Back in the Closet

You have had to develop quite a bit of resilience over the years as you face discrimination against LGBTQ people and even if it's not outright discrimination, there's often examples of when people just make assumptions, right? You talked earlier about how people see that wedding ring on your finger and ask about your wife, and so you have to kind of bring them back around and say, "My partner is doing well, thank you." Can you describe an instance of when you have felt discriminated against and why is resilience such an important asset and quality for leadership?

Luckily, there haven't been a lot in the recent past, but my first job out of college, actually, I had a homophobic boss on my first job on Wall Street, and my second week on the job, he called the guy beside me the F-word and basically showed our entire floor that he was homophobic and was not comfortable with LGBTQ people. At that point, I was out to my family and to my friends, to my college friends, and I was out to a couple people in that organization but I immediately did what anybody does in a homophobic environment, I went back to the closet and I started looking for a new job. Ever since that moment, I decided that I would be out and that I would be very visibly out, that I would never hide who I was, and if it cost me a job or promotions or something else, then that was not the right company for me. So luckily, I have actually experienced very little discrimination since then but I have heard so many stories of leaderships who still do. In 27 states, it was still legal to be fired for being gay up until this last June and in 34 for being transgender, and that sort of pervasive not just homophobia but that sort of idea of a heteronormal society is incredibly pervasive, and I think that's really the challenge, so it's less outright discrimination but more stereotyping and really creating opportunities or barriers of access.

Amid that backdraft of ongoing discrimination and feeling like there isn't a safe environment to come out, how do you build resilience and why is resilience such an important leadership asset?

Yeah. Well, I'll share with you is that as part of that, and our recent ally Up research, we found that 58% of LGBTQ employees are still not out at work. That's a huge number, and within that, we found that LGBTQ women were almost 4 times less likely to be out at work. If you think about every single time an LGBTQ person has to come out, right, as a woman or person of color, you don't have to come out. You walk into a room and people know that you're a woman or you're a person of color, but every single room a gay person walks into, they have to assess for safety, they have to figure out if it's safe to come out, should they come out? What are the ramifications of coming out? Is everybody here cool with it? All of those things, that goes through a gay person's head in every single business opportunity, in every single business environment, so you have to be resilient, you have to be able to be okay with that, and I think that does make us incredibly empathetic as I mentioned before, it makes us really strong leaders.