Straight or gay? Your company wants to know, but don’t worry

ARE you gay? The question isn’t taboo in the workplace anymore, for better or worse.

JPMorgan Chase’s human resources department is asking employees for the first time this year if they’d like to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity. Companies including Facebook, Deutsche Bank, IBM and AT&T also collect the data. By one measure, nearly half of the largest US businesses – under pressure to be inclusive as they compete for talent – seek to gather information on who on the payroll is homosexual, bisexual or transgender so better benefit plans can be designed and managers can consider diversityenhancing promotions.

“Collecting the data is not weird now,” says Gary Gates, a retired demographer from UCLA Law School’s Charles R Williams Institute. With the US Supreme Court having legalised same-sex marriage and the military abandoning its don’t ask, don’t tell policy, “there’s much less fear and stigma”.

That may be true, but there’s enough peril that Chevron decided not to pose the question after a review identified data-security risks.

Many that have studied the issue opted not to proceed, says Michelle Phillips, a lawyer with Jackson Lewis in White Plains, New York, who advises companies on employment law. Phillips says one worry is that a rogue employee might leak the information about a colleague to do him or her harm.

There are a host of concerns – including that it’s legal in 28 states, from Montana to Virginia, to discriminate against anyone who isn’t heterosexual. The issue is more urgent for people who work in or travel for work to the more than 76 countries where homosexuality is a crime. Companies are careful: American Express, which has been collecting sexual-orientation specifics in the US for 10 years, is adding a question about gender identify only in countries where that’s legal, says Chris Meyrick, the chief diversity officer. Businesses that do ask the questions make it clear it’s voluntar- ily to answer.

For former Ford Motor chief financial officer Allan Gilmour, who came out as gay in the 1990s after twice being passed over for chief executive, it’s a pleasant surprise that employers are interested.

“I never would guessed 20 years ago that questions of this kind would be asked,” he says. Back then, it was best to operate as though “this is nobody’s business except mine”.

Tom Barefoot, a strategic planning manager and senior vice president at Wells Fargo in Charlotte, North Carolina, was one of the employees who encouraged the bank to adopt the self-identify policy in 2011. “When I finally clicked that one field on my sexual orientation,it was just like time had stopped,” he says. “I’m actually putting into our HR system that I’m gay? It felt really good.”

About 2.1 percent of EY (Ernst & Young) workers reported being LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) in the anonymous surveys.

The human resources data collected is too new for comparison, Crespo says, though EY estimates that 2.1 percent is half the actual percentage.

At EY and many other companies, she says, about 4 percent of people prefer not to answer, saying they don’t trust the question or consider it inappropriate. – Bloomberg