Diversity: Give all employees a fair go
By Joshua Jennings | smh.com.au | 28 March
Bitter-sweet...some employees are not getting a fair go
Employers are seeing the value of respecting the sexual diversity of staff.
It's one of many similar stories that came to light during the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2007 Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry. The employee held a prominent position with one of Australia's leading banks. Rumours about his sexual orientation began circulating. He was advised that the rumours would affect his opportunities for promotion if they were substantiated. The man consequently changed employers.
A 2006 report by La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society states one in three gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (GLBT) employees still alters their behaviour at work for fear of discrimination. While Federal Parliament last year amended nearly 100 different laws to remove discrimination against same-sex de facto couples, Australia still lacks comprehensive federal laws to prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Although states enforce such laws, a slew of state-level exemptions still exist and the state laws fail to cover federal employees. Corey Irlam, a spokesman for the Australian Coalition for Equality, says exemptions in state law allow discrimination to continue.
"So if a teacher of some 40 years at a private Christian school or [someone] in a small business with less than five staff is outed as a homosexual, the school [or business owner] may sack them," he says.
"There would be no grounds for that staff member to make a discrimination complaint while these exemptions remain."
But Irlam says the introduction of federal sexual orientation discrimination legislation should face no obstacles.
"This has been ALP policy for many years and the Liberal Party seems to understand the need to protect people on the basis of unfair discrimination," he says. "There will always be vocal minorities in the community who speak out against such reforms. I'd remind them that over 70 per cent of Australians believe it is unfair to discriminate on the basis of someone's sexuality."
A spokeswoman for the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, Hayley Conway, says one of the keys to introducing federal sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation is raising the profile of the sexual orientation discrimination issue.
"Government's still fairly conservative and it's not an easy thing for them to take on. It's not something they consider to be as valuable or important as the Sex Discrimination Act or the Racial Discrimination
Act. But certainly for our community the discrimination is equally prevalent."
Conway says one of the challenges of dealing with sexual orientation in the workplace is that it isn't always easy to identify.
"You can just be completely unaware about things like not inviting someone's partner to a function because you assume that they're their housemate because they're the same sex," she says. "That kind of stuff can slip through the cracks really easily."
IBM's EAGLE (Employee Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Empowerment) Networking Group's agenda is to create a safe and open workplace for employees of all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions. GLBT employees within the group are engaged in professional and social networking, career development and mentoring, participation in community outreach and development of IBM's overall GLBT strategy.
Mark Latchford, IBM Australia-New Zealand's vice-president of systems and technology and executive sponsor for EAGLE in Australia, says businesses can differentiate themselves by encouraging a diversity agenda that includes people's sexual orientation.
"Having a policy that's very visible in the market has led us to attract and retain some great talent," he says. "They just happen to be part of the GLBT community. An organisation that's prepared to show itself to be inclusive of the GLBT community is inherently seen as being inclusive for the other communities as well."
But there are plenty of smaller businesses that don't have the resources and staff to create GLBT-inclusive policies, Conway says. "There certainly needs to be more support for small business and more guidelines and more clarity around exactly what expectations are for employers in cases of antidiscrimination, so that they can access those things from the start, as opposed to having to wait until something has gone wrong and having to deal with it by trial and error," she says.
And how will the current economic climate affect the incidence of sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace? Diversity@Work chief executive Mark Heaysman says some businesses will choose to stop addressing sexual-orientation discrimination workplace issues.
First published by Smh.com.au on March 28 2009
Visit smh.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
