Is Not Being Straight and Male A Barrier to Careers?

LGBT staff looking for work often face discrimination when applying for jobs.

Stonewall has collaborated with pollster YouGov to research how LGBT+ employees feel treated in the workplace. The findings paint a harrowing portrait of just how little recent moves towards widening diversity and inclusion have actually gone.

Getting a Job

Almost one in five of the LGBT community who were looking for work said they were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or gender identity while trying to get a job in the last year, according to the report.

More than a third of LGBT people (35 per cent) looking for work are worried about being discriminated against or harassed at work due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Getting a Promotion

Many survey respondents who had a job said they had weaker career prospects than their straight colleagues. ‘One in ten LGBT employees (10 per cent) say they didn’t get a promotion they were up for at work in the past year because they’re LGBT,’ said the report. ‘This number rises to 24 per cent of trans people, compared to seven per cent of LGB people who aren’t trans. Black, Asian and minority ethnic LGBT staff are also more likely to didn’t get a promotion, as are LGBT disabled people, 19 per cent and 16 per cent respectively.’

LGBT Companies Perform Better

While LGBTQ+ staff fight for recognition, studies show that companies with more of a focus on diversity and inclusion perform better than more conservative counterparts.

In 2016 Credit Suisse examined the impact that a focus on LGBT diversity had on corporate performance. The results showed that companies with openly LGBT management, companies voted in a recent survey as a leading LGBT company, or companies whose employees are openly members of local LGBT business networks, outperformed global stocks as well as a custom Credit Suisse index that included just companies based in the US, Europe, and Australia.

Gender Pay Gap Vs Profitability

This is the same story for women. Among the world’s largest 500 companies, only 10.9 percent of senior executives are women, according to Weber Schandwick’s Gender Forward Pioneer Index.

A significant 37% of those companies have all-male leadership teams, while just 21% have only one woman.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics completed a survey of 21,980 firms from 91 countries and found that having women at the C-Suite level significantly increases net margins.

‘A profitable firm at which 30 percent of leaders are women could expect to add more than 1 percentage point to its net margin compared with an otherwise similar firm with no female leaders,’ the report notes. ‘By way of comparison, the typical profitable firm in our sample had a net profit margin of 6.4 percent, so a 1 percentage point increase represents a 15 percent boost to profitability.’