Episode 16
· 32:41
Many folks in STEM, who don't identify as as LGBTQ will say, well, I don't care if my colleague identifies that way, but it doesn't belong here. It doesn't belong in the professional space. Like, don't talk about it here. And that on the surface sounds neutral, but that's a myth because people who are talking about heterosexual relationships or heterosexual families don't get that. Right?
Erin Cech:Someone who is talking about their heterosexual partner and their children don't get, told all of a sudden you're bringing politics into work.
Sonia Kang:What does being LGBTQ+ have to do with your job? Actually, a whole lot. LGBTQ+ plus people face many barriers at work and to being employed in the first place, like hiring discrimination, microaggressions, and lower earnings. And if people feel like they have to hide who they are at work, it can take a huge toll. So today, we're going to be busting the myth that being LGBTQ+ doesn't matter at work.
Sonia Kang:I'm Dr. Sonia Kang, Canada Research Chair in identity, diversity, and inclusion, and academic director at GATE.
Carmina Ravanera:And I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE. So this myth about sexual and gender identity not mattering at work is definitely a sticky one. People who are not LGBTQ+ may believe this myth because they're part of a dominant group and haven't had to think about how gender and sexual orientation might affect their professional lives. At least not to the same extent as members of minority, gender, and sexuality groups. They've never had to worry about how their gender or sexuality might impact things like their ability to get a job or how they're evaluated at work.
Carmina Ravanera:They also likely haven't had to hide their gender or sexuality at work or anywhere else for that matter.
Sonia Kang:Right. But our sexual and gender identities are part of who we are and influence how people perceive us and the opportunities we have.
Carmina Ravanera:Definitely. I talked to a couple of scholars who have done research in this area to help us debunk this myth. I first spoke to doctor Lee Airton, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies in education at Queen's University. They unpack this myth for us by explaining how a workplace is no different than any other space where people form relationships.
Lee Airton:I actually wanna start with just unpacking that idea that being a queer person or a trans person, that that isn't something that that would be relevant in your workplace. I mean, workplaces are first and foremost somewhere well, I know a lot of folks work remotely now, but still it's it's a place or community that you spend a lot of time in. And I think in the 21st century workplace, you recognize more than ever before that workplaces are relational spaces. Right? So you you can't really thrive and offer your best to your workplace and to your colleagues unless you are you feel comfortable with them.
Lee Airton:Unless the, the, the Monday morning small talk about what you did on your weekend, invites you in where you feel like you can actually authentically say, oh, well my partner and I, or if you're a man and your, and your partner is a man and you can use his correct pronouns. Or if you have a partner with non binary pronouns, like they, them, for example. There's, there's nothing that human beings do that doesn't come back to the relationships we have and that includes the workplace. So I think a major barrier is going to be, that anxiety and that constant sort of hypervigilance that's created when you know that the people in your workplace are not, accepting of LGBTQ+ people. Right?
Lee Airton:So if you know that there's someone or especially someone with position of power over you who has, like, views or thoughts or feelings about gender and sexuality that mean your life and your relationships are not good, or not the norm. So that is that burden of of, checking yourself and kind of thinking and rethinking and overthinking what you do share with people who you work with, even in casual conversation. I mean, that is a significant cognitive load that will definitely detract from your performance and that's gonna detract from your ability to excel and and advance in that workplace too. So that that's just one barrier.
Sonia Kang:Whether they're virtual or in person, workplaces are where people connect with each other, work together on common goals, and form relationships and even friendships. So hiding who you are in day to day interactions can be, as Lee says, a really heavy load.
Carmina Ravanera:Yeah. But people may use this strategy because they know they'll face discrimination if they don't. This is called identity management. You're managing how you present aspects of your identity to avoid being discriminated against. Research shows that LGBTQ+ job seekers hide who they are to get a job because they believe they wouldn't be hired otherwise.
Sonia Kang:Right. Navigating sexual and gender identity in the workplace can be exhausting, especially if you expect that you'll be mistreated or excluded.
Carmina Ravanera:So what are the effects of this exclusion on LGBTQ+ folks? I spoke to doctor Erin Cech, associate professor of sociology and mechanical engineering by courtesy at the University of Michigan. She's done research on how LGBTQ+ employees in the US experience their workplaces, including with professionals who work in science, technology, engineering, and math, otherwise known as STEM.
Erin Cech:When I started this work, it was pretty clear that LGBTQ identifying workers were experiencing personal devaluation or personal isolation within the context of the workplace. Their colleagues might be disassociating from them or not treating them as warmly as non LGBTQ colleagues, and that certainly has follow on implications in terms of their ability to have access to things like, informal connections and the kind of mentoring relationships that we know are important for success in the workforce. But what was not totally clear is the extent to which that has implications for other kinds of workplace opportunities and workplace experiences. And so what my work had intended to do was to expand our our understanding of those potential concerns to look at both experiences of professional respect and opportunities and also the extent to which those things that they experience in the workplace might actually lead to really personal implications. So some of the things I've found is that in addition to these kinds of, experiences of social marginalization and isolation, LGBTQ identifying professionals, I've looked at this both in the, in the workforce more broadly and in STEM specifically, are more likely to encounter colleagues who, devalue them professionally, who question their expertise in the workplace, for example, and also that those kinds of negative encounters that they have with bias in the workplace actually get under under their skin in particular ways.
Erin Cech:In that LGBTQ identifying professionals are more likely to experience more negative health and wellness outcomes, for example, have are more likely to have depressive symptoms and are more likely to experience, insomnia, for example, in the connection to their negative treatment in the workplace.
Sonia Kang:So this exclusion can happen personally and professionally. Not only is there the social isolation that Lee mentioned, but also devaluation. LGBTQ+ folks may have their professional expertise questioned or ignored. It's no wonder that these experiences create problems for people's physical and mental health. For instance, getting sick more often or experiencing anxiety or depression.
Sonia Kang:It's hard to have to deal with those situations every single day.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. And we talk about intersectionality a lot on this podcast, so it should be no surprise that taking an intersectional lens here is crucial for understanding these experiences. Erin's research has also focused on how gender and race play a role in LGBTQ plus workers' experiences.
Erin Cech:And so what my work has done is to ask, well, how might these kinds of experiences by LGBTQ status, for example, vary by axes like gender and race? And what I find is that, LGBTQ identifying persons of color tend to have more negative experiences than white LGBTQ identifying persons along the lines of what we've seen in other research that has focused on things like racial inequities. The same thing goes for gender, LGBTQ identifying women are more likely to experience things like harassment and professional devaluation than those who identify as men. But even looking at those even even accounting for the general general differences by gender and race, ethnicity and other axes of difference, we still find that there are inequities along the lines of LGBTQ identity across the board.
Erin Cech:So even when we account for for differences along other axes, those differences by LGBTQ status still show through.
Sonia Kang:That makes sense. Racialized LGBTQ+ women not only have to contend with exclusion based on their sexual identities, but also because of gender and racial bias and stereotyping. Every aspect of our identities affect how we experience the world.
Carmina Ravanera:The other thing I want to point out is that we often lump LGBTQ+ workers together when discussing their experiences. But people within this group will obviously have different experiences from each other as well. Lee spoke to me about this in our interview.
Lee Airton:But for trans employees in particular, we, and I say we because I'm a trans person myself and I'm employed. So we we have even in this era where we've had in Ontario, for example, gender identity and gender expression human rights protections on the books in the act, for over 10 years. We're still in a position where our employers, whether prospective or current, don't quite yet understand what it looks like to prevent and respond to discrimination. Because so many of the ways that trans people have been sort of shut out of public and social life, those are kind of ingrained. So the idea that you can assume what a person's pronouns are or, we don't we don't actually know if there's a gender neutral bathroom, in this building, or or there isn't one and and that's okay.
Lee Airton:Or we're having a corporate retreat to in, like to, to a lodge or an event center or something. And we actually haven't thought about, facilities and whether there are accessible all gender facilities there. And so for trans people, we often show up, to a workplace that just hasn't actually thought about how these assumptions structure what happens there. Right? So what we unstructured expectations around what, what, what professionalism looks like or what, what, how long it should take to go to the bathroom and come back.
Lee Airton:If the bathroom is an elevator and a long walk away because it's the only all gender one in the building. My trans my trans community members and myself, we are often teachers. This generation of trans workers, especially, we are going into workplaces and we are doing a lot of educating, and educating in relationships where there are very unequal power dynamics. Right? Having to, having to alert folks who are much more senior than us, who have a lot more experience and longevity in that workplace when they misgender us or say the wrong pronoun or gender term.
Lee Airton:And and it's it's quite it feel can feel very precarious. So I think to wrap it all up, I'd say that, trans workers in particular are coming up against norms and expectations or gender that many people in workplaces don't even know are there. And so we stand out a lot and in many ways, more so, at times than our than our queer, cisgender colleagues.
Sonia Kang:Right. While LGBTQ+ employees may face a lot of the same or similar barriers at work, trans employees have to cope with the additional burden of having to educate about gender diversity and what that means for workplaces.
Carmina Ravanera:Now I want to zoom out from workplaces here and think about the impacts of LGBTQ+ discrimination and marginalization more broadly. Having inequitable access to work along with other forms of marginalization can lead to dire outcomes. I spoke to doctor Bianca D M Wilson, who is an associate professor of social welfare at UCLA. She talked to me about her research on LGBTQ+ populations and economic insecurity.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:We have fairly consistently over the last 15 years seen that LGBT people experience higher rates of poverty. That's been pretty consistent. And the more data that let us actually ask questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, and, you know, keeping in mind my work is primarily in the US, but I do work with some groups there, I found somewhat similar, you know, similar findings too. That the more we get information about sexual orientation and gender identity in our populations, the more we've been able to continue to validate those findings that we've been seeing for years. So, for example, LGBT people in the last study my colleagues and I did, using 2021 data, national health data that asked about income, but also sexual orientation and gender identity.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:We saw that 17% of the LGBT people were experiencing poverty, like, living below the poverty line in the US, whereas 12% of straight cisgender people were experiencing poverty. When we look within LGBT people and separate both by gender identity, so those who are cisgender sexual minorities, meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual people who are cisgender, and compare them to transgender folks across sexual orientation, we see that transgender people have the highest one of the highest rates of poverty and in fact are one of the driving subgroups of what we know about poverty. But it wasn't just trans people. It was also cisgender bisexual women had equally high rates of poverty to trans folks. Similarly, when we talk about race, when we look with among LGBTQ people, we see racialized disparities similar to what we see among straight cis people.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:Queer people of color have much higher rates of poverty and other forms of economic instability, food insecurity, housing issues compared to white LGBTQ people and that that has remained relatively consistent too.
Carmina Ravanera:Bianca told me that there are many different factors that contribute to these outcomes. For example, in one of her studies, LGBTQ+ people of color, in particular, reported experiencing intergenerational poverty. Other LGBTQ+ folks reported substance abuse, mental health issues, and lack of affordability when raising families. These issues drive economic insecurity for all people, not just LGBTQ+ folks, but LGBTQ+ people face many specific additional barriers.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:That included factors like being rejected from parents. And, you know, so for people that we interviewed that say grew up middle class, grew up upper, like, upper income, the rejection from their families for being trans or for being gay meant a loss of the financial support that their peers in their economic group would normally have as they moved into adulthood. So that was a major factor that's, like, very unique to an LGBT experience that like major break. And then of course also our participants talked about discrimination in employment, in housing, in food services, in shelters. So those were also significant factors.
Sonia Kang:Basically, economic security and sexual and gender identity are linked in many ways. While being LGBTQ+ is not the only risk factor for economic insecurity, it can create barriers that exacerbate it.
Carmina Ravanera:I also want to point out that everyone in a society loses out when people are marginalized. Erin talked to me about why it's so important for organizations to address this issue, particularly in the context of STEM, but I think her insights could apply to many other industries as well.
Erin Cech:These kinds of experiences are not just disadvantageous for LGBTQ persons themselves, but they're bad for workplaces and bad for professions overall. So when LGBTQ identifying professionals experience devaluation, marginalization, things like that, it can affect them negatively. It can lead to them being less likely to want to continue in the line of work. So in my research in STEM , for example, I find that LGBTQ identifying STEM professionals are more likely to think about leaving STEM entirely or going and searching for a new job. Those are sort of issues of retention that not only are problematic for individual workers, but are bad for the profession.
Erin Cech:They're bad for STEM overall, for example. Right? We're losing people who are who are well trained and experienced, that that have nothing to do with their performance in those spaces, but rather have to do with the kind of biases that they're encountering. And so in addition to this kind of retention issue that can come up with these issues of disadvantage, there's also an underutilization of of a deep bench of talent. So what I talk about in the context of STEM, for example, is that we need all the talented, invested folks that we can get in this space.
Erin Cech:Right? These are difficult, complex problems that that STEM folks are facing, and we need all the smart people we can get to stay and be committed to these fields. And so undercutting diversification in whatever axis we're talking about, LGBTQ identification included, we're robbing these spaces of the talent, of these individuals. It is not only an issue of just basic equity, which it certainly is, but it's also an issue of how do we make sure that we are, putting our best foot forward to solving the pressing problems that professional communities are communities are facing.
Sonia Kang:Whether we're talking about STEM or any other sector from business to arts to education, when a whole group of people is unable to thrive, our society can't thrive either. So the question is, what can people do to address inequality for LGBTQ+ people?
Carmina Ravanera:It's a complex issue that needs to be addressed through education and public and organizational policy. But for individuals, I think Lee had a great suggestion about getting people to question their biases and educate themselves.
Lee Airton:I would say that the number one thing colleagues can do is to learn to differentiate between their own feelings of being unsure, and versus their feelings of being unsafe. Right? So we often see that those feelings can kind of run together and can be hard to pick apart. But if you're if you're uncomfortable, or unsure and if you're if you're somewhere in that neighborhood because you don't know what to say or you didn't expect to see that person who is otherwise behaving completely normally and appropriately in a bathroom or in another space of that kind, if that's not what you expected, that is not the same thing as being unsafe. But because for so many folks, gender diversity is new.
Lee Airton:It's increasingly less new, which is helpful and unhelpful because that also means a lot of misinformation floats around in addition to the information. It's important as a colleague to to get a handle on when you are noticing that you have you are learning, you are rethinking versus when something is happening that's actually making you unsafe in your workplace. And I think that's really important because especially when the issue of gender diversity is becoming quite polarized. But I think that's the number one thing people can do, is differentiate discomfort, learning from a feeling of being unsafe. And when you feel that discomfort, lean in, access some resources, and do your best to meet folks' needs in the same way they're meeting your own.
Carmina Ravanera:Speaking of resources and education, Lee recently released a second edition of their book, Gender Your Guide. In this book, they explain how to better understand, converse about, and navigate gender, and I encourage everyone to check it out. And education and other kinds of individual efforts are important, but as we always say, individual efforts are undermined by systems and policy that aren't set up to support them. Bianca and I spoke about this, how public policies can make a difference if they're implemented properly.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:When you think about the policies that are promising solutions and tie it back to our data that emphasize some of these general concerns, then that would suggest that clearly programs that support all people struggling are also gonna help LGBTQ people. Right? So our guaranteed income programs, housing programs, assistance with childcare, food insecurity. But, of course, there are also LGBT specific policies that are gonna matter because, kind of queerness is still one of the factors, one of the issues related to the discrimination experience. So LGBT specific policies are needed, you know, given reports of job discrimination in our study and other people's studies.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:You know, that we we know that, like in the US, with a Supreme Court decision saying sexual orientation and gender identity are included under the prohibition of sex discrimination in employment. So that's important. And yet we now know that that still exists. That exists now, but we still hear reports of discrimination. So policies are important, but we also need to be looking at the implementation and enforcement.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:Because even in policy protective environments, like the US in many ways now, like Canada, when I think of in the specific state that I live in in California, these are relatively policy protective environments and yet discrimination is still happening. So it means that policies are an important foundation but not the end right so we need to look at that implementation and and enforcement. One other domain of policies that when we talk about LGBTQ poverty to not lose sight of given what we know about LGBT poverty and it being driven so heavily by the people of color. We also need to make sure we don't forget about the policies that are assumed to help racial economic justice. So those policies like reparations, support of native sovereignty, and economic independence.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:Policies geared toward addressing generations of intentional impoverishment among racialized minority communities are also policies that are gonna specifically help LGBTQ people.
Sonia Kang:So public policy that helps members of other marginalized groups can also help LGBTQ+ people who are economically insecure. Race, class, and sexual and gender identity are intertwined. Policy solutions that assist racialized people will also assist LGBTQ plus communities and vice versa. Now let's bust this myth once and for all. If someone were to say to me that being LGBTQ+ does not matter for people's professional lives, what could I say?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, there are a couple of things you could start with. Lee mentioned that you could take a humorous or light tone to point out that queer and trans people are in the workplace and that they belong there and that being themselves matters.
Lee Airton:It's one of my one of the great pleasures of my life is being silly with other people. So for me, I might say something like, well, I guess no one had to talk about this when it was only straight white men working here. But that not that might not be your style. So it was assumed that everyone was just like a straight white man who had a straight white wife at home who didn't work and stayed home and took care of the house and the kids. No one had had to actually share much about that because it was so understood when those were the only people in the c suite or when they were the only people in the manager's meeting or the only people there at all except for apart from secretaries.
Lee Airton:So I think that's attack that I might take, but that again draws very heavily on my my personality and my my my ways I love humor. I think, if someone's less into taking that tack, I think if they heard someone say being LGBTQ+ , like, that has nothing to do with the workplace, I think I might say, oh, yeah. So when someone says when someone asks you what you did on the weekend, what do you say? And then just listening for the cues that probably this person is in a heterosexual relationship and they are using, you know, seamlessly using without thinking pronouns that indicate all the people they spoke about are cisgender. And then just lightly pointing it out and saying, well, what if someone's partner who they had dinner with on Friday was non binary?
Lee Airton:That's why this is with us in the workplace because queer and trans people are here and we aren't going anywhere.
Carmina Ravanera:And Erin said that you could point out how heteronormativity runs so deep that people often don't consider the ways that it comes up in and affects work and employment. She told me about some examples from STEM professions.
Erin Cech:So one of the examples I often give is that, in an interview I conducted with, a biology graduate student who identifies as gay, he was talking about how his biology classes were so, overwhelmingly focused on heterosexual relationships between animals. So he talked about that they would only focus on heterosexual relationships between the fish. And those fish might have 3 or 4 gender mating systems, but they never talked about those other kinds of gender mating systems. And in that way, in the in the kind of cultural prioritization of particular ways of interaction, it actually led to a, a simplification or an ignoring of certain parts of, like, the biological systems because those things were seen as sort of the less, you know, quote, unquote, real way, of of of mating systems happening. And there's all kinds of ways in which we use, analogies that have to do with, with humans as shorthand.
Erin Cech:So for example, in circuitry, there's often a male plug and a female plug, and they're talked about it that way. Right? And so these because culturally, like, heteronormativity runs deep, that also means that that can inflect, the ways that we interact with with with fellow professionals or even interact with the kind of content that we work on in a day to day basis in ways that we don't necessarily think of as being inflected with, you know, norms as gender or sexual identity, but can be, in really sort of surprising, and powerful ways.
Carmina Ravanera:And finally, Bianca pointed to how the evidence clearly shows that being LGBTQ+ is definitely connected to work experiences and outcomes.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:Well, for one, they can definitely point to the data we have on LGBT poverty. We know that they're experiencing more poverty. We know the whole concept of poverty is about how much money you have in the household. Money is associated with the ability to get work and and have a quality standard of living. So we know that the poverty rates are there.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:But I would also tell them to listen to LGBT people because they've been saying it for decades now that it matters. We have decades of research and anecdotal reports about people needing to hide the gender of their partners in the workplace or actually being fired because if someone found out that they were gay or trans. Our own research had many examples of of this. So one participant was non binary, black, middle aged, you know, in in their forties, talked about, you know, how many times they got into an interview that they seem very positive about them over the phone. And then once in front of them, they were struggling with pronouns and seem irritated.
Bianca D.M. Wilson:And then they never got the job. You know? Or trans women that talk to us about having similar experiences of very negative responses once they show up for an interview. Lesbian women that talked about not getting promotions and feeling that that was you know, they heard comments about them being gay in the workplace. So our research for decades now have shown us reports of these specific experiences.
Sonia Kang:Basically, being LGBTQ plus affects whether people can find jobs, how they experience workplaces, their relationships with colleagues, and their overall economic security. So I think we can definitely say that this myth is busted. With that, please make sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode of busted. We'll be busting myths around menstruation.
Carmina Ravanera:Until next time, happy myth busting!
Carmina Ravanera:GATE's busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to busted. You can also find more interesting podcast series from the Institute For Gender and the Economy by searching GATE Audio wherever you find your podcasts.
Carmina Ravanera:Thanks for tuning in.
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