Why Organisations Should Practice What They Preach During Pride Month

It’s Pride month*, and the rainbow display pictures are out. There is a lot of conversation around different issues the LGBTQIA+ communities in India face, including access to education and employment. We spoke to Moulee, a Diversity and Inclusion strategist, and co-founder of Queer Chennai Chronicles, on how organisations can be more inclusive in general, and especially when it comes to LGBTQIA+ persons. Excerpts below:

Why should organisations care about inclusion in general, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion in particular?

The simple answer is — it’s the right thing to do. All organisations need to include everyone because that’s the right thing to do.

The second reason, I would say, is because organisations need to stay true to their policy. Organisations usually have a detailed policy about how they do not discriminate against a person based on their gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, caste, and other markers. They would have put a lot of effort into drafting this policy; many organisations draft policies carefully based on their geographic location — for example, sexual orientation may not be explicitly stated in some countries where it is outright illegal to be queer, and there is a penalty attached to it. Not only do organisations have these things in their written policies, they also actively promote themselves on these parameters. They talk about the work they do with regards to inclusion of all employees. So, when they say that they are including employees — everyone — it is directly related to their business.

But above all, the third thing is about the consumer market that they’re working on. Many organisations don’t have a specific ‘set’ of consumers — consumers are diverse, especially when it comes to product companies or even software. So, there will be people from different walks of life who are your consumers. And what happens is when these products do not work for a certain community, for example, persons with disability; or if it is a security software automatically blocks every website that has the term ‘LGBTQIA+’ or ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ or ‘transgender’? Then, the consumer is ultimately going to get disappointed. The organisation will have to rectify it — and spend more money on this. This, then, becomes a business loss for the organisation, and organisations need to look into inclusion for all these reasons.

How can organisations ensure diversity in their teams? What should hiring managers be looking at?

To ensure diversity, it is important for organisations to first look into their existing policies, and how they are hiring people. Sometimes a lot of potential candidates, talented potential candidates, may not even apply to a job because they think that they will not get hired by that company. Organisations should think about why they give that sort of a vibe to people.

For example, there’s a study which says that men usually apply to a job even if they are not qualified. But women, even if they are overqualified, don’t apply to the job because they think that they are not eligible for the job. This is because we have societal attitudes that, say, in technical jobs, hiring managers usually tend to pick men.

So, organisations then need to not just sensitise a hiring manager, but the recruiter — the person who reaches out to the candidate. Studies show that recruiters spend less than seven seconds to go through a resume. That’s not enough time for anyone to understand a candidate — unless someone has the skill of editing a beautiful resume. That’s a skill yes — but that’s not the skill you want for a technical job, right?

Second thing is to have a hiring panel instead of a hiring manager, and this interview panel should be diverse. Is a man going to interview all the women candidates? Is an able-bodied person going to interview persons with disabilities? There’s existing prejudice in these scenarios.

But these are all only small steps to mitigate the symptoms. It’s not ultimately going to change unless the organisation culture changes overall. The interviews need to be accessible — for example, if you are going to interview a trans person, organisations need to understand practical issues, like having different names and gender markers on their mark sheets. A trans person would also need to navigate office security to even come into your building — so, IT park owners need to work with their security teams and see how they can make it easier for candidates to come into the interview.

And at the end of the interview, they need to have an evaluation process which actually looks into all these social factors. So, unless they do these things in detail — and this requires a lot of investment for every organisation — we are just addressing the symptoms, and not the root cause of an issue.

Beyond hiring, what should organisations do to ensure their LGBTQIA+ employees and their families, including partners, are happy and safe?

Organisations need to look at doing periodic surveys for all the employees, because one when we talk about inclusion, there’s something on paper, and then something that happens in reality. These are two different things.

Currently, what organisations have is an employee satisfaction survey, which in general looks into how employees are in the workplace. However, these surveys are not specific to the inclusion of the employees. What would help is that they have an annual study or survey, asking employees how they feel about their promotion, pay, how their work is being assessed by their manager, and how they are being treated by their fellow employees.

With such a study, you can easily note how the career growth of two persons who have the same experience, but different gender or sexual orientation is within the organisation. And, if there is a difference in their career growth — like if someone from the dominant group has a better career growth and the other person does not have it — it’d be easy to probe why this is happening. Especially when it comes to an LGBTQIA+ person, it is more important. It is easy for people to put up rainbow stickers on their laptop and say this is the safe space, but then when it comes to the appraisal, the manager could actually be doing things wrong.

A question on the larger queer movement in India: There are legal and policy fights for marriage rights, banning conversion therapy, reservations for trans persons etc. What should you prioritise?

I think these should happen in parallel, but for me, priority would be education and workplace inclusiveness. The other things are happening — there are litigations etc., so eventually there will be a verdict when it comes to, say, marriage equality.

But for me, the priorities are education and work, because these two things involve people’s livelihood — where a person can take care of themselves in the absence of a law.

When it comes to education, we need more sensitisation for teachers, and our curriculum needs to be revised as well to be more inclusive of gender diverse or gender non-conforming children. In workplaces, too, a lot of talent is being excluded because of their identities. There needs to be changes in the labour laws in the country, because if we are going to believe only in private organisations and their diversity policies, that is not going to work in the long run. Work needs to be done to look into the existing labour laws to see how they can be inclusive of LGBTQIA+ persons.

We talk a lot about allyship these days, but a lot of times, it gets reduced to convenient things like changing your display image or putting a post on social media like “love is love”. What should the cis-het society — especially those who believe they are political — do to be real allies?

First, I think they should use their privilege to talk about issues — to initiate the conversation. But they should not make it about themselves.

Secondly, allies who are political need to come out of the patronising language they use. A lot of queer persons today are a very assertive people, and are talking about what we need. But somewhere, the language of allies is a language of patronising. Like, “oh, these are poor people” or “they need our help.”

I understand where this comes from. But then the downside of this outlook is people do not see a queer person as someone who is capable of doing work; as someone, who’s capable of, you know, running an organisation or leading a team in a workplace. So, this patronising language needs to go. It’s not important to just use gender neutral language or have our pronouns entered into email signatures, but to do away with this patronising attitude because it affects the progress and growth, especially in the workplace.

I’ve seen a lot of people who patronise with stuff like, “I’ll be your friend in the office because no one is talking to you.” However, it’s not like they would actually extend that attitude when it comes to career growth. If both these persons are going to have cutthroat competition, no one is going to say, “Oh, this is a gay person. This is a lesbian woman. So let me give up my promotion.” No one is going to do it! They’re going to do what they have to do to get their promotion. So why be patronising in other aspects? Just treat us as equals.

First published in The News Minute members only Newsletter on *January 27, 2021. Interviewed by Ragamalika Karthikeyan. To support The News Minute, visit https://www.thenewsminute.com/supportus