This Hispanic Heritage Month, I want to talk about something that is quietly closing a door in our own community.

Companies are offshoring executive assistant jobs. A lot of those jobs are going to Latin America. Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic.

I am a proud Dominicana. I run an executive assistant company. Offshoring would be the easiest money I will ever make, and I could do it this quarter.

I am not going to.

Here is why, and why I think it matters more than most people realize.

What the seat actually is

An executive assistant sees the budget before it is approved. She is in the room when a hire is debated. She builds the board deck. She knows which projects are dying and which ones have a champion.

Plenty of college graduates take this job on purpose. It is a serious role, and it is also a vantage point. You are sitting next to power, learning how a business actually runs.

That advantage is what is being moved offshore. Not the work. The advantage.

I know what that seat is worth because I could not get one

In January 2014, with a master’s degree and a decade as an instructional and operations leader in Boston Public Schools, I applied for executive assistant jobs and could not get one.

So I stopped applying and started freelancing for the same kinds of businesses that now offshore this role. I have spent twelve years sitting next to power. Running operations. Training and placing executive assistants. Watching what that seat does for a career.

On my own team, a Dominican woman joined as an executive assistant. She moved into leading talent and people. This year she became our Chief of Staff. She did not need another degree to do it. She got close to the work, earned trust, and was promoted.

What if I had chosen to offshore this role? That is a job I would take from my own community, a growth opportunity I would erase, a wealth gap I would have been partly responsible for while enriching myself.

Plenty of companies are making that trade right now.

In September, a company posts about Hispanic Heritage Month. It may feature a Latina employee. It posts about the wealth gap and urges you to support Hispanic-owned businesses. Promote Hispanic leaders. It holds a Hispanic Heritage event. It even puts a banner on its company page.

In October, it makes a financial decision. It replaces a role next to power with a woman in Medellín or Santo Domingo at a fraction of the pay. No benefits. No path up. No seat in the room.

The line I actually draw

I am not against hiring outside the United States. My own automation and website developer is in the UK. He is excellent, I pay him what he is worth, and I am not looking to replace him.

I am not going to stand here and say a woman in Santo Domingo should not have work either. She should. She deserves more than she is being paid.

I am against offshoring this one role, because it widens the very wealth gap we spend every September saying we want to close.

My developer is not sitting next to a decision-maker learning the business. The assistant is.

That is the difference, and it is the whole argument. This job is next to power. You are in the room when decisions get made. You learn how money actually moves through a company. You build relationships with people who will hire you, fund you, or refer you later.

Move a back-end role offshore, and you have moved a job. Move the executive assistant role, and you have closed a career pathway.

What this costs, and when we will notice

Many of us are the first in our family to hold a professional job.

That first job sets your network at thirty and your net worth at forty.

When a company removes that job, nothing shows up on the quarterly report. It shows up in fifteen years, in who is at the table.

That is how a wealth gap gets built. Not in one decision. In small ones, over and over, that each looked reasonable and fiscally responsible in the moment.

What I chose

So back to what I said at the top. I could offshore. I have not, and I will not.

Our assistants are based in the United States. They are college-educated W2 employees.

That decision costs me money every year. I make it anyway, because the communities that pay us should be the communities that benefit. If American companies are paying my invoices, then the career investment should happen here too, because the wealth gap we keep talking about is here in the United States.

That is my contribution. It is a payroll decision, and I sign it every two weeks. But at the heart of it is a values decision.

I was the woman who could not get that job. I know what it cost me to build the door myself.

Celebrate us with a banner in September. Then bring that job back in October.

About the Author: Wendy Hernández, M.Ed. (she/ella) is the CEO & Founder of LionsPride Associates™. She is a certified special education teacher who spent a decade in Boston Public Schools practicing differentiated instruction. That principle became Differentiated Operations™, and it is the foundation of the LION Method™, the certification she built to train executive assistants to design support around the four leader archetypes.

LionsPride places U.S.-based executive assistants and operations partners with founders, executives, and social impact leaders. Wendy founded the company to raise the standard of the profession and to keep it a viable career in the United States.

She writes ROAR: Realities of Access + Representation in C-Suite Support, a column on power, proximity, and who gets to sit next to it.