identities in personal branding? Here are a few things that I've learned. One is to embrace the full picture. Your brand isn't just your job title or your LinkedIn profile. It's your lived experiences. It's your perspective and it's how you bring all of your authentic self into the work that you do.
Next is being selective about your energy, and this is big especially now in the environment that we're in. Not every space is designed to honor your full identity. This is why it's important to build intentional networks and create spaces that affirm and uplift you. We're going to reflect back to the podcast episode I did on your personal board of directors, such an important strategy for us to have so that we can always feel as if we have a squad to rely on.
Next is telling your own story. If you don't define your brand, and I have said this over and over again, the world will define it for you. What does my mother always say? My mother always said, “You should be the wind and not the leaf.” Be proactive, use your voice, share your experiences, and most importantly, advocate for yourself and for others. Speaking of others, celebrate and support others. Your brand is not just about you, it's about community.
Uplifting other women, especially those from historically excluded backgrounds, strengthens us all. We think about active allyship and engagement and that's really it. How do we support the experiences of other women in our networks, in our workplaces, in our lives generally?
So in closing, here is my challenge to you. Take a moment to reflect on your own intersecting identities—and we all have them—how have they shaped your brand? And think about this, are you showing up fully or are you minimizing aspects of who you are to be “palatable” in the spaces that you occupy?
I hope the answer is no, but no matter what, I want to hear from you. Send me a message on LinkedIn, send me an email to info@paulaedgar.com and definitely please share this episode and tag me with your thoughts.
If this resonated with you, make sure that you are subscribed to Branding Room Only and tell a friend to tell a friend so you never miss an episode. Until next time, my friends, stay firm in your identities, own your power, and keep on building your brand on your terms. Stand by your brand, y'all. Until next time, bye.
