CIPD Podcast – CIPD LGBT+
Philippa Lamb: Hello this month we’re bringing you a new podcast every week and
all of them are about LGBT+ at work. Why are we focusing so hard on this? Well
because right now more than 60% of LGBT+ graduates who are out at university go
back into the closet when they start work. That's right – 63% and that's according to
Stonewall.
So what’s going on? LGBT+ employees of course have legal protection against
discrimination but we all know that making workplaces inclusive is about more than
rules and regulations and for all the positive messaging on company websites and
good work being done by many organisations tens of thousands of LGBT+ people
still feel it’s just too risky to bring their whole selves to work.
So what are their anxieties and how do you create a workplace where everyone can
flourish?
Getting to the heart of this really matters. Failing to be inclusive is very expensive.
Great candidates and valuable employees avoid organisations where they’re just not
confident they’ll fit in and they can waste as much as 30% of their mental energy
hiding who they are if they work for an organisation that doesn’t feel truly inclusive.
In this first podcast you'll hear gay, lesbian and trans people talk about their work and
their colleagues, why they do, or don't, disclose their sexual identity, how there's no
such thing as the LGBT+ community and why all sides get so hung up on language.
Stephen Frost is globally recognised diversity expert and a gay man so he's ideally
placed to assess the situation for LGBT+ people at work.
You'll also hear from trainee vet Hatti Smart; EY partner Liz Bingham; Amy Stanning,
who is Shared Services Director at Barclays; Paul Deemer who is Head of diversity
and inclusion at NHS Employers and Scott Durairaj, head of patient experience,
mental health and learning disability for the NHS.
Stephen Frost: So where are we now? I think in many ways we’re in a great place.
In many ways we’re world leading. In many ways we’ve changed this to be a positive
good, a commercial good, rather than a cost or something we don't want to be
associated with. But of course we still know that young people are bullied for being
lesbian or gay. We still know that too many people think of their identity as being a
liability in their career rather than as a resource and part of them being an authentic,
whole person at work.
PL: This is a reality for many young people entering the workforce, here’s Hatti.
Hattie Smart: There has been times where I've not mentioned it at all because I've
felt that it wouldn’t have been taken in the right way necessarily. Times on
placements more than anything else, some settings are quite traditional, quite
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religious, old-style farming communities. I've known for a fact that people have been
verbally abused on placements because of their sexuality. So it was something that I
maybe hid.
SF: I think the issue becomes when, let’s take Jane or Bob that have been out at
university, have bought the website and the marketing and the ‘Kool-aid’ and then
have gone in and met the line manager and then the penny drops. Oh! And it’s the
classic you know Drucker quote that the culture eats strategy for breakfast.
HS: What they say on paper and what actually happens can be two completely
different things and I think you kind of need to be there for a while to understand that
at times, which is difficult when you’re at interview process.
PL: Not disclosing can put a serious dent in productivity and in career progression.
Liz Bingham: I had a flourishing career until rather shockingly when I turned 30 I fell
in love with a woman for the first time. This was at a point in time when Elton John
was married to a woman and George Michael was straight. And so it was not an
environment where I felt comfortable in coming out, started to doubt whether I was in
the right place: my career sort of really stalled as I struggled to stay in the closet, if
you will.
PL: Did you feel before you made the decision to transition and to be open about it,
did you feel that the situation you were in impacted adversely on your performance at
work?
Amy Stanning: Undoubtedly. When you’re having to hide something so fundamental
about yourself as gender identity, or indeed sexuality, you have to use so much of
your mental capacity to kind of protect the secret that that inevitably a) distracts, but
basically takes mental energy away from anything you do, family, work.
I got to the point where I could no longer cope with managing the conflict between
how I felt and how I appeared. I reached out to my senior HR business partner and
basically said, “This may come as a bit of a shock to you but I need to transition my
gender, transition my presentation at work and I need your help to do that.”
LB: My boss had a conversation with me and he asked me if the flatmate that I’d
introduced him to was in fact my partner? But then I thought well I could lie because
I've been lying quite successfully for two years, but I realised I didn’t want to lie and
so I told him the truth and we had a great conversation. And then at the end of that
conversation I asked if he would respect my confidence because nobody else in the
office knew and it didn’t affect my work and he told me that I was wrong, that it would
affect my work if I wasn’t being able to be open and honest with my colleagues, my
clients, that it would diminish my effectiveness as a leader. And so I very tentatively
stepped out of the closet and amazingly enough the sky didn’t fall in and so I told a
few more and that was really positive. All of this was happening eight years before I
came out to my parents.
The fear disappeared, the fear of being found out. I think when I was in the closet the
power was all with everybody else, you know in terms of the potential to find me out
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and then for bad things to happen. With every conversation I had I felt I was claiming
back the power, power with a small ‘p’.
PL: And you must have spent a great chunk of your energy in hiding that truth?
LB: Yes, yeah trying to avoid using pronouns and names and being very vague
about what you did at the weekend and so on.
PL: And not disclosing could also land you in some awkward situations.
Scott Durairaj: I've had some really interesting ones, so I worked in an organisation
in East London once. It was interesting there was quite a few Asian staff there and
my heritage is, my father was Sri Lankan, mother was English, and I was in my 30s I
think at the time and there was a woman there and she said, “Oh you're not married!”
and I said, “Oh no,” because at that time I was still with my partner who I'm with now
but we couldn’t get married of course, but I hadn’t come out in this organisation. And
she said, “Oh I've got some friends I’d like you to meet.” I thought it was going for an
innocent curry with a load of Asian colleagues who I worked with, hadn’t realised she
was lining me up for a date with an Asian woman. So before I knew it I was kind of on
a date with a woman.
PL: Awkward for both of you?
SD: Yeah well it was yes, it was a bit of a ‘Will and Grace’ moment – that unwitting
prejudice that occurs. So when people talk about, “Oh so was it a civil partnership or
did you have a normal wedding”? You know those kind of languages, the
heteronormative approach we kind of tolerate.
PL: It’s ignorance isn’t it but not necessarily with malicious intent?
SD: No. But unwitting prejudice when it’s delivered by a number of people still deliver
enough micro-aggressions to an individual’s spirit, confidence, ability in themselves
to actually negatively affect how they see themselves and how they seem
themselves within your company.
PL: Unwitting prejudice undermines an inclusive atmosphere.
SF: It’s this ladder isn’t it from unconscious incompetence to conscious
incompetence, to conscious incompetence to conscious competence. So it’s this kind
of journey of learning which L&D can facilitate. It can help and say, “It’s okay,” right,
“There's a ladder, there's a route, this is normal, it happens to everybody, we’re all
biased, let’s just all learn.” And you put people on training courses and it just
becomes normalised that okay we all learn this stuff, great, happy days. But I think
another way is just very practically in the moment when it really happens, like in the
line manager example, and it’s just, as with disability, ask – just ask. “I'm sorry what
would you like? I'm sorry I don't know. What would you suggest?” And just asking is
actually a really important thing to do.
PL: The language thing it’s interesting to hear your thoughts on that because a lot of
the conversations we've had for this podcast people have been anxious about
terminology and the terminology around LGBT can be extremely complex, certainly
for people not in those circles, and I think even for people who are. And it seems that
the legal framework around it is almost creating more barriers though because as
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you say people are literally anxious now that they’re transgressing legally if they say
or do the wrong thing.
LB: Yes I think that's absolutely right. So I've experienced that myself where people
have said, very innocuous question like, “Are you married?” and I am now married
but prior to same sex marriage I’d say, “No but my partner and I had our civil
partnership.” And the response was often, “Oh I'm sorry” ((laughs)). Actually what
sorry that I'm in a civil partnership or sorry that you assumed I was married? What is
it that you’re sorry about?
PL: There’s a kind of hypervigilance isn’t there, an oversensitivity about it?
LB: Yes exactly.
PL: That people were terribly anxious about transgressing that makes them behave
in a safe way and a safe way is often not a reaching out or an inclusive way.
LB: Absolutely.
SD: What’s useful for me with LGBT is we recognise that it’s an umbrella term. I think
people who use it as a very clear descriptor that would be wrong. I always say it’s not
necessarily whether people say to me, “Are you LGBT? Are you BME?” I would
rather them think “this is Scott and there are some particular areas we need to
consider in employing Scott.” And that's all I'm asking for.
PL: Scott’s point about treating people as individuals is an important one because
there's no such thing as the LGBT+ community.
SD: Within the LGBT community there's a lot of bi-phobia.
LB: The lesbians will all stick together but within the lesbian community you'll have
different factions.
AS: A lot of gay and bi people don't get trans, why should they? Because that's about
sexual orientation whereas trans is about gender identity. It’s very different.
LB: Within the gay men community you have a hierarchy.
SD: And there's also a hell of a lot of trans-phobia.
LB: And don't even get me on the bisexuals, you know. There are some members of
the community who don't think they should be represented at all, you know kind of
“make your mind up, you can't have it both ways” ((laughs)).
PL: Accepting that one size doesn’t fit all means not relying solely on disclosure data
to understand your employees. The NHS employs 1.3 million people so statistically
that's maybe 100,000+ LGBT staff – but how many of them feel able to disclose?
Paul Deemer: What we find in terms of sexual orientation is that the disclosure rates
are quite low, so there's a high level of “do not wish to disclose” or “unknown”. So on
that 1.3 million 0.6% of the workforce declare themselves to be gay, 0.4% of the
workforce declare themselves to be lesbian and 0.4% as well declare themselves to
be bisexual.
PL: So in terms of lesbian, gay and bisexual people you've got under 1.5% of the
workforce reporting which is really low isn’t it?
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PD: According to the data. It is very low. And we know it’s not accurate.
PL: So it’s about recognising what these numbers really mean.
SF: It’s legal in the UK to ask people about their identity if they want to voluntarily
disclose and that gives you a real measure on two counts: 1) it gives you a measure
of how many people might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, in an
organisation. And we know that if the national average is around about 6% where an
organisation benchmarks versus that, and it’s usually a lot lower. But secondly it
gives us a measure of inclusion because if we thought that there were about 6%
LGBT people in the country and therefore perhaps in our workforce, if not all those
people feel able to disclose or want to disclose it’s actually a measure of inclusion
more than a measure of diversity because can they be out? Can they feel
comfortable and trusting that organisation to let you know?
PL: And it’s important to ask the right questions in the right way.
SD: What I've learnt over the time is the barrier to those questions is not the people
answering them it’s the people asking them. If I start by asking, here’s some
questions that are really personal, you don't have to answer if you don't want. That
really sets that structure. But if I say, “Here’s some critical questions that would be
really helpful for us as an organisation to prove the services we deliver, if you could
help us fill them in that would be great.” It frames the question much more differently
and you get much more positive answers.
PL: It’s tricky ground isn’t it, particularly for straight people asking those questions
because in their head they’re thinking, “no one asked me this question, no one asked
me about my sexuality”.
SD: But I think that's the point they should be because we assume. So some people
look at me as a six foot five, mixed race Scouser and they will make an assumption
I'm straight and it happens quite a bit, maybe not so when they look at my shoes but
it happens quite a bit.
PL: There's a lot to take in here so let’s think about the endgame, what should a
workplace feel like?
AS: The day comes when you present in your acquired gender for the first time,
which is nerve wracking. I had a role where I was mobile, so three or four days of the
week I was different location. So everywhere you’d go there's a first time. When you
walk in, in my case to a branch and there are cashiers sat behind the desk or
personal bankers at the front and they kind of all know you're going and they all want
to look, which is fine and that's just how it is.
PL: Do you constantly feel you’re having to manage people’s expectations and
preconceptions?
AS: Yeah so my presentation was hugely important to me and still is. And you know
you make some fashion crime mistakes along the way but if the culture and the
environment is right whatever people feel they will treat you with respect and that's
really important in the workplace. So I knew I could go somewhere and even if I
looked appalling people would treat me with respect and the challenge for me wasn’t
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being at work it was going to work and leaving work. So sitting on the train, sitting on
the tube with people looking at you, that was incredibly stressful and on more than
one occasion led to me being abused and assaulted. So for me to be able to almost
like come to work where I was who I was, no discrimination, was hugely important to
me.
PL: We’re getting to the end of this first episode but before we finish here’s a
sobering thought: when we started work on this series I imagined we should all be
aiming at a time when inclusion would be such a norm we wouldn’t need policy about
it anymore but Stephen put me right on that.
SF: Often people, good people espouse a nirvana where we don't need to do this
stuff because it’s just natural and normal and here’s the slightly uncomfortable truth;
as human beings we prefer sameness to difference and if we don't consciously
include we will unconsciously exclude. So I think yes we can get to a situation where
it becomes much more commonplace and it’s standard HR practice, and we’re not
there yet, but I think even if we were to attain that nirvana vigilance is important in
order to prevent regression. And I think we can show in hard data that when you
don't consciously lead on this stuff you do go backwards. In the absence of
transparency and challenge and inclusion we do tend to hire in our own image and
we do tend to get more homogenous rather than more diverse.
PL: Our thanks to Stephen Frost, Hatti Smart, Liz Bingham, Paul Deemer, Amy
Stanning and Scott Durairaj.
Come back to the podcast page every Tuesday this month for lots more on the how
tos…
AS: We planned that I would sit down, firstly with my team and then with a larger
peer group and basically tell them the story.
PL: Okay before you go any further I want to ask how you felt before that meeting
because it just sounds terrifying?
AS: Terrified, absolutely terrified.
PL: And the how not tos…
LB: My then boss said to me, “There must be more of you out there?” And I said,
“What Aries?”
PL: Women?
LB: What are you referring to? ((laughs)).
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