#Pride2018: together we CAN make an impact!

The latest in a series of Pride 2018 celebrations will take place this weekend in London and I am pleased to see how much the business community, including Accenture, has had to celebrate. This month we reached 32,000 LGBT+ allies in Accenture globally and participated in more than 40 Pride events worldwide. It has been a standout, positive year.

At Accenture, we believe in a workplace where everyone – regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability – feels equally accepted. I believe our diversity makes us stronger, and we embrace diversity as a source of innovation, creativity and competitive advantage. Our ambition is to be the most inclusive and diverse company in the world.

 I want to recognize our people who are helping us on this journey. This year we received the Workplace Pride Benchmark as one of the TOP 4 employers with regards to LGBT+ inclusion globally, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Tom Veldhuis and Bey Cil.

Our businesses in Australia, supported heavily by Ian Goshko and Sonya Goldenberg, as well as the team in Argentina, marked the new legislation allowing same sex couples to get married in November last year with some celebrations, while in India we hosted an LGBT awareness session with several of our competitors. We all share the same vision for inclusion. We sponsored the Mardi Gras Film Festival in Sydney while on the other side of the globe, Accenture participated in the UK's biggest LGBT recruitment fair. Thanks to people like Oliver Holmes and Megan Cross, we were able to meet more than 2,000 LGBT students from 160 universities.

In the US, Monica Boll helped ensure that we were heavily involved in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) NYC Gala, a great event that provided a range of businesses to connect with friends, clients, colleagues and our community in support of equal rights. We hosted internal broadcasts in North America and Australia to celebrate and share employee stories in recognition of Transgender Day of Visibility.

In 2018, we have seen some big increases in Pride participation. For example, at Helsinki Pride in late June, the parade saw participation almost triple, to 100,000 people. Accenture was only one of many businesses that showed their support at the event, as the image at the top of this blog shows.

But we are not content with resting on our laurels and remain determined to keep growing and developing our support for LGBT equality. We are developing the next generation and have already hosted sessions in Shanghai and Milan for Accenture LGBT+ future leaders, with participants from 35 countries. Next month, we will continue this in North America. I must thank the efforts of Patrick Rowe, Cristine Rauh, Andy See, Ian Goshko and Javier Leonor for helping make this happen. We also announced that Javier Leonor, based in Amsterdam, was taking over as Global Pride lead from Zoya Zayler, who is based in Canada.

Accenture’s team in the Philippines take centre stage at Manila’s Pride celebrations 

All of these activities are part of our goal to ensure that we operate as an equitable organization by removing boundaries that prevent an inclusive and productive environment. For any business, this requires examining our differences and finding common ground. Accenture recently published our Getting to Equal research, finding that in cultures of equality, LGBT professionals are three times more likely to advance and are three times more satisfied with their career progression. Equality benefits productivity, innovation and retention of your workforce.  

Members of Accenture’s team in Brazil prepare for Pride celebrations  

So, why is all of this important to companies like Accenture? Let me leave you with the words of Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “If we are to achieve faster global progress towards equality for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and intersex people, businesses will not only have to meet their human rights responsibilities, they must become active agents of change.”

 Getting behind Pride 2018 – members of Accenture team in Australia