Masked in Virtuality: Subtle Discrimination of Migrant Professionals in Virtual Work

Abstract

This empirical paper explores how migrant professionals experience subtle discrimination enacted by supervisors, co-workers and customers at a multilingual workplace. The minority status of these professionals of foreign descent stems from their inability to speak the language of their country of location. We undertake a case study of a multinational professional services company before and after the outbreak of the pandemic and combine it with a mixed method design. The results indicate that the shift to virtual work served as a mechanism to mask discriminatory behaviors. While migrant professionals experienced more open linguistic discrimination during face-to-face work, these discriminatory acts turned into covert exclusion during virtual work. The shift to virtual work thus further deepened the divide between employee groups and rendered the faultlines that were previously translucent more impenetrable. We contribute to research on the mechanisms of subtlety behind subtle discrimination and language-based exclusion in virtual work.