What Is Covering? Kenji Yoshino Explains

Franklin Roosevelt never hid that he had polio. Everyone around him knew he used a wheelchair. Yet for twelve years in the White House he made sure he was photographed only from the waist up, seated behind a desk before his cabinet filed in, driving a specially rigged car in full view of reporters so the public would see a man who looked unmistakably capable (05:07). Margaret Thatcher never hid that she was a grocer's daughter from a small town in Lincolnshire. Her handlers sent her to a voice coach instead, and she came back with the clipped, lowered, unmistakably patrician voice the world remembers as the sound of the Iron Lady (08:15). Neither of them was lying about who they were. Both were doing something that has a name, borrowed from a two-page aside in a 1963 book by sociologist Erving Goffman: covering.

NYU legal scholar Kenji Yoshino found that name in Goffman's book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, and it changed how he understood his own life (24:11). Yoshino is gay, and by the time he read Goffman he had already lived through what he describes as three separate responses to a stigmatized identity. First comes conversion, the wish to change who you are: as a young man on a Rhodes Scholarship in England, he knelt in a college chapel and prayed to be made straight (16:20). Next comes passing, hiding the identity entirely, which he did through much of law school (18:56). The third response is subtler. Covering means being open about an identity while muting its outward signs so other people feel comfortable. Erving Goffman's book gave Yoshino the word that unlocked this for him.

"It is not perverted, it is thwarted." — Kenji Yoshino's psychiatrist [18:18]

A few years later, as a junior law professor, a kind and well-meaning colleague gave him career advice that turned out to be a textbook covering demand: he would have an easier path to tenure, the colleague said, if he were "a homosexual professional rather than a professional homosexual" (21:41). Nobody was asking Yoshino to convert or to return to the closet. They were asking him to be gay quietly, with no activism and no scholarship on gay rights. Yoshino's key insight is that, unlike conversion or passing, almost anyone can be asked to cover. Race and disability cannot be converted away or easily hidden. But the volume at which a person displays any identity can always be turned down, which is why covering, he argues, is a genuinely universal experience (27:25).

Once Yoshino had the word, he started seeing it everywhere, including in situations that have nothing to do with sexual orientation. New mothers in demanding jobs often face what researchers call the motherhood penalty, an assumption that having children makes a woman less committed to her career. A study by psychologists Beatrice Arronda and Peter Glick found that women can partly offset this bias through what Yoshino calls work-devotional behavior: never mentioning their children at work and constantly signaling unlimited availability (29:54). That, too, is covering. So was the moment when Yoshino's mother, worried about a New York Times profile naming him an openly gay advocate, asked him why he had to be a "jandaku," her family's transliteration of Joan of Arc: why carry the banner, rather than simply living a life (37:42).

What It Costs

In 2012, Yoshino partnered with the consultancy Deloitte to test whether covering was a widespread phenomenon or just a personal theory. A survey of 3,129 employees across eight Fortune 500 sectors found that 61 percent of respondents reported covering some aspect of their identity at work, and that somewhere between 60 and 73 percent of those who covered said it damaged their sense of self (47:47, 47:58). The most striking figure, to Yoshino, was not about any marginalized group. It was that 45 percent of straight white men, the group with the least obvious reason to hide anything, also reported covering, usually around age, religion, socioeconomic background, or a history of illness (54:40). A related finding showed that 53 percent of respondents felt their organization's leaders expected them to cover, and half of those people said the expectation measurably reduced their commitment to the workplace (68:29). Yoshino extends this logic beyond categories most people associate with diversity work. He points to Susan Cain's book Quiet, which argues introverts, roughly a third of Americans, face constant pressure to perform the louder, backslapping style of an "extrovert ideal" at work, even though leaders from James Madison to Abraham Lincoln were by most accounts introverts (56:56). The same reasoning, he says, applies to depression and addiction: the goal is not to erase stigma overnight, but to stop forcing people to hide a struggle so they can actually get help (59:50).

Yoshino's own test came in 2008, when NYU offered him an endowed chair named for Earl Warren, who as Attorney General of California had overseen the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II (50:20). Yoshino, who is of Japanese descent, turned it down. Three days later the dean called back with a revision: the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professorship, honoring the man who later wrote Brown v. Board of Education and called the internment his greatest regret. Yoshino accepted. He calls an episode like this a distinct story, a deliberate, set-piece account of refusing a covering demand (64:44). He contrasts it with diffuse storytelling: small, unplanned disclosures, like mentioning in passing that he left work early for his kids' school play, which quietly give colleagues permission to do the same (66:58).

Building the Room

Yoshino is careful to say not all covering is bad. Asking an abrasive colleague to tone down genuinely obnoxious behavior is also a form of covering, and he thinks a world where that argument always loses would be a worse one (32:33). His test runs in order: is this actually covering, does it hurt, and if it hurts, is there a value on the other side that justifies the demand. If the answer to that last question is no, the demand deserves to be challenged (85:43). For leaders who want to lower the pressure to cover, Yoshino borrows a phrase from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who studies what she calls psychological safety: a team climate of mutual trust in which people feel safe being themselves (106:21).

"The way you get somebody to uncover, it's a little bit like asking a bird to eat from your hand." — Kenji Yoshino [106:55]

Nobody forces the bird. The work is building an environment calm enough that it chooses to land. Yoshino's larger claim is that belonging is worthless if it was never offered to the real person in the first place, since trusting that others accept you means first letting them see who you actually are. FDR's waist-up photographs helped keep him in office. Thatcher's coached voice helped make her the Iron Lady. Neither of them stopped covering, and most people will recognize some version of the same quiet editing in their own week. Yoshino's point is not that the editing should stop overnight. It is that naming it is the first step toward asking, honestly, whether it still needs to happen at all.