Awareness, training can help diminish transgender workplace bias

More than one in four transgender people have lost a job due to bias, and more than three-fourths have experienced some form of workplace discrimination. 

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, an organization that advocates to change policies and educate society on the understanding and acceptance of transgender people, “refusal to hire, privacy violations and even physical and sexual violence on the job are common occurrences.”

Entrepreneur and business owner Amanda Boyd founded Visible Talent, a recruitment company based in Akron that helps the

LGBTQ+ community in job searches to make sure they have resources to find safe work environments.

Visible Talent also helps employers to make sure their workspaces are LGBTQ+ friendly.

“I am a certified diversity sourcing professional, and if I go through a corporation’s job description, I might give them suggestions on how to better advertise their positions to make it feel more inclusive for potential candidates,” she said.

Within her capacity, she also works with individuals who may have left a job due to feeling unsafe in the environment.

“A lot of times I’ll meet people and maybe they’re working for a more traditionally conservative company or religious company and they’re tired of being like, ‘I really would like to find a new position because I don’t feel like I’m valued,’” Boyd said. 

Her clients may also feel they might receive some sort of backlash for wanting to be treated as their preferred gender.

“A lot of that’s happening where I’m being a part of someone’s initial branching out from the more conservative or binary corporate setting,” Boyd said.

She said she often asks her human resource or talent acquisition clients if they have inclusive medical plans that could be used toward gender reassignment and top surgeries or hormone supplement treatment.

While Visible Talent works directly with employers and clients, there are other organizations and companies that work toward bettering experiences for transgender people.

The LGBTQ+ Center at Kent State offers training and educational opportunities for those who may not know enough about transgender bias or those who have experienced it and don’t know what to do.

Lo Denmon, assistant director of the LGBTQ+ Center, said transgender people are often more at a disadvantage than cisgender people when it comes to the job search. 

“[Transgender people] may have criminal records because of their identities, they have faced more policing,” Denmon said. “They may have had to rely on things that are not legal to make ends meet because they were discriminated against previously and unable to obtain other jobs and other ways to support themselves.”

Discrimination or less-favorable jobs may have created a gap in employment that would make employers wary of hiring them, Denom said, which further negatively impacts the job search.

The Equality Index, created by the Human Rights Campaign, is a yearly report of corporate companies who received rankings toward different aspects of DEI and LGBTQ+ safety.

“Providing those things can be like an overall approach that they can mark those things off on their score but that doesn’t necessarily mean the environment’s inclusive,” Denmon said.

Employee Resource Groups are voluntary, employee-led groups that work to foster an inclusive, diverse workplace. Denmon said these are often used as a social space but can also be used as an advocacy group.

“[ERGs] are not necessarily for the people who are part of those communities but for the folks who are not part of them to learn more about them and get a better idea of how to support either their colleagues or their clients who might be a part of the community itself,” they said.

Training can also be effective in altering the language used in the workplace. For some older companies, male-respective language may be used more often than not. 

“If you continue to use language that emphasizes that everyone in this space is a man and you have folks who are in the space who aren’t, then you’re going to be erasing folks who are in the space,” Denmon said. “The same can be true for transgender [or] gender-nonconforming folks.”

Along with education, implementation is a key factor to acceptance.

“When you’re taking those trainings in, you’re learning different ways to communicate with folks and different things to take into consideration — their processes and procedures — that you might need to change,” Denmon said.

Something as simple as listing pronouns in an email signature or a LinkedIn page can make a world of difference to LGBTQ+ people searching for jobs, according to Boyd. Key words and phrases such as “inclusion,” “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or “LGBTQ+ community” will automatically light up green flags for diverse hirees.

“Even though it might be discriminatory not to have those things, if [companies] do have those things, they are going to tend to attract a more diverse hiring,” Boyd said. “Typically, as far as discrimination or practices have been going, it really just comes to the microcultural level.”

Bias is evident in almost every workplace. Specifically in the LGBTQ+ community, more than one in four transgender people have lost a job due to bias. Read more here: https://t.co/y7Jmuoft8v

— kaitlyn finchler (@KaitlynFinchler) December 16, 2022