Almost half of LGBTQ+ people have faced discrimination at work

A study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has provided some sobering statistics about the experiences of LGBTQ+ employees, including that 47% of LGBTQ+ workers have experienced discrimination at some point during their careers.

The study, released last month, looked at a survey of LGBTQ+ workers about their experiences in the workplace in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which granted employment protections to LGBTQ+ people.

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The study’s author says the findings are a wake up call to interrogate conscious and unconscious bias.

“Employment discrimination against LGBTQ people continues to be persistent and widespread,” the executive summary of the survey reads.

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Almost half, 46%, of LGBTQ+ people are not out to their supervisor, and 20% are not out to any of their coworkers. 40% of the employees who are out as queer at work say they have experienced discrimination and 12% who are not have experienced discrimination.

Similarly, 42% of LGBTQ+ workers have experienced harassment, and 17% who are not out as gay have experienced discrimination.

Many LGBTQ+ employees said that they took action to avoid discrimination and harassment, including hiding their identity and changing their physical appearance.

The rates of discrimination are the worst for trans and nonbinary workers, with 55% of them having experienced discrimination. The number is lower for cisgender LGBQ individuals with 31% reporting experiencing discrimination.

Similarly, rates of discrimination in the workplace are higher for LGBTQ+ people of color, as 42% of LGBTQ+ people of color have experienced discrimination, compared to 27% of their white counterparts.

While the survey looked at the lifetime experiences of respondents, it found that in the last year, 17% of LGBTQ+ people had experienced discrimination. 22% of LGBTQ+ workers said they had experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity within the past five years

Among all survey respondents, 33% left their positions due to how they were treated as a result of their identity as LGBTQ+.

Nearly three-fourths (72%) of respondents said that they had heard negative comments, slurs, or jokes about LGBTQ+ people at work at some point in their lives. Over one-third (36%) had heard negative comments about the LGBTQ+ community within the past year.

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