How You can support your LGBTQ+ Staff this Pride Month

Pride month is a time when a lot of businesses become more aware of what they can do to support their LGBTQ+ employees. For many businesses, it is also a time where they merely pay lip service to the month by ‘rainbow washing’ their social media with tone-deaf displays of slacktivism. I am lucky to say that where I work neither of these scenarios is true. JGP Consultancy does not use Pride as a wake-up call to start thinking about how to support its LGBTQ+ employees, because it is understood that this is a year-round responsibility for all businesses in this day and age. As an openly gay and third gender team member, I have had experiences in other workplaces where this was far from true. It is still surprisingly rare for queer people to find themselves in working environments where it is the norm that they feel like fully welcomed and supported members of the team. This is partly because many people have little experience interacting with members of the LGBTQ+ community in their personal lives.?

One way that my experience at JGP Consultancy has been different from other places I have worked is by being treated with honesty and respect. At other places of work and in my education, I found myself often being underestimated intellectually, mostly on the basis of my appearance and behaviours. This is a very common experience many people in the LGBTQ+ community face in the world of work, and this underestimation hinders our confidence to assert our opinions and knowledge in professional settings. I recall once overhearing a co-worker at a previous job openly dismissing my value at work in a conversation with other employees. In this conversation, my sexuality was brought up multiple times. Overhearing this demotivated me and caused me to disengage with my work, feeling that no matter what I did it wouldn’t be respected by colleagues.?

At JGP I have been consistently uplifted and respected by the team I work with. This is important for anybody to work effectively and feel motivated but it is especially important for somebody who has experienced the opposite before. My colleagues have made a conscious effort to engage with me respectfully and with courtesy. This has been through some very simple actions.?

Some ways my co-workers have helped make me feel seen and respected as a queer person in the workplace are:?

Respecting pronouns?

As a gender minority I use he/him, they/them, and she/her pronouns. I include this in my LinkedIn profile and my email signature but it can often trip people up or cause some confusion. My colleagues have taken the time and care to ask me about this in a respectful way ensuring my comfort to explain my pronouns. This is so important because it shows that my team are valuing my experience and want to understand how I experience the world. Many people in working environments avoid conversations about pronouns and worse still, without leadership intervention they often ignore a person’s pronouns. In other places of work, I have not felt comfortable expressing my preferred pronouns or explaining why I use the pronouns that I do, at JGP I have felt seen and respected enough to be confident to have this conversation.?

Acknowledging Queer Culture?

LGBTQ+ people have historically been excluded from various aspects of mainstream culture and life, and this led to the development of a distinct queer culture that in times past was an essential life raft for our community to connect. While this is no longer the case queer culture is still an important part of how many of us see the world. My colleagues have acknowledged its importance to me and have asked respectful questions about different aspects of queer culture. For some LGBTQ+ people, this might not be something they want to experience at work but for me, it means a lot to know that the people I work with respect queer culture enough to ask questions about it and show interest. ?

Displaying Allyship through Normal Behaviours?

Many people think that the way to be an ally is to always be at a 10, overemphasising their support of queer people in very performative ways. This can manifest itself in ways that are actually harmful. Some people will overly utilise queer slang, tokenise LGBTQ+ staff through positive discrimination, and rainbow wash on social media. This does not help us as a community, if anything it trivialises us and makes us feel like caricatures of what a gay person or a trans person is supposed to be. My colleagues display their allyship by instead treating me as an equal and respecting me in conversations around equality, diversity, and inclusion that I have a relevant perspective that will enrich a decision-making process. This is massively important because I don’t want to be the token anything in a working environment, but when my identity has relevance to a conversation, I am comfortable being acknowledged for my point of view and experience. This is a tricky balancing act to manage and works best when LGBTQ+ staff feel comfortable enough to be open and confident in their sexual orientation or gender identity at work.?

Not having an LGBTQ+ Wage Gap?

We often hear about a gender wage gap, but what few people know is that there are also wage gaps for people who are disabled, people of colour, and people in the LGBTQ+ community. I have previously experienced situations where equally qualified straight co-workers in the same role were making more money than I was. This is not okay, and thankfully something I have only experienced once before. In my current role at JGP, I am paid fairly and equally to a straight counterpart would be. This should be the norm across the board for how businesses pay their employees. ?

Sometimes it can be difficult to know how to approach expressing myself in the world of work, and I have often found myself watering down how I comfortably express my gender identity and sexuality when I’m on the clock. At JGP I have been free to be myself at work, that is something that can be quite rare for anybody regardless of how they identify. The way to support each other at work is by embracing people as they are, and for who they are. Far too often we play the part of whom we think we ought to be in the world of work. I know I have been able to excel at work because I have had the support from my colleagues to simply be myself.?