{"id":964,"date":"2007-10-15T06:38:59","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T11:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/964"},"modified":"2007-10-15T09:34:27","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T14:34:27","slug":"the-gay-glass-ceiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/964","title":{"rendered":"The Gay Glass Ceiling"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

365Gay.Com has a good post up today, about the Gay Glass Ceiling<\/a>.  There’s an interesting little tidbit in it…<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Most students were able to tell which hat they were wearing from the treatment they received.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,12],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-discrimination","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}