Companies celebrated for their GLBT agenda, but discrimination against gay candidates still exists

Several GLBT rankings in various world regions or countries celebrate new or rotating leaders in their field every year. But do the top lists mean that gay men and lesbians have achieved equal opportunities and that they are considered a valuable part of everyday business reality? A new Harvard study puts some dark clouds next to the rainbow of achievements.
One of the GLBT rankings, Stonewall’s Top 100 Employers, has just released their 2012 list of Britain’s most GLBT-friendly workplaces. This year, the top group includes employers such as Ernst & Young, the Home Office, Barclays, the NHS Foundation Trust, Goldman Sachs or Accenture. All of those organisations have consistently implemented Diversity to include GLBT aspects and also made sure that a number of GLBT specific topics were covered through dedicated policies or programmes. But beyond all the great HR frameworks and ‘out’reach initiatives, there is also a human factor which still may lead to biased decisions – many of which we will never know about.
Similar to a number of previous experiments (relating to gender and race/ethnicity), researchers have designed a brave study to investigate a potential GLBT bias in the (pre-)selection of candidates. Harvard social scientist Andras Tilcsik and his team sent out two sets of resumes with equal qualifications to 1,769 companies, with one set indicating that the candidate was (openly) gay. They then compared the success rates measured by invitations to interviews. The key result of the research shows that the ‘gay’ applicant was 40% less likely (!) to receive an offer for an interview. Moreover, interview offers for jobs that traditionally were associated with an aggressive, assertive or decisive persona were far more likely to be refused to gay candidates. “The result does not come as a surprise”, comments Diversity expert Michael Stuber who has included GLBT in many of their Diversity workshop programmes. “Bias on GLBT is unfortunately more than unconscious and still stronger than for some other diversity dimensions”, he adds. The strong focus on gender and ‘family-friendliness’ also had not helped for this topic to be embraced whole-heartedly – and GLBT is for the most part driven by gay men and lesbians themselves, as opposed to straight allies. Interestingly enough, the Harvard researchers interpret some of their results in a slightly biased way. They argue that, with regards to job-specific bias, the research showed that this bias, was ‘partly rooted in specific stereotypes and cannot be completely reduced to a general antipathy against gay employees’. But who would be able to draw this line?