LGBT+ Discrimination Is Bad for Society — and Bad for Business

What would the world be like if every LGBT+ person could participate openly in the economy — as consumers and at work?

By Todd Sears of Out Leadership

LWhat would the world be like if every LGBT+ person could participate openly in the economy — as consumers and at work?

Despite great progress, this is still an enormously pressing issue. Remarkably, in the United States, 46 percent of LGBT+ people are still in the closet at work, and a shocking 72 percent of senior LGBT+ executives are, too.

In the U.S. alone, 43 percent of LGBT+ workers have been fired, harassed or denied promotions at work because of their sexual orientation. The annual cost of replacing employees who were fired or left because they were discriminated against at work has been estimated at more than $64 billion.

Closeted employees are forced to waste time and energy hiding their true identities at work, negatively impacting their productivity.

And these statistics are only exacerbated for employees who live in more prejudicial environments, including the 74 countries where being gay is illegal.

The global business community has long been more interested in finding the value locked behind closet doors than governments have been — and the intersection between the interests of business and the interests of LGBT+ people has long been fruitful for both parties.

That’s why, in many countries, business leads the conversation about LGBT+ inclusion in the face of governmental inaction or discriminatory pressure.

For example, consider the 18 major corporate sponsors of Pink Dot in Singapore, whose support for LGBT+ rights has been controversial in a country where same-sex intimacy between men is criminalized.

Companies are often responsive to pressures from consumers and from employees. In the United States, businesses have been way out front of state and federal governments when it comes to every major civil rights advance LGBT+ people have made, from domestic partnerships to nondiscrimination protections to marriage equality.

In 2011, I founded Out Leadership, the global LGBT+ business advisory company. Our work is predicated on the idea that inclusion of LGBT+ people drives innovation, improves talent recruitment and retention, and has favorable brand impact for companies of every size. We work with the business leaders of 65+ multinationals to help them realize the upside of inclusion — and because business drives culture.

From a business standpoint, the case for LGBT+ inclusion is open-and-shut. Companies that are inclusive of LGBT+ people outperform the market and their industry peers once they have adopted inclusive policies.

Inclusive policies also help companies engage a growing global market of LGBT+ and ally consumers.

The LGBT+ market opportunity is more than $4 trillion globally. LGBT+ people and their allies are more likely to want to do business with companies that visibly take a stand in favor of inclusion.

Top talent looks to be a part of organizations where they’ll learn and be challenged, and organizations are best governed by leadership that draws on diversity of experience. Engaging on LGBT+ inclusion can help organizations make meaningful headway on those priorities.

Every country, including the United States, is at a different stage in its journey toward full equality for LGBT+ people. In some countries, political backlashes are threatening people’s lives and livelihoods.

But the substantial and growing global business consensus about the economic and moral value of inclusion of LGBT+ people is an important backstop to the rights we’ve won thus far.

Indeed, in some countries, multinationals are among the few institutions that visibly acknowledge the equality of LGBT+ people, and support or create spaces where LGBT+ people can be themselves — even in the face of official scrutiny.

In 2016, Pink Dot Singapore attracted more than 28,000 Singaporeans, who gathered within 600 square meters of Hong Lim Park to demonstrate for LGBT+ rights in the city-state — a tenfold increase in participants since the event began in 2009.

The next day, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said that it would “take steps to make it clear that foreign entities should not fund, support or influence such events.”

The impact the government’s statement will have on the ability of multinational firms chartered in Singapore to support Pink Dot in 2017 remains to be seen, although at least one company (Google) has already declared its intention to seek a permit.

At the Out Leadership: Asia 2016 Summit, Pink Dot steering committee member Alan Seah discussed the impact of this sort of support: “Because LGBT issues are still taboo in Singapore, and an event like Pink Dot is a real rarity, corporate sponsorship has been really amazing, because it normalizes the issue. It shows that these big companies, who are very successful and very progressive and very attractive to our government support this issue and are willing to do so publicly.”

Such companies are helping us discover what the world would be like if every LGBT+ person could participate openly in the economy. What are you — and what is your company — doing to help?

Read more essays from business leaders about the imperative of moving toward a more inclusive economy.