The Gay Glass Ceiling
I’m fortunate enough to be working for an employer that takes diversity in the workplace serious. I have never, Never, felt more comfortable as a gay man in the workplace as I have at Space Telescope. The work environment I’ve experienced has been pleasant, professional, and genuinely good-natured. But I have worked in a hostile environment too, so I know how it is. I’ve been told to my face that there was "no place for homosexuals in our company". And I’ve been let go in situations that I was certain were about my sexual orientation and nothing else, even when other excuses were being made. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been threatened. I’ve seen the atmosphere turn on a dime, the instant my sexual orientation became known.
365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling. There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…
In one ingenious study at Rice University, undergraduates were fitted with one of two hats: one of them said “Texan and proud”; the other, “Gay and proud.” The students didn’t know which hat they were wearing, but they were instructed to apply for retail jobs.
The researchers found something interesting: the gay hat-wearing students were just as likely to be hired as the Texan-hat wearing students. There was no hiring discrimination (and in fact, the students were in a municipality that protects against gay employment discrimination). But the interviewers were more hostile toward the gay hat-wearing students and more likely to end the interview early.
Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.
I’ll bet they were. The difference between being gay, and being black or Hispanic, is that you can’t usually tell someone’s gay just by looking at them. Unless something in their job application or resume alerts them to it, a prospective employer isn’t likely to know that the person they’re interviewing for a job is gay. So white gay folks don’t generally experience job discrimination upfront. But unless the gay person is deeply, and I mean Deeply closeted, sooner or later their co-workers figure it out and then things change.
The glass ceiling is what you experience if you’re lucky. Otherwise you are simply ushered out the door. Sometimes they tell you to your face it’s because you’re gay. Sometimes they make some other excuse. When the religious right points to studies that they claim prove that gay people earn far more money then heterosexuals, what they’re really pointing to are studies that prove that rich people aren’t as afraid of being open about their sexual orientation on a job survey form as someone barely making ends meet has to be.
October 16th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
British & European employment law is such that (with a very few exceptions) it is illegal to fire someone, pass them over for promotion, or not hire them on grounds of gender, sexuality, race, faith or disability. Age will soon be added to that list. Likewise discrimination against/victimisation of employees by other staff for any of those reasons is also illegal. Culturally most European countries are far more accepting of gays than the USA – particularly western Europe (the UK, Scandinavia, Benelux, Germany, France, Spain). There is little to no stigma for gays against being out, at least for my generation and the generation above, so you’d think that, if gays on lower wages in the US have to keep their sexuality under wraps because American culture is so backward on this point, that gays in the EU would be on comparable wages to straights, which isn’t the case. Gays do generally earn more here as well.
My guess is that this is a result of the drive to compete that Reagan and Thatcher promoted so heavily in the 1980s. It’s comparative – “I have a bigger house, a nicer car, a prettier wife, more kids”, and so on. But gays have only just recently come into a position where they can have many of those things – where it’s possible for them to have 2.4 picket fences and a 4×4 Labrador Retriever – and a lot of gays still reject those status symbols as being “too straight”. Alongside kids, guys tend to find the most pride in their work – so if you’ve not got any kids (and aren’t likely to have any) then your career is going to be far more important, and you’re going to have a lot more time & energy to devote to it.
Say you’re interviewing two guys for a promotion, and you know the position will involve longer hours and more stress than they’re currently dealing with. They’re about the same age, have much the same work experience & qualifications, both have partners, but one has kids and lives in the suburbs, well over an hour away, while the other probably won’t ever have kids and lives in an apartment half an hour from the office. Which will have been able to devote the most time & energy to being prepared for the interview? And which will be able to commit more to the job?