In the early part of the 2010s, Kecia M. Thomas, now an associate dean at the University of Georgia, participated in a year-long development program for Black women in academia. By the end of the program, she had coined the term “Pet to Threat” and in 2013 she made it official with a study backing up the racist behavior.

“There were 35 Black women from across the country at different stages in their career and I kept hearing the same sorts of issues,” Thomas says. “The women who were in the early phase of their careers would talk about being treated as a minor player or the paternalism of their male colleagues. The women who were mid-career were constantly feeling as though they were coming up against barriers even though they had already established high levels of performance. We were being treated like threats when we were just trying to develop our careers. One day in the lobby I said ‘well yeah, it seems like you go from pet to threat’ and that’s where the idea came from.”

Thomas, along with four others, published their findings in the 2013 academic paper entitled “Moving from Pet to Threat: Narratives of Professional Black Women,” based on data culled from interviews with five Black women faculty. The authors explain that early in their career, Black women may be treated as pets rather than professionals. They write, “A pet is beloved, cared for, and often treated in child-like fashion. The pet status for new professional employees suggests that new professional employees are not equal to their masters and that their masters know what is best for them, if only they behave appropriately.”

I think in every career trajectory there comes an opportunity for a promotion or leadership where the individual has a level of influence or power to make significant changes and to rethink how business is done. That’s when women are probably most vulnerable to getting recast as threatening.

Pets often experience feelings of tokenism, invisibility, pressure to assimilate, mistreatment, and being overprotected by colleagues. One interviewee, a junior faculty member, recalled how several colleagues would “speak on her behalf” even when she was in the room and how one colleague would go so far as to check all of her administrative assignments. “It made me think they imagined I was incompetent or not qualified for those duties,” she reported. Another recalled being made the face of several internal projects but not being given any responsibility.

When Black women resist their status as pets, they find themselves transforming into a threat. “I think in every career trajectory there comes an opportunity for a promotion or leadership, where the individual has a level of influence or power to make significant changes and to rethink how business is done. That’s when women are probably most vulnerable to getting recast as threatening, because their colleagues are pushing back on the person legitimately exerting their influence in the workplace,” Thomas says.

Black women seen as threats often experience microaggressions or punishment for challenging the status quo of the workplace. Another interviewee discussed how she was barred from supervising dissertations and thesis projects despite being requested to do so by students of color and how colleagues would advise students not to enroll in her classes.