Pride Month - The limitations of being gay in life and business

Anyone who knows me personally, knows I am gay. 

June Pride month is always a time to stop and reflect on my personal journey, but also the lack of equality that still exists and how this impacts friends and colleagues.

My journey

Personally I was lucky to have grown up in Holland, one of the most forward thinking countries in their LGBTQ+ support. In my career, I have never directly felt discriminated against, because of my sexuality, my hard work has been rewarded time-and-time again, which has been a privilege and I realise I was lucky.

As a gay person you have to always be aware of your surroundings and any new people you encounter, make snap judgements about their intentions and decide how open you will be about your sexuality. This may seem like a small thing to most people, but it is exhausting and limiting. As open as I am, at times I too pretend to be straight to a taxi driver (or anyone I may encounter) when I am unsure of the response and my potential safety. Let's not even talk about holding hands in public with a man, this opens another level of security issues.

Living in Czech Republic in a committed relationship for 15 years, unfortunately means we cannot get married nor have children. People will argue that we can get a domestic partnership agreement, which is almost the same. But it is not equal. We function as full members of society, creating employment and paying the same taxes as anyone else, why should we not get the same rights?

I am happy to see organisations such as https://www.jsmefer.cz/ work hard to get this recognised. Most of Central and Eastern Europe sees similar if not worse challenges, with no immediate outlook of positive change.

Our company - competing for talent

We work hard at building the most diverse teams at Mews, the key requirement for a new hire has to be their talent, nothing else should matter. We debate and discuss this internally regularly, we too have unconscious biases that we need to unearth and educate ourselves on to push our boundaries of openness. This is a continuous process that will never stop.

As an employer (250+ employees and 50 open roles), we have to compete for the absolute best talent internationally. Unfortunately the lack of equality in countries like Czech Republic is one of the reasons why we miss out at times on hiring the best candidates, which is disappointing and simply unacceptable in 2021.

Equal is equal and we should not accept anything less.