Bridging the Gay Gap

本文最初发布于2017年8月。

Apple’s Tim Cook is an openly gay board member and chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. Can you name any other openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) board members of major public companies in the U.S. or elsewhere?

领导地位，一个基于纽约的群体，支持LGBT人员在商业中，估计，只有10张财富500强公司的董事会成员 - 或0.3％ - 是公开的同性恋。它旨在改变这一点。

The group, whose advisory board members include Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Blankfein and KKR & Co.’s global head of public affairs Ken Mehlman, started Quorum in 2015 with founding global sponsor KPMG to identify and help place senior LGBT executives on boards. It’s trying to reshape the corporate landscape when almost all of the conversation around board diversity today focuses on women and people of color.

“那里有一个错过的机会，”领导成员托德西尔斯说。

Companies also need to hear from people with different sexual and gender orientations. At companies, and among investors, the issue of board diversity has become a significant one. Adding LGBT representation to the list “just expands the pool” of candidates, Sears says.

领导力一直在与纽约市退休制度合作，鼓励养老金计划就此问题发言，并与公司高管汇谈。塞尔斯说，该集团旨在创造一个核武器和财务主管“愿意讨论谁，愿意进行谈话。”

“We are looking not just at the Fortune 500, but also at the middle markets,” he adds.

In May 2016, Sears and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer co-authored a thought piece on expanding diversity on boards. The city’s pension funds were “among the first major U.S. institutional investors to approve an LGBT-inclusive director standard for the companies in which they invest billions of dollars,” they wrote.

Sears knows the finance world, having started his career in the sector as an investment banker. He later became a private wealth advisor at Merrill Lynch, before the firm’s 2009 purchase by Bank of America. At Merrill, he built the first national team of financial advisors focused on the needs of LGBT clients, expanding related assets to more than $1.5 billion. Sears then moved into management, serving as head of strategic initiatives for the brokerage firm’s office of diversity. After that, he joined Credit Suisse Group, where he was head of diversity and inclusion for the Americas.

Out Leadership’s first initiative, Out on the Street, was started in 2011 to connect senior LGBT executives with allies at major financial firms. The idea is to spur “crucial innovations at the intersection of business” and the LGBT community, according to the group’s website.

One of Sears’s key insights from the beginning was to form an organization that’s neither activist driven – though Out Leadership does advocate globally for LGBT rights – nor purely a human resources conversation.

The challenge of how best to support gay employees is an important part of his efforts. Sears wants to make the case for LGBT inclusion while convincing senior management to think seriously about issues the community faces in society and the workplace.

This business-orientated approach helped Out Leadership garner significant support from financial-services firms before other industries stepped up as well. The group now has more than 70 member companies, up from six in 2011, according to its website.

About five years ago, Goldman’s Blankfein threw his weight behind one of Out Leadership’s earliest priorities: the campaign for marriage equality.

He emerged in 2012 as the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to lend his support to the campaign, even producing a 30-second video segment on the topic. The U.S. Supreme Court bolstered gay marriage with two rulings the following year, and in 2015 made it a constitutional right.

“Lloyd was my guinea pig,” says Sears. “After marriage equity,” he adds, “What’s next?”

仍有很多问题来解决，包括美国印度尼西亚以外的LGBT人民的权力和保护的权力和保护。在新加坡，它同样仍然很难生活为公开的同性恋或变性人。在这两个国家，以及全球商业界的其他地方，领导力一直是当地LBGT社区的重要盟友和倡导者。

Meanwhile, in the U.S., in many states it remains possible to be fired just for being gay. Sears says that 92 percent of Americans think you can’t be fired for being gay, when, in fact, in many states it is perfectly legal to do so.

“我找到了很多不知道的同性恋者，这让我想起了这一点，”他说。

“很多人没有意识到你可以在星期六或星期日结婚”同性伴侣，他说，“周一上班，然后在29个州发射，如果你是跨国的话。”

证明，即使在美国，仍有大量的战斗才能获得。