Layoffs aren’t neutral and they don’t affect people equally, on a demographic level but also on a bounce-back-able level.
Even when reasoning seems legally neutral (budget cuts, reorgs, bottom line), “objective” business decisions can still produce deeply uneven outcomes.
-
Layoffs can undo years of slow progress in one fell swoop, on micro and macro levels. Who is chosen for layoffs is patterned by systemic inequality, and those systems reflect bias and occupational segregation. Even something “fair” like “last in, first out” has a different impact in workplaces that only recently started diversifying.
-
On top of navigating insurance loss and unstable finances, there’s added stress for marginalized people—prolonged exposure to biases that have plagued their careers all along. On the other end of a layoff, marginalized workers had already faced additional obstacles to GET the job in the first place. Reentering the job search means being spit back out into a market that’s already proven itself structured to undervalue them. Even when qualifications are comparable, marginalized workers have longer unemployment durations, older workers get fewer callbacks, and women and Black workers experience larger post-layoff wage penalties.
-
Some roles are more likely to be labeled “non-core,” and those roles often skew toward communication, coordination, support, content, and other kinds of empathy-driven work that are harder to quantify.
-
There are undeniable psychological consequences. If you’ve experienced it a few times, with long bouts of job searching in between, eventually the instability itself starts reshaping your sense of possibility. You stop thinking only about the loss of a single job and start recognizing a repeating cycle of precarity that changes how you relate to work, risk, and your own individual worth.
This time around, it’s hard not to wonder whether I’m trying to force (shrink) myself into a system that keeps finding neutral and not-so-neutral ways to dispel me. I’ve clumsily navigated this industry as a woman, as a fat person (studies consistently show that, especially for women, weight bias affects both hiring and pay, and, in my experience, upward mobility and perception), and now as someone over 40 facing both ageism and general future instability in tech. I don’t know how to carry these truths and enthusiastically interview at the same time.
The strangest part of modern layoffs is that they happen collectively, but are experienced individually. Thousands of people can lose their jobs at once, and for some it’s a temporary obstacle and for others it’s an impactful derailment.
Bouncing back can’t be an individual responsibility when we have to do it inside systems that helped produce the instability in the first place.
