Berlin Tijen Onaran is one of the best-known founders in Germany. The 37-year-old has been campaigning for more diversity and inclusion in business for years. If you ask the head of the Global Digital Women consultancy about the career opportunities for migrants in this country, she immediately thinks of an experience she had recently.
“I sat in a panel discussion with a black founder and an influencer who wore a hijab,” she says. “The organizer’s first question to both of them was: ‘German or English?'”. Onaran and her discussion partners were irritated: both were native German speakers.
The Founder later told Onaran that he keeps hearing questions like this. Questions that resonate: You don’t look like you’re one of us. “He asked himself: ‘What else do I have to do to finally be recognized as a businessman here?'” says Tijen Onaran.
The entrepreneur believes that people with a migration background in Germany experience this type of exclusion more often than any other population group. “There are many factors that make it difficult for people to be successful: age, gender, social background,” says Onaran, who grew up in Karlsruhe as the daughter of Turkish parents. “But none of that makes promotion as difficult as a migration background.”
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Studies also confirm your thesis. A study by the University of Mannheim states, for example, “(…) that migrants and their descendants are largely less successful on the German labor market than Germans without a migration background.”
And a study by the University of Hamburg shows that immigrant families in Germany are exposed to a significantly above-average risk of poverty – and that they are very likely to pass the poverty on to their descendants.
Immigrant families often lack a network
But why is that? Onaran believes, among other things, in the lack of a network of people with an immigrant background. “When I was looking for my first internship, for example, many of my friends asked their parents – they often knew the managers of some companies,” she says. Her own parents did not know such people.
That didn’t change anything about her ambitions. When she was 16, she wanted to do an internship with the then mayor of Karlsruhe. “The problem was that neither my parents nor I had any idea how to apply.”
Onaran’s mother chose an unconventional but direct route. She went to City Hall with her daughter and called on the mayor’s receptionist. After some back and forth, Onaran got the internship.
>> Read also: How the economy could benefit from more diversity
What this story shows: Even without a lot of money and impressive networks, professional success is possible for young migrants. But they have to work for it twice or three times as hard as non-migrants, says Onaran.
The more dimensions of diversity a person combines, the more difficult it is for him to advance professionally and socially. In other words, someone who comes from a working-class family has fewer chances of becoming CEO than someone from an academic family. If you come from a working-class family and are female, your chances are even lower. And those who come from a working-class family, are female and have a migration background rarely become CEOs.
A problem that ensures that many top performers escape the German labor market – Tijen Onaran is certain of that. “People with an immigrant background have many skills that are needed in today’s professional world,” she says. For example, most migrants have strong problem-solving skills. “If they didn’t have money for their studies, they had to work. If they weren’t born with business contacts, they had to develop them.” Onaran believes that experience will stand them in good stead in a constantly changing job world.
“Ah, doner kebab. Well, that suits your background.”
But even if they are already successful business people, people with a migration background are often not taken seriously enough. Recently, one of her Turkish friends, who has set up a kebab chain in Stuttgart, was a guest at one of her events. When another visitor found out what Onaran’s friend does for a living, she said to her: “Ah, doner kebab. Well, that suits your background.”
Onaran was annoyed. “I said to the lady, ‘My girlfriend is a great businesswoman. I don’t give a damn whether someone earns their money with doner kebabs or lipstick.’” In such situations, however, there is often no one to stand up for migrants who have been discriminated against – which eventually wears them down.
“I didn’t get any business knowledge from my family”
Onaran himself has also felt uncomfortable at many events. “When I founded the company five years ago, I went to a lot of start-up events,” she says. The participants were almost exclusively young men, all with a similar look, all graduates of similar elite universities. “They spoke this business language that I didn’t understand. It was about track records, cash flow, sweat equity and bootstrapping.”
Terms that, for Onaran, came from a world she had never had access to for most of her life. At such events, she often disappeared to the toilet to google expressions like these. “I just didn’t get any business knowledge from my family.”
Nevertheless, she has established herself in the scene. In the meantime, she has become an investor – and is planning a venture capital fund with which she only wants to financially promote business ideas from women.
More: “Worst career advice I’ve ever received? Stay as you are!”