HRC Weighs In: LGBT Rights and Business

Last week, Deena Fidas, HRC’s Director of the Workplace Equality Program, participated in a virtual debate for The Economist about LGBT rights and businesses.

Fidas was asked, “Should businesses focus only on working toward greater equality for their LGBT workers across the world? Or should they also be advancing social change for all LGBT people?”

She replied:

“In reality, it’s not an either/or proposition. There is a revolving door between any workplace and the society outside. When corporations include more LGBT people, they inevitably spur greater social acceptance outside the doors of their businesses. When LGBT people feel welcomed and are able to bring their full selves to work, their visibility quietly and profoundly changes the attitudes of those around them. Simply put, it becomes difficult to cling to stereotypes and biases about LGBT people when they are your employees, co-workers and managers—and your friends.

Since 2002 the Human Rights Campaign has teamed up with businesses in our annual Corporate Equality Index. This report benchmarks companies’ progress towards LGBT inclusion. For example, the index charts how a majority of Fortune 500 companies provide specific workplace protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, alongside other categories such as race and religion. A majority of businesses in the index are even extending these protections to their staff who work in their overseas locations.

One reason companies are doing this is that there is a clear and growing business case. They are now translating this business case and goodwill into advocacy for social and legal change: take the experience we have had in America with marriage equality.

Very few businesses stood up to oppose Proposition 8 in 2008, a law that killed marriage equality in California. After LGBT activists and their allies lost that battle, the fight for same-sex marriage was waged state by state. By the time the question came up in New York state in 2011, dozens of businesses were lining up to support marriage equality. Companies from Google to Goldman Sachs were publicly supporting equality in the name of fairness, and in the interest of business.

Businesses realized that marriage equality and LGBT legal equality no longer only concerned people outside their doors. Rather they directly affected their own valued leaders and employees. Corporate leaders made history by speaking about how their world view was being shaped by LGBT mentors, their LGBT workers’ children and families, and, in some cases, their own sexual orientation. Employee network groups for LGBT workers swelled with participation by non-LGBT allies.

But as some states extended the right to marry to same-sex partners and others did not, the patchwork of laws left businesses with a frustrating and costly mess of state and federal tax implications for their workers’ health-care benefits. Businesses were feeling the cost of inequality and recognizing that it would require their collective clout to resolve the administrative headaches associated with the unequal legal and tax treatment of LGBT families.

The social change we are witnessing began with businesses blazing the trail, offering partner benefits and LGBT workplace protections well ahead of the law. These same leading businesses are the ones that helped bring about full marriage equality. Could they have done it without first recognizing the diversity of their own employees? Most certainly not.

All the businesses that have stood up for LGBT equality are doing so as fully invested entities. They are not waiting for the laws to change: they are bringing equality to their workplaces and beyond. Globally, more and more LGBT people are now able to be themselves in their workplace—even when the culture around them remains hostile.”

Last fall, HRC announced the creation of a groundbreaking global business coalition committed to advancing LGBT workplace equality around the world.  The members of the coalition recently joined Vice President Biden at a round table in Davos, Switzerland during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. 

On March 3, HRC President Chad Griffin will join business leaders with a stake in LGBT equality at The Economist’s Pride and Prejudice conference. 

Non-discrimination policies, benefits and other practices that include LGBT workers are essential for businesses as they compete for talent and customers. Through pioneering tools like the Corporate Equality Index, HRC works to provide employers the resources they need to improve and promote fairness in the workplace. Learn more about out how corporate America is working toward adopting inclusive policies and practices here.

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Black History Month: Honoring the Life and Legacy of James Baldwin

Post submitted by Beth Sherouse*

While African American writer and activist James Baldwin passed away in 1987, his words still serve as powerful reminders of the intersections of racism and anti-LGBT sentiment, and the need for us, as advocates and as an LGBT community, to account for those intersections in our work.

“I don’t know of anyone [Black] who has denied his brother or his sister because they were gay,” Baldwin said in a 1984 interview. “No doubt it happens. [But] a Black person has got quite a lot to get through the day without getting entangled in all the American fantasies…It’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all Black people live…. The gay world as such is no more prepared to accept Black people than anywhere else in society.” 

As a queer Black man** growing up in mid-twentieth century America, Baldwin wrestled with a culture that condemned him for his race, sexuality and gender expression. Like Baldwin’s own relationships, his fictional characters frequently transgressed sexual and racial lines, occasionally igniting controversy. In 1956, while the Cold War was in full swing, Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room, which contained explicitly queer characters.

“It was very hard for me to write that book,” he recalled. “They said—if I published it, it would ruin my career.…That, in effect, nobody would accept that book, coming from me. My agent told me to burn it.”

After moving to Paris for a few years, Baldwin returned to the states to lend his support to the growing Civil Rights Movement, and quickly established himself as one of the movement’s leading voices, never attempting to hide his sexuality from the public eye.

In Baldwin’s relationships, writing and activism, he consistently refused to bring anything less than his whole self to the table. As we celebrate Black History Month this year, may we all learn from his example, honoring and celebrating the complex and interconnected identities that make the LGBT community so beautifully diverse.

For more information on HRC’s work with African-American LGBT communities and other communities of color, visit our Communities of Color page.

*This post is taken in part from the author’s doctoral dissertation.

**Baldwin is often assumed to have been gay. This might be because of his relationships with prominent men like bisexual actor Marlon Brando. However, throughout his life, Baldwin also had relationships with women and sometimes referred to himself as bisexual.

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