The Economic Cost of Homophobia

Imagine coming to work every single day, where hundreds of people work; but no one talks to you or joins you for lunch. While this seems like a scene from a teen flick, where things get only better afterwards, it isn’t often what happens in real life. Homophobia, simply put is fear or dislike of LGBTI people. This fear is most often due to conditioning from popular culture or lack of LGBTI representation in society. But is there a cost to homophobia?

According to the World Bank Report of 2016, India loses $32 billion (1.7% of GDP) to homophobia. M. V. Lee Badgett who spearheaded this research says, homophobia and economic development are closely connected through multiple links. The direct impact of homophobia is violence, incarceration, loss of employment, discrimination, family rejection, harassment in schools and colleges, pressure to marry, among others. More than half (56%) of the white-collar LGBTI workers report discrimination. Two-thirds (64%) of Kothi's have incomes below $70 a month. Almost 28% of urban lesbians experienced physical abusive violence in family. These social exclusion lead to less education, lower productivity, lower earnings, more poverty, poorer health, shorter lives and lower labor force participation. These individual-level outcomes lead to higher health care and social program costs, lower economic output and fewer incentives to invest in human capital.

While many organizations are celebrating Pride Month, many more are figuring out how to get started. Many LGBTI/Ally employees in organizations are raising their hand and asking for an inclusive workplace. When they are facing the D&I/HR or Senior Leadership team, they are faced with many questions, primarily why?

This is a universal question: Why?

1. Business Case: At the end of the day we are talking to businesses and there has to be a business case for any action. Be it the employee medical insurance or the gym at work, be it the flexi work policy or air conditioning at work; everything has a well thought out reason to happen. There is plenty of data that proves LGBTI inclusion makes business sense.

a. Productivity: Multiple research point to lower productivity when employees spend bandwidth “hiding at work”. Stonewall estimates a 30% loss of productivity.

b. Retention: Closely tied to productivity is retention. In an unproductive workplace, even while exerting 100% bandwidth, employees produce lesser than their best, and this over a period of time leads to growing dissatisfaction with ones work and rate of progress/growth. Needless to say people quit, not because they were not skilled but because of cultural roadblocks that kept slowing them down. MINGLE’s Workplace Climate Survey of 2016 found consistently lower satisfaction & trust in employers for closeted employees compared to their out counterparts.

c. Talent Attraction: An inclusive workplace attracts better talent pool, and inclusion to one constituent tends to accompany inclusion of other constituents of difference/diversity. An LGBTI inclusive workplace tends to be better for women and the same applies for countries too. Employees today look at all these factors before choosing an organization to join so it’s not just LGBTI talent pool but also allies who look for inclusion at the workplace.

d. Market segment: Customized solutions create the differentiation today. Going that extra mile to understand the customer segment and tweaking the product/service a wee bit makes a big difference. Pink Rupee is getting stronger by the day, globally the Pink Economy is estimated to be $4.6 trillion USD, effectively the 4th largest country by GDP (1). The Pink economy in US alone is estimated to be a trillion dollars. Indian LGBTI purchasing power is estimated to be $117 billion USD.

e. Marketing: People choose brands that share their customer story. With the advent of digital marketing and hyper segmentation there is really no excuse for not having some representation of LGBTI stories in your brand story. 78 percent of LGBTQ community members in the United States agree that they tend to purchase from companies that market to and support the LGBTQ community. More than 75 percent of LGBT adults and their friends, family, and relatives say they would switch to brands that are known to be LGBT friendly.

f. Population: It all comes down to “how many people”, the concept of “minuscule minority” does not really apply to LGBTI community. The US population estimate of 4.5% in 2017. Each generation has a successively larger LGBTQ+ demographic , showing that 31% of Centennials or Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+. Indian LGBTI population estimate is 86.6 million.

g. To sum it up, it just costs businesses to be exclusive and we get a look at that data at a macro level: India loses up to 1.7% of its GDP due to homophobia. Do note that 1% loss of GDP year over year is considered to be recession.

2) The right thing to do: A lot of noise on the terms used in the context of LGBTI has left people confused, and there is little understanding of the challenges faced by LGBTI coworkers. Words/phrases like “sexual preference”, “choice”, “it’s a private matter” etc damage the understanding. Let’s get some fact right:

a. It’s not a choice: Did you choose you sexuality/gender identity? Just take 2 minutes to think about it. We just realise our sexuality/gender identity as we grow up and not make a conscious choice to be a certain way.

b. We do not talk about sexuality at the workplace/ it’s a private matter: Every time I ask a roomful of people “Do we talk about sexuality at the workplace (in a non-LGBT world)?, 99% of people say ”NO”. “Congratulations on your wedding! Oh that’s such a cute baby” Hell yeah we talk about sexuality ALL the time. It’s such an inherent assumption that we don’t even realise making it.

c. It’s illegal/immoral/against my religious views: It never was illegal in India to form a support network or have an equal opportunity workplace. If Section 377 was a roadblock, it's gone now. The morality of an act is not for one person to decide, everyone has differing morality on any topic you pick and a workplace is really not to preach morality. Ethics with morality are two different things, do not confuse the two together The purpose of Code of Conduct at workplace is to create a minimum guiding principle for people of varying backgrounds and an opportunity to work together collectively, while keeping our individual identity. One’s personal morality and/or faith is personal and no one is asking one to change that, but at the workplace all employees must be treated with respect & dignity.

So it’s not a choice. Keeping morality out of it, let’s look at some of the challenges faced:

The challenge of being different brings the onus of fitting in on an LGBTI employee’s shoulders. So not only do they have to deliver at par as their coworker but also spend bandwidth fitting in. That results in mental health issues, lack of belonging at the workplace, less hanging out with team members which can be detrimental as a lot of professional conversations happen during "casual hangouts" where one is not in the loop and loses out on important information. Inauthentic relations shows up, people figure the distance, the level of participation and then the person is labeled as "rude", “not a team player”, “doesn’t gel well” etc. LGBTI people are most impacted by covering at the workplace.

It gets particularly difficult for transitioning transgender/gender non-conforming people to fit in, something as basic as attending the call of nature can become a Herculean task. UTI infection in trans people is way higher due to lack of safe bathrooms. Basic things like having your educational certificates in your legal name can be a nightmare for transgender people. Note, all these challenges have nothing do with their education or skill set required to get the job done.

3. The chasm grows everyday: The funny joke about the “sissy” boy, the clapping of hands when you read transgender, the weird look from the person in the lift, the extra scrutiny by the security guard: all these little things are like the tiny dents, each day, each joke hammering the person, killing their self-esteem is the workplace culture. Per the MINGLE survey, 44% of LGBTI employee reported facing harassment/bullying, 2/3 hearing homophobic jokes and for a fifth of them, harassment came from their own manager/HR. This is the workplace, and as business leaders it’s important to take accountability to fix it. With every “joke” we are pushing away our LGBTI colleagues in closets so deep, we stop hearing them, we stop seeing them and then we wonder where they are? Just because there are no reported cases of bullying/harassment does not mean that it does not happen. Even to report it, one needs to potentially come out to someone for which one may not be ready. Not be ready to be  labeled as that “LGBTI” person.

Sources:

1. Based on the assumption that there are three to seven percent of 5.3 billion people in the LGBT, multiplied by global GDP per capita (http://news.gallup.com/poll/201731/lgbt-identification-rises.aspx and http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp.php)
2. A 2017 GLAAD study showed that 20% of Millennials – consumers who are building considerable earning potential in their 20s, 30s and 40s – identify as LGBT. In addition, LGBT consumers are over twice as likely to buy from companies they trust and with a collective spending power of £100bn in the UK alone, marketeers need to find ways to authentically engage with this growing segment. https://www.othervox.com/why-is-lgbt-marketing-important/

 

Written by:

The Pride Circle.

To know more; visit: http://www.thepridecircle.com/