One-Up and One-Down Power Map
Map social position to find where privilege, exclusion, and responsibility sit
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 99%
The One-Up and One-Down Power Map examines how repeated social advantage becomes embedded in organizations and institutions. For a specific context, identify the groups historically given the benefit of the doubt, greater representation, and easier access to opportunity; these are one-up positions. Identify groups repeatedly excluded, targeted, or marginalized; these are one-down positions. Then map your own multiple identities rather than defining yourself by only the position where you face hardship. The method reveals both where you encounter barriers and where things come easily because power already favors you. That one-up position is the practical site of allyship: use its access and influence to help remove barriers. The framing minimizes personal guilt about inherited systems while preserving high responsibility for changing their effects.
Origin
Myers credits the framework to VISIONS, Inc. and uses it in her book What If I Say the Wrong Thing? to explain social hierarchy, power, and systemic isms.
Core principles
- 01Repeated group advantage becomes embedded in systems
- 02One-up status identifies where institutional power is concentrated
- 03One-down status identifies where exclusion and barriers accumulate
- 04Most people hold both privileged and marginalized identities
- 05Inherited position creates low guilt but high responsibility
How to run it
- 1
Define the context
Choose a concrete system such as hiring, promotion, education, meetings, or access to a service. Power positions can change with the context, so avoid an abstract universal ranking.
Pro tip Name the opportunity being distributed before naming groups.
- 2
Identify one-up groups
Mark the groups historically centered as the norm and repeatedly given representation, benefit of the doubt, and access. Look beyond personal beliefs to the system's accumulated pattern.
Watch out Individual goodwill does not erase an automatic institutional pattern.
- 3
Identify one-down groups
Mark the groups historically treated as less capable, excluded, or marginalized in the chosen system. Locate the specific barriers or missing opportunities they encounter.
Pro tip Ask who has to prove belonging or competence more often.
- 4
Map multiple identities
Examine your own one-up and one-down positions across race, gender, class, education, disability, language, nationality, and other relevant identities. Expect a mixture rather than a single label.
Pro tip Pay special attention to areas that feel effortless; ease can reveal privilege.
Watch out Experiencing marginalization in one area does not cancel power in another.
- 5
Trace power to outcomes
Compare opportunity, representation, voice, and attention across the mapped groups. Identify where the hierarchy reproduces unequal outcomes without requiring an openly prejudiced actor.
Watch out Do not reduce the analysis to whether individual people are mean or bad.
- 6
Act from the one-up position
Use access, authority, or credibility available in your one-up position to remove a barrier. Follow the leadership of people closest to the one-down experience.
Pro tip Choose one concrete opportunity or obstacle rather than making a symbolic declaration.
Watch out Do not turn allyship into rescuing or speaking over the affected group.
In the wild
Myers describes being one-down through race, gender, age, and working-class origins while also being one-up through elite education, income, lack of disability, English as a first language, and being US-born. Seeing both sides identifies where she faces barriers and where she holds power that can support others.
→ A single marginalized identity no longer obscures the areas where responsibility and influence exist.
Common mistakes
Turning the map into a blame score
The map explains systemic position, not personal virtue. Its purpose is to locate power and responsibility, not assign moral worth.
Mapping only your disadvantages
Focusing only on one-down identities hides the places where access comes easily. Those one-up positions are where allyship can have leverage.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders and teams examining unequal access to opportunity, representation, attention, or decision-making power.
Not ideal for
Using identity labels to rank individual worth or predict every person's lived experience.
From the transcript
“which is the group that has been targeted as not as good less than and which are the groups that have been given the benefit…”
“the group that has been excluded marginalized is called the down group”
“this is low guilt because for the most part people don't believe it we didn't create it but it's high responsibility to try to level…”
From the episode
YAPClassic: Vernā Myers on Overcoming Bias and Promoting Equity
YAPClassic