It is difficult to be different. This applies in many areas of life, but may be especially true of the workplace, where belonging to a minority gender, ethnicity, or culture may make it hard to become fully immersed in its social network. However, there can also be a strength in doing your own thing, rather than trying to adapt to the expectations of others, as we see in the 2017 short story “Goldhawk” by Katherina Magyarody.
The main character of the story is Dinara Akhmatova, a woman of indeterminate age and ethnicity who works as a programmer for an unnamed tech company somewhere in North America. As the story progresses, we learn that she is a skilled and dedicated worker, that she is an immigrant, and that she has a background in astronomy but was forced to transition into programming, probably because she could not use her degree after she immigrated (l. 40).
The story is told by a third person narrator. For the first couple of paragraphs, this narrator tells the story from the point of view of Dinara’s colleagues, revealing that they generally do not like her (l. 10). Even though Dinara’s professional success is clearly due to her skill and dedication, her jealous colleagues try to explain it away through references to Dinara’s gender, age or ethnicity, noting that her presence is “good for the diversity profile” (l. 11).
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