Complex Careers, Convenient Double Standard

The Professional World Loves a Multi-Hyphenate. Until It Doesn’t.

For the past 6 months, I have been navigating a professional impasse.

After nearly 20 years of consistent career growth in the media industry and strategically leaving companies for better opportunities, for the first time, I quit a job without having another one.

Since then, I have been doing what many experienced professionals do: keeping one foot in the job market while simultaneously consulting and building my own business. I am working. I am advising. I am creating. And like many professionals in this position, I've had to confront one of the most frustrating decisions in modern career management: how to present myself on my resume, on LinkedIn and to the market.

For most people, that's simply a formatting question. For Black women, it's a complex dilemma.

For most people, that's simply a formatting question. For Black women, it's a complex dilemma.

The Impasse

The reality is I am looking for the right corporate opportunity. I am also consulting while building a business. These are not contradictions. They are the natural expression of a professional with years of experience, a diverse skill set, and multiple streams of value to offer.

But presenting both authentically risks undermining each when you don’t look like most professionals in the corporate world. Recruiters see the business and start asking, is she fully committed? Is she a flight risk? Could this be a conflict of interest? While potential clients seeking my business credibility wonder, is she just a freelancer? Is this a side hustle? How can her business be successful if she’s doing both?

In trying to show the full scope of who I am professionally, I risk becoming illegible to some.

A colleague of mine has navigated this exact same reality. He has a full-time job, a consulting practice, and is the founder and operator of other businesses. An ardent, multi-hyphenated disruptor! He is celebrated as the embodiment of the modern portfolio career. Any company and client would be lucky to work with him. His complexity is his superpower! He is a white man.

His complexity is his superpower! He is a white man.

That same colleague shared a story about a Black woman he knew who had built a similar career. Corporate role, consulting work, and running her own business. Her response to “the rub?”: Deactivate her LinkedIn account entirely. When he told me, he was genuinely puzzled by her decision. He couldn't understand why she would limit her visibility and potential opportunities that way. She understood exactly what she was doing. So did I.

The Perception Tax

There is a specific perception tax levied on Black women who dare to be more than one thing.

When we position ourselves as both corporate professionals and entrepreneurs, we are not seen as industrious. We are seen as confused or lacking focus. We are labeled as "jacks of all trades, masters of none." Our businesses are "little” side hustles, not serious ventures. And our corporate experience? Viewed as evidence that we haven't fully committed. Neither identity is taken seriously. Both are diminished.

The "portfolio career” is becoming one of the most embraced concepts in the modern professional landscape. But like so many embraced concepts, it was built with a specific person in mind. The behavior that reads as dynamic and entrepreneurial in one body reads as scattered and unfocused in another. That is not a coincidence. It is a double standard.

The behavior that reads as dynamic and entrepreneurial in one body reads as scattered and unfocused in another. 

The Experiment

In 2025, a Black woman named Aliyah Jones put a number on that reality.

After spending months applying for roles and getting nowhere, Jones decided to test what she already suspected. She created the alternate profile of Emily Osborne. Same resume, same qualifications, same experience. But with a new name and a photo of a white woman. She called it Corporate Catfish, and it didn’t (and sadly did) disappoint.

As Emily Osborne, she was seen. She got interviews. Recruiters reached out to her proactively. This was not shocking to Black women. It was confirmation of what we have always known and what the research has consistently backed up. Studies have shown that applicants with distinctively white-sounding names receive significantly more callbacks. Proving the name on the paper is doing more work than the paper itself.

What Jones's experiment really exposes is that bias shows up way before hiring decisions are made. It shows up the minute we publish to our LinkedIn page, or we click the submit button on a job application. All pointing to how our professional narratives are read, interpreted, and whether they are valued at all.

What Is Rewarded

The professional world rewards legibility. The cleaner the story (one industry, linear trajectory, progression of titles, no career gaps), the more “hirable” you are. That is the path, profile and resume the algorithm, recruiters, and society are designed to recognize as credible. Optimal.

But Black women's careers have rarely been linear. Not because of lack of focus or ambition, but because the institutions we have entered were not designed to retain us, promote us, or invest in us equally. We have been passed over, underpaid, and pushed out. We build our own things not only out of purpose and passion, but also out of necessity.

Now, the evidence of that resilience, the pivots, the parallel tracks, the businesses we built on the side while still showing up and outperforming in the room, is being used against us. We are penalized for adapting to a professional landscape that was never optimized for our success.

We are penalized for adapting to a professional landscape that was never optimized for our success.

The Question That Has to Be Asked

Why is it that the same professional profile, entrepreneurial, consulting, open to new opportunities, is a badge of honor on one person and a source of doubt on another?

Why are Black women asked to choose between being seen as a serious entrepreneur and being seen as a serious employee, a choice that others are never asked to make? And why does the burden of proof rest entirely on us?

Why must we strategize, edit and reframe our professional identities to be seen as credible, while others walk through the door and are granted credibility by default.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions I sit with every time I open LinkedIn and try to figure out how to tell my story without losing the audience before I've had a chance to be heard.

The Cost of Contorting

There is something quietly exhausting about being forced to decide which part of yourself to make visible. Not because you are ashamed of any of it, but because you have learned, through experience, through data, through the stories of women like Aliyah Jones and the Black woman who simply logged off, that showing all of it can cost you.

But we as Black women do what we always do, we contort. We shrink the business, so we don't scare off recruiters. We downplay the corporate roles, so clients won't question our commitment. We adjust the language, the framing, the headline. All of it aimed at finding the sweet spot where we are palatable enough to be considered.

When some of us decide contorting isn't worth it, we log off. We deactivate. We choose to be invisible rather than be misread. That, too, is a rational response to an irrational system.

The industry will continue to talk about representation, inclusion, and the value of diverse talent. But until the marketplace is willing to examine how it perceives Black women who show up as the full, multidimensional professionals we are, the conversation will remain exactly that. A conversation.

Curize Richards is a founder, executive, marketer, creative strategist and educator, examining how culture transforms modern media.