Survey: More Than 1 In 3 LGBTQ Youth Experience Discrimination At Work
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A new research report that examines the discrimination young people face in the workplace finds an alarming divide between LGBTQ youth and their straight and cisgender peers, a gap that points to an urgent need for more companies to develop diverse and inclusive hiring strategies as well as to create workplaces that are affirming and supportive.
Researchers at The Trevor Project, the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning young people under 25, looked at data from the group’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. They crunched the numbers to study how LGBTQ youth experienced bias on the job, and found that even though last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County and President Biden’s day one executive order were big steps in the right direction for LGBTQ American workers, their research shows companies still have a ways to go in terms of creating genuinely inclusive workplaces.
The data points to the most marginalized among LGBTQ Americans experiencing the most pain, according to the organization’s director of research.
“When things are going bad, they end up going worse for folks who are trans and non-binary,” said Dr. Amy Green, vice president of research at The Trevor Project. “In terms of things like workplace discrimination, the number overall is quite high. But the differences between LGBTQ who are trans and non-binary compared to those who are cisgender is striking, with 61% of transgender youth who are employed saying that they've experienced discrimination compared to under 30% of those who are cisgender. That's a that's a really big number, showing more than half are more likely than not to experience it.”
THE TREVOR PROJECT
The bar graph shows that more than one in three, or 35% of LGBTQ youth, experienced workplace discrimination, with significantly greater rates among transgender and nonbinary youth. Transgender men had over 3.5 times greater odds and transgender women had nearly triple the odds of experiencing workplace discrimination, compared to cisgender (meaning “non-transgender”) LGBQ men.
Nonbinary youth were twice as likely to encounter LGBTQ-based workplace discrimination compared to cisgender LGBQ men.
American Indian/Alaskan Native youth had more than double the odds of reporting LGBTQ-based workplace discrimination compared to white LGBTQ youth. More data, especially specific to race and ethnicity, can be found online at The Trevor Project website.
“Folks will experience it in ways that they may know what's happening even if the employers aren't being blatant,” said Green, an out lesbian who revealed she knows first-hand about this experience. “One time, I applied for a job and was in the final process, where I was told that the next step was that my significant other and I would fly down and meet the CEO and receive the offer. And when I provided the name of my significant other, who is also a woman, I was told that maybe I was better off staying in academia. They were a ‘family values-based company’ and they thought that was a better fit. It was completely legal to do it, and those experiences happen all of the time.”
The release of this report coincides with the U.S. Senate considering the Equality Act which would for the first time offer protections from all forms of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation from coast to coast. Conservative propaganda has claimed the bill would erase religious protections, although that’s been effectively debunked. But while lawmakers have taken a break from their debate, discrimination doesn’t wait.
“This new report sheds some much-needed light on the impact of discrimination and offers policy recommendations for how employers can not only support but affirm their LGBTQ employees,” said The Trevor Project’s communications manager, Rob Todaro, in a statement.
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Green addressed that point in a GoogleMeet interview, talking about what companies can do on a broader level. “One of our data points showed the companies and brands that voice support for LGBTQ people can positively influence how they feel about themselves. And that's one of those things that expands beyond the month of June. While it's fantastic that we have brands and companies in June who provide a lot of resources around Pride, LGBTQ folks are living their lives year-round. And if there are ways that companies can stand up and support, particularly in times when we have things like harmful bills that may have implications for companies and brands, if they're able to to stand up and to say, ‘We support the LGBTQ community at all times,’ that can really have a positive impact on LGBT youth and LGBTQ people in general.”
For example, Oreo tweeted a show of support for the transgender community last month by saying, “Trans people exist” from its official account last month, just as more than half the state legislatures across the nation ramped-up efforts to ban trans girls and women from scholastic sports.
As of press time, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi have joined Idaho in enacting new laws that outlaw trans athletes from competing according to their gender identity by restricting women’s and girl’s sports to competitors presumed to be female at birth.
NPR reports South Dakota’s Republican governor issued executive orders late Monday toward that same goal, after failing to find a compromise with state lawmakers on their own ban.
The Rapid City Journal reported the South Dakota Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus sent a letter to Gov. Kristi Noem prior to her orders, warning of “the irreparable cost to our local communities, our small businesses and our state’s economy should we lose these sports tourism and convention opportunities," if she pursued this ban and if it results in boycotts, which is what happened in 2016 in North Carolina, to the tune of $600M. "These events create a halo-effect which can turn into future visits, investment possibilities and relocation prospects."
“At the end of the day, we're talking about human lives and we're talking about companies who have the power to make people feel better about themselves and to feel better about their lives and to feel supported. And I think that's a pretty powerful thing.”
Green suggests prospective and current LGBTQ employees should consult resources like Human Rights Campaign’s annual Corporate Equality Index, which ranks more than 1,140 companies nationwide based on their policies, practices and benefits for LGBTQ employees.
According to The Trevor Project’s research, a majority of LGBTQ youth, 58%, said that companies or brands that voiced that kind of support helped them feel better about being LGBTQ, with 49% saying brands that support the LGBTQ community positively impact how they feel. The numbers were lower for transgender, nonbinary and Black LGBTQ youth; they reported the lowest rates of company support for LGBTQ people positively impacting how they feel about being LGBTQ, hovering between 39 and 40%.
Unfortunately, only 36% of LGBTQ youth described their workplace as LGBTQ-affirming, indicating that most LGBTQ youth are employed in a setting that they do not feel affirms their LGBTQ identity.
“That relates also to things like the differences that we see in rates of depression and anxiety and thoughts of suicide in trans and non-binary youth, compared to those who are cisgender. Again, it’s the way they're treated,” Green said.
The report shows being employed in a workplace that is LGBTQ-affirming was associated with lower rates of a past-year suicide attempt.
THE TREVOR PROJECT
The data shows LGBTQ youth who experienced workplace discrimination related to their orientation or gender identity were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide in the past year, compared to those who reported no bias on the job. Among those who experienced workplace discrimination, 81% reported co-workers were the source, half pointed the finger at their supervisors, and 39% encountered it during the hiring process.
Each form of workplace discrimination reported was associated with at least twice the odds of a past-year suicide attempt, according to the report. But The Trevor Project researchers learned employed LGBTQ youth who said that their workplace was LGBTQ-affirming reported lower rates of attempting suicide in the past year, just 9%, compared to those who did not report their workplace as LGBTQ affirming, or 12%. In the cases where youth experienced discrimination at work, having the feeling that the overall workplace was LGBTQ-affirming had a positive effect: LGBTQ youth had the lowest rates of attempting suicide when they were free from discrimination in an LGBTQ-affirming workplace.