The Identity Tax
Earlier today, I spoke with a young lawyer.
Smart. Driven. Early in his career and already navigating something that no textbook or university paper ever covered.
He's from an ethnic minority background, stepping into an industry predominantly made up of people who don't share his culture, his upbringing or his way of moving through the world. The conversations feel different. The banter lands differently. And then there's the drinking culture - the Friday night rounds that function as the unofficial social infrastructure of the profession. The place where relationships get built, where names get remembered, where the informal currency of belonging gets exchanged.
He doesn't drink. So he doesn't go. And in not going, he misses something.
Not the drinks. The connection. The access. The relationships that form in those spaces and quietly determine whose name comes up when an opportunity arises.
He wasn't complaining. He was just naming it honestly for what it is.
And I quipped: "And they told you: ‘Get the degree and all the doors will open.’ Right?"
We both laughed. Because we both knew exactly what that meant.
The degree did open doors. Nobody lied about that part. What they forgot to mention was what was waiting on the other side.
The promise and the gap
For a generation of professionals from minority backgrounds - ethnic, cultural, faith-based or simply different from the dominant norm - the script went something like this: work hard, get qualified, earn your place and the rest will follow.
Meritocracy. The level playing field.
There's enough truth in it to keep the script alive.
But there's a gap between the door opening and actually feeling at home in the room. Between access and belonging. Between being present and being valued for exactly who you are.
That gap is where so many capable, qualified, hardworking people quietly get stuck. Not because they lack skill or ambition. But because the room wasn't designed with them in mind - and nobody warned them that navigating it would require a daily negotiation with their own identity.
The identity tax
It rarely announces itself as one big dramatic moment.
It's much smaller than that. A thousand micro-decisions, accumulated quietly over time.
Do I correct the mispronunciation of my name… again? Do I mention my dietary requirements or just quietly decline and hope no one makes it a thing? Do I bring my full perspective into this meeting or read the room and dial it back? Do I explain my cultural obligations or just say I'm unavailable and leave it at that?
None of these feel significant on their own. But they compound. The energy spent managing how much of yourself to bring into a space - that's the tax. Paid invisibly, in instalments nobody else sees on the ledger.
And here's what makes it particularly exhausting: it's almost impossible to name without feeling like you're making a fuss. Each moment seems too minor. So most people don't name it. They just carry it.
This isn't only a faith thing. It isn't only an ethnicity thing. It's the experience of anyone who has ever walked into a professional space and quietly calculated how much of themselves was safe to bring in.
The question we don't say out loud
Mumtaz Parker, author of Betting on a Hijabi - https://www.impactfulchange.co.nz/ - hosts a podcast through the Diverse Leadership Institute Aotearoa - https://open.spotify.com/show/2rdxqPDJoApiZ0iLvoFScP - and she explores a question that I think sits at the heart of all of this:
"Do I belong here?"
She names something important: the micro-moments in which that question appears - "I'll speak up later," "I'll wait for others to go first," "Maybe this isn't my space after all" - don't just affect one meeting or one day. They accumulate. They form a pattern. And over time, that pattern becomes the story we tell ourselves about who we are and where we fit.
The belonging question, left unanswered, quietly shapes identity.
But here's the reframe she offers - and it's a good one:
Instead of "Do I belong here?"
Ask: "What perspective do I bring that is valuable in this space?"
That's not a small shift. That's a fundamentally different starting point.
What a teenager in the Hawke's Bay understood
This week, Amanjot Singh (remember the name) - a Year 13 student from Hastings Boys' High School - was named national champion of the 2026 Race Unity Speech Awards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mn9FrDNejc
I'd encourage you to watch it.
He spoke about belonging, micro-moments and navigating spaces that weren't designed with him in mind. And he did it not with grievance but with grace. The weapon of choice, as one judge put it, was love.
What struck me was this: here is a young man, at the very beginning of his professional journey, who has already named something that many adults spend decades either avoiding or absorbing in silence. And he named it publicly, clearly and constructively.
The conversation is no longer only being had in quiet one-on-ones. It's being had on stages. In courtrooms. In boardrooms. In the spaces that were, for a very long time, not designed to hear it.
The real cost of the performance
Back to my young lawyer friend.
What he's carrying isn't a drinking problem. It's an identity tax. And the longer he pays it without naming it - without someone helping him understand that his difference is not the liability in the room, but potentially his greatest asset - the more it will cost him.
Not just in confidence. In capability. In the energy that should be going toward his work, his growth, his contribution - quietly redirected into managing perception instead.
The degree got him in the door. But nobody told him that the most important work wasn't in the courtroom. It was in deciding, every single day, whether to keep editing himself down - or to start bringing more of himself forward.
Final thought
So here are the questions worth sitting with this week:
Where are you paying an identity tax that nobody ever put on the invoice?
What have you quietly edited out of yourself in professional spaces - and what has that cost you?
And instead of asking "Do I belong here?" - what if you asked: "What do I bring to this space that no one else can?"
Because the door is already open.
The question is whether you're willing to take the Next Step through it as yourself.
Go on. Take the Next Step.
