Kristen Egziabher was all jitters just before the pandemic, awaiting news of a possible raise, until her manager came back dejected from his meeting with the higher-ups.

“I was presenting the case for you,” he told her. “And people were like, ‘We don’t really know Kristen. We only know her work.’”

What?

Sure, her work. What else could be relevant to a performance review? But this was exactly what had always irked Ms. Egziabher, 40, about her office, where she served as a project manager for a Texas food chain. No matter her productivity, her colleagues seemed to care primarily about the chitchat — what’d you do last weekend, where’d you get that purse? Ms. Egziabher, who is Black, felt that her white co-workers were fixated on who was jostling for entry to their in-group.

“What does all that matter for my pay?” she wondered. “If we’re being real, I don’t care what you did last weekend.”