Companies grapple with protecting gay employees
When Air France-KLM resumed regular flights to Iran in March after an eight-year hiatus, gay flight attendants urged chief executive officer Frederic Gagey to let them take a pass, given that homosexuality can get you executed in the Islamic Republic.
“It’s inconceivable to force someone to go to a country where his kind are condemned to death for who they are,” stated their online petition, signed by almost 30,000 people.
In the U.S., states and cities have been excoriated for restricting the ability of transgender people to use lavatories appropriate to their sexual identity. Duelling lawsuits between North Carolina and the federal government, and a sharp rise in workplace bias claims, have put lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues centre stage in a way that hasn’t been the case since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
But a broader, global threat to equality persists, and not just for flight attendants. LGBT employees of multinational companies must often worry about legalized harassment, imprisonment, or worse. About 75 countries still consider homosexuality a crime, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Ten of those states, including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (home to financial hubs Dubai and Abu Dhabi), and Saudi Arabia, can impose the death penalty, HRC said. Representatives of the three countries, and Iran, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The brutal killing in Bangladesh recently of a gay activist employed by a U.S. aid agency and increased commerce with Iran following its nuclear deal framework have lent urgency to how companies interact with restrictive governments. Increasingly, it is chief executives instead of politicians who are faced with protecting the rights, and lives, of LGBT employees.
Deena Fidas, director of the workplace equality program at HRC, said that while companies can establish “a bastion of equality” at the office with a code of conduct, what happens to workers, and particularly local hires, in countries that allow discrimination isn’t necessarily in their control.
“This is something that businesses are grappling with,” Fidas said. “I don’t think I could point to one company that has it figured out.”
The subject is sensitive: Few companies are willing to discuss their efforts in detail, perhaps to avoid offending host nations or imperilling business. Even Apple, whose chief executive is openly gay, declined to comment other than to note that the company led by Tim Cook has a robust anti-discrimination policy covering employees worldwide.
The World Bank estimates that, in 2012, US$31 billion was lost due to discrimination against LGBT individuals in school and employment. Lower labour force participation led to more poverty and poorer health outcomes, in turn causing higher health-care and social program costs, not to mention less economic output. There are geopolitical costs as well: In 2014, the World Bank froze a US$90 million health-care loan to Uganda because of an anti-gay law passed there.
Some 64 per cent of LGBT employees in 10 large countries, including the U.S., Brazil, India, and China, said they hide their sexual identity in the workplace, according to research by the Center for Talent Innovation.
Most major American firms say they ensure that the protections employees enjoy in the U.S. extend to offices abroad, said Todd Sears, founder and principal of Out Leadership, a New York-based consulting firm.
The U.S. government does the same, offering diversity training to employees worldwide, said Regina Jun, president of GLIFAA, which represents LGBT workers at the State Department and other foreign-affairs agencies. While some employees choose not to serve in places where the sociopolitical climate is especially hostile, many go anyway, she said. The reality in some countries is that LGBT employees face a stark choice about how to live their lives. Some couples prefer to maintain domestic partnership status rather than marry, even though that means forgoing health coverage for a partner. This is because U.S. marriage records are public, and an embassy employee could theoretically be “outed” if someone wanted to search databases, Jun said.
While companies say they’re consistent in supporting equality or inclusiveness globally, they adapt the way the message is delivered, depending on location. EY, the global consulting firm also known as Ernst & Young, opts to have a high-level executive talk about LGBT issues in some Asian countries because it carries more weight with employees and clients, said Chris Crespo, the EY Americas inclusiveness director. “We also make the business case that diversity helps performance not only from a talent perspective but in a company’s branding in the marketplace,” Crespo said.
As for employees, EY offers the same benefits to same-sex domestic partners that are given heterosexual couples working abroad, including help obtaining a visa for a partner.
In certain countries where discrimination is codified, that may not be possible. Companies often seek to dissuade workers from going to locations where they won’t be safe. For instance, a gay couple with children could face difficulty in Russia, which (like Lithuania and Nigeria) has outlawed LGBT advocacy, HRC said.
EY tries to accommodate workers who decline a move to inhospitable places, or those who get there and then ask to leave. Workers who do take jobs in countries with severe
Despite all of the attention placed on increasing the number of female executives at American companies, the needle on the gender gap has hardly moved. Pavle Sabic, author of S&P Global Market Intelligence report It’s inconceivable to force someone to go to a country where his kind are condemned to death for who they are.
anti-homosexuality laws tend to hide their sexual identity, Crespo said, and not surprisingly, same-sex partners are usually unable to get a visa to those countries. Such locales can also be hard for unmarried heterosexual couples, Crespo adds: “We’ve told (cohabiting heterosexual) employees that you’ll only be effective there if you’re married.”
Sears said what most companies do to protect their LGBT employees in the most difficult locations is to simply not send them. And when they do go, employees tend to just avoid mentioning their sexual identity.