Andy Jaeger big thinking for a small world

Interview: Diversity – the pink ceiling

As a graduate of Stonewall's Leadership Programme, it's a real pleasure to help out in promoting the course to future participants, and sharing my experiences in the workplace. A little while ago, I was interviewed by the lovely Hashi Syedain for a piece in People Management magazine. The complete article is below, and also on the People Management website. The interview with me is towards the end.

Diversity - the pink ceiling

Being openly gay shouldn’t be a big deal any more, yet many people still face enough prejudice to make them wary of revealing their sexuality. But the effects of not coming out can also harm career prospects.

"Organisations generally have become more diverse, but you don’t often see gay people in senior teams, just like you don’t see gender or ethnic diversity at top levels,” says David Shields, Stonewall’s director of workplace programmes.

Telling your workmates that you are gay can be tough: witness the brouhaha that surrounded rugby player Gareth Thomas, cricketer Steven Davies and Swedish footballer Anton Hysén when they each declared their sexuality. Sport may be an extreme case – Hysén is still the only openly gay professional footballer in the world – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy everywhere else.

Even if open homophobia in workplaces is less common than it used to be, gay rights group Stonewall argues that many organisations still operate with a “pink ceiling” – a more subtle barrier of prejudice that stops gay people getting to the top of their profession or causes them to hide their sexuality.

“Organisations generally have become more diverse, but you don’t often see gay people in senior teams, just like you don’t see gender or ethnic diversity at top levels,” says David Shields, Stonewall’s director of workplace programmes. Women or ethnic minority men may fear a double dose of prejudice, he adds, which means that lesbians or black men are more inhibited about coming out than white, gay men.

In other cases, people may be out to their colleagues but not their clients. ”Coming out isn’t a one-off event. It’s something that comes up every time you build a new relationship,” says Shields.

One of Stonewall’s initiatives for smashing the pink ceiling is a leadership course for mid-career gay professionals at Ashridge Business School. Among other things, the ­programme looks at authenticity and leadership.

“Good leaders have a strong sense of self-awareness,” says Albert Zandvoort, a management professor who teaches on the Stonewall course. Exploring authenticity can help gay people become more comfortable with their orientation and more open and honest. It’s not impossible to be a good leader if you are gay and not out, but it’s harder, says Zandvoort. “The personal stress will get in the way of being fully authentic. Honesty is a great thing and people respond well to it.”

The principle of a separate training course can be ­controversial, however, even among gay people. “I wouldn’t want any special courses for gay people. You treat them as an integral part of your workforce and if you think someone has been ill-treated because they are gay, you deal with it,” says Bernard Buckley, an ex-HR director and now an executive coach, who is also gay.

Even those who sign up to the course sometimes go with mixed feelings – although our case studies also show that gay people, even in broadly enlightened workplaces, face issues that most of the rest of the workforce don’t.

Case study: Lucy Bryans, EMEA operations manager, American Express Business Travel

“I wasn’t out until I was about 22. I took a gap year after university and went to New Zealand and Australia, where I met my first long-term partner. Getting a visa to work in Australia was my first big challenge as a gay person – we had to jump through all sorts of hoops to prove our rel­ationship and could not get the same visa as a straight ­couple. That’s when I realised that there are barriers in life when you are gay.

“My first experience of coming out at work was at Trailfinders in Australia. I took a deep breath and told everyone on the training course, ‘I have a partner and her name is Cat.’ Trailfinders was a great place to work. It was no big deal, a non-issue. I made a decision then that I’d never be closed at work ever again.

“It’s very hard to come into work every day and not refer to your partner, to keep having non-gender specific conversations. I can’t imagine doing that – although I know people who have. My current partner did it for three months at one place, because some of the people she worked with were very homophobic. Then one day she said “my partner” and “she”. They sneezed, coughed and spluttered – and never mentioned it again.

“When I came back to the UK in 2006, I started working at Hogg Robinson. It was a more formal environment. In the main the experience was positive, but it was the first time I experienced anxiety. Certain people were a bit suspicious or said inappropriate things. The standard ones are assuming that you’ll never have children or asking, ‘Which one of you is the man?’. I deal with that sort of thing with humour and honesty because the minute you get defensive, people don’t understand.

“I’ve been more out with each job I’ve had. At AmEx, I found out about the Pride network when I joined and emailed them: ‘I’m new and I’m gay.’

“Last year we set up a mentoring scheme with the network and I have a mentor from that. She’s very senior and she’s not gay but she’s a strong ally of the Pride network. She was the first person to challenge me about whether being gay has an impact on how I am at work. I’d never considered before how I am always making split-second decisions about coming out many times each day. You want to be authentic, to be 100 per cent yourself with regular contacts – but it mustn’t become overwhelming to yourself or others.

“In some roles I’ve worked with people who had never come across a gay person. I thought, ‘I’m not going to hide it, but I’m not going to throw it in their face.’ You just hope that if you are genuinely hitting a barrier, you’ve got someone else to turn to. Not everyone does.

“When I first heard about the Stonewall leadership course I wasn’t sure about it. ‘Are we asking for separate courses now?’ I thought. ‘Really?’ But I had a very positive experience. The connection with the others on the course was an immediate peer connection – there was a lot of ­rubbish we didn’t have to go through. You quickly felt free to deal with the hard stuff, such as why you behave in a particular way and what impact your sexuality may have on that behaviour. I’d not experienced that freedom on a course before.

“I manage people from all sorts of minorities – hearing other people’s negative experiences makes you realise how others are feeling. There were people on the course who’ve had real challenges to overcome. I was amazed at how many people weren’t out with their clients. Some must have to listen to homophobic comments all day – so it’s really important to keep up the pressure. If you don’t, things can go backwards. That’s the point of networks. There are people in 2011 who are not progressing in their careers because they are gay. And that is not OK.”

Case study: Andy Jaeger, assistant director, communications, Nursing and Midwifery Council

"I came out in my early thirties, having spent most of my twenties living an outwardly straight life. At the time I was on the leadership team of a children’s charity with a Christian ethos. Overwhelmingly, the colleagues that I was closest to were incredibly supportive. So was the head of HR. No one was deliberately antagonistic, but long-term it was never going to be a comfortable fit. It was difficult. The charity ran 80 projects, 40 of which were church based. Having an openly gay head of fundraising… well, it was a bold decision.

“I now see a real difference in the kind of person I used to be at work. I was much more guarded about everything. I used to describe it as living an inch below the surface of my skin. It coloured everything. I wasn’t being true to myself. Living life as a whole person is important to my motivation now and my ability to do my job. You can’t connect with other people, or manage effectively, if you can’t be yourself.

“I stayed at the Christian charity for a year after I came out and then came to London to do a masters in marketing and communications. I was looking for a complete change and going to university was incredibly liberating. Of 20 people on the course, I was the only UK national. Being gay there was a total non-issue.

“After my masters I worked briefly for a housing association and then came here. This organisation has gone through a period of fairly rapid change and growth. There’s been high staff turnover. There are now 300 people in the organisation, compared with 220 when I joined five years ago. One of my challenges, when I was promoted to assistant director, was to make sure that across the organisation people are treated with respect and dignity – because as we’ve got bigger, we’ve realised that you can’t just rely on everybody knowing each other.

“I was quite skeptical about the Stonewall leadership programme – and I think many of the others there were too. We shared a sense as a group of having arrived, having made something of our careers. I had moved beyond thinking of being gay at work as a challenge. It’s a non-issue now, partly from a personal determination on my part to make it so. There are people who try to hide aspects of themselves, and on the flipside there are people who everybody instantly knows are gay. I make it a non-issue by making sure it’s not the only thing about me. People are much more interested in the fact that I sing in a choir or love sci-fi films.

“The Stonewall course wasn’t about being gay at work, it was about understanding yourself as a person and how your experiences have an impact on the way you do your job. There’s something very powerful in that, for anyone. Being gay, you are constantly making decisions about coming out. That gives you life experience of managing risk and perception. It makes you good at judging situations.

“As a result of my going on the course, we joined Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme and I set up an LGBT network. This organisation is already incredibly diverse in terms of race, disability and sexual orientation, so the network is a way of enhancing something that’s already good. The course also challenged my own expectations of gay people. I met bankers, accountants, people working for utilities – people I don’t come across in my social circle. It’s amazing the stereotypes we walk around with – and coming out doesn’t rid you of those, or of discriminating against people.”