At the consultancy where she used to work, Karla Martin, Google’s Director of Global Business Strategy, watched a partner repeatedly offer the lead role on new business to a white male whom she had previously led on a massive cost-reduction project for a multimillion-dollar client. “That partner simply couldn’t remember that it was my leadership, my work — aided of course by the team and that one guy (we’ll call him Jim) — and that I’d been instrumental in hiring Jim and promoting him while I was leading it,” she says. “He’d look me straight in the eye and say, ‘Why don’t we put Jim on this new account? He did such a great job with that cost reduction project.’”