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Pride events with your company
Have you done pride events with or at your company? Mine is going to be in the parade and I can walk with them. CFO is gay and they have been very helpful with my transition so I don't feel like they are faking it.
For others, how has your workplace acted or have they done anything related?
I work in childcare so we always do something for it but it’s always a little touchy. This week I had to explain to a newer staff member that no, it’s not influencing the children to normalise lbtq. She took it and she got it but fucking hell… every year someone says something just painful
To answer the original question, we’re doing a rainbow week. So for the young ones we’ll just make rainbows and for the older ones we’ll talk about what it symbolises (lbtq) and read some stories with some non heterosexual or cis people in (I don’t know if I worded that right but hopefully you get the gist). In some classes we have children with two mums/dads so it’s already normalised but not all children have that so it’s a good opportunity to give them that cultural capital
That's great, I'm a trans mom so my daughter gets picked up from daycare by either mom.
My current employer (semiconductor industry related) has quite the collection of rainbow swag for the LGBTQ+ employee resource group and anyone else who wants it, and we're doing an ice cream social for anyone who's interested. It's a small site so it's hard to do anything too big. There's actually quite a few LGBTQ+ employees, including a manager, and I feel like we don't have any problems with the company culture. And, well, rainbows are fun! The new Pride Month company lanyard is actually really awesome looking, if rainbows are your thing.
It's more the year-round things, like not having to lie about the gender of some of my exes, that matter to me though.
Agreed. The company I work for is celebrating Pride Month globally with numerous events spanning several time zones throughout the month, but as you said, it's more of the year-round stuff that I appreciate as far as our company culture. It's common for people to have their pronouns in their email signatures (and plenty who choose not to, which is fine as well!); we have resources for transgender and GNC employees for how to transition at work (changing their first names for emails, etc. without necessarily requiring a legal name change for example); and we have an employee resource group for LGBTQ+ employees. For the most part, people just treat you like a normal colleague regardless of where you do or don't fall on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. I really like that about the company.
Yeah, my company is totally on board and also the customer we work for has a pride group that spans a few different organizations.
A long time ago (about 15 years ago?), I was working at a large corporation, and... long story short, I ended up co-organising the brand-new "Gay and Lesbian Employee Network" with the lesbian who came up with the idea. (Sorry, transgender people: you weren't actively excluded, we were just a bit less aware in those days.)
For the first year or so, we organised local get-togethers in various cities around the country, for any LGBT+ staff who felt like joining in. The company assisted with some minor funding, but us members mostly had to pay for everything out of our own pockets.
Then some of our members came up with the idea of putting a group in the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Suddenly, the company was more interested.
For context: this company had about 20,000 employees, with offices all around the country. However, the head office was in another state, not New South Wales where the Mardi Gras is. That meant the majority of the company's employees were in that city, not in Sydney.
The company agreed to help us join the Mardi Gras:
It would not pay any travel or accommodation costs for employees travelling interstate to the event.
It provided us with branded T-shirts to wear in the march.
It paid for some local advertising in Sydney, to promote its involvement in the Mardi Gras.
The other organiser and I felt like our group was being used for the company's selfish purposes, but the employees themselves were so excited to be marching as part of a group that we didn't want to pull out of the march and spoil their fun. Also, it was still a novelty for companies to be so accepting of their LGBT+ employees, and we didn't want to discourage the company from doing more in the future. So, we marched with a small group of employees (the ones local to Sydney and the ones who were coming interstate to the event anyway), in company-branded shirts, with a drag queen leading the way wearing a costume made out of old corporate marketing materials.
I felt dirty, and not in the fun way.
Later that year, the company won an award at an annual LGBTQ inclusion event, run by a local queer advocacy organisation.
I felt used.
Nothing, not even a "happy pride" message in public channels, as posting one would get you to be the next target of the bigoted bullies. We called out this lack of psychological safety, and the leadership's response is to draft a "no politics in the workplace" policy (like basecamp and coinbase).
That's a tech company with "we foster diversity" copy everywhere, but it's just a bait and switch. They will be losing great employees because if this.
Wow, that's bad. Sorry they did that.