Get my free whitepaper “10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition” – Download Now
Trend Spotting – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here
Currently, there are only four LGBTQ+ CEOs in the Fortune 500 and none in the FTSE 100. This really illustrates the hidden challenges and differences in professional opportunities for LGBTQ+ people, especially when it comes to promotion and recruitment into senior roles.
Many employers publically say that improving diversity and inclusion in their workforce is a significant priority, but this will only truly happen with appropriate representation at the top of the organization.
My guest this week is Layla McCay, Director of Policy at the NHS Confederation and author of a new book called “Breaking The Rainbow Ceiling.” Layla shines a light on the challenges that LGBTQ+ people face at work and offers advice on how companies can recognize and address the barriers and build a more inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and succeed.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Why she wrote the book
• The barriers that prevent LGBTQ+ people from being hired or promoted into senior roles
• Roles models and self-esteem
• Conscious and unconscious bias
• Managers reinforcing imposter syndrome.
• Understanding different experiences
• Allowing people to do their best work
• Intersectionality
• Equity in talent management
• Advice to employers on inclusive hiring
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Greenhouse. Greenhouse is your altogether hiring platform. Engage top talent with smart sourcing tools, deliver a more equitable interviewing process, welcome new hires with ease, and get the insights you need to make measurable improvements, all within a single platform. Hire better altogether with Greenhouse.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there. Welcome to episode 618 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Currently, there are only four LGBTQ+ CEOs in the Fortune 500 and none in the FTSE 100. This really illustrates the hidden challenges and differences in professional opportunities for LGBTQ+ people, especially when it comes to promotion and recruitment into senior roles. Many employers publicly say that improving diversity and inclusion in their workforce is a significant priority, but this will only truly happen with appropriate representation at the top of the organization.
My guest this week is Layla McCay, Director of Policy at the NHS Confederation and author of a new book called Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling. Layla shines a light on the challenges that LGBTQ+ people face at work and offers advice on how companies can recognize and address the barriers to build a more inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and succeed.
Hi, Layla and welcome to the podcast.
Layla: Hi, lovely to be here.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Layla: My name is Layla McCay, and I am currently Director of Policy at the NHS Confederation, which is a membership organization representing the National Health Service in the UK.
Matt: Tell us a little bit more about what your job entails.
Layla: So, I look at all the various types of policy that could affect the NHS, whether that’s something to do with funding and financing, whether it’s regulation, things around waiting lists, all manner of things that affect the NHS and affect the people using it. And I try to work with the organizations that make up the NHS to find out what they need, what would help them to deliver the very best care, and then work with government regulators, all those national bodies, to understand how can we bring this together and how can we help improve the NHS.
Matt: Now, you’ve also recently written a book. Tell us a bit more about the book and why you wrote it.
Layla: So, the book is called Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling, how LGBTQ+ people can thrive and succeed at work. And it is being published by Bloomsbury very imminently, and the book is essentially a response to me realizing that LGBTQ+ people are less likely to get promoted into the top jobs. I started doing a bit of research around that. So, for example, of the 500 biggest companies in America, The Fortune 500, only four of the CEOs out of the 500 are LGBTQ+ people. Actually, one’s just retiring, so it’ll be down to three. And only 0.8% of those board members, obviously, thousands of people are LGBTQ+. So, I got interested in this question of the disparities and why they exist.
And then I had this experience where I met somebody who’d been on an interview panel where I was a candidate, and they just happened to mention that on the panel, there had been a discussion about not appointing me because I’m a lesbian. I was completely shaken by that information because you have theoretical understanding that there might be discrimination and prejudice around sexual orientation or gender identity. But then to hear that, it has genuinely happened in a personal way really had a huge impact. So, I got interested. I wanted to read a book about how being LGBTQ+ actually does impact you in the workplace. Couldn’t find a book, so I ended up writing this one.
Matt: Tell us a little bit more about what are some of the issues that LGBTQ+ people experience in the workplace. You obviously talked about how you didn’t get that job. Tell us a bit more about the barriers that stop people moving into senior positions.
Layla: Absolutely, so, first of all, there’s things that happen right before you even enter the workplace. The impact of growing up as an LGBTQ+ person gives you a different experience than other people in terms of really developing as a young person in an ambience of homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, all those different experiences that exist in this world and the impact that that has on our self-esteem and on our ambitions. Quite a lot of people round about my age never really heard of anything positive about LGBTQ+ people when we we’re growing up, we didn’t see those role models in positions to which we could aspire. I mentioned the Fortune 500 companies before. The very first person to come out as a gay person in a Fortune 500 company was Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. And that was only a decade ago.
So, people growing up, you don’t have the role models. You have lots of discrimination and prejudice, and it really impacts how you feel about what you can achieve, what you want to aspire to, and coming out to people, which many people end up doing in those formative years, and experiencing various types of rejection, ridicule, whatever that may be. These experiences can then come back and affect you in the workplace. So, I think that there’s all that stuff that happens to people before you even get anywhere near the workplace. Then once I mentioned this impact of hiring and, of course, on promotion there’s lots of really interesting data around that in terms of people putting in similar applications and being significantly less likely to be selected for interview if there’s an indication that they’re an LGBTQ+ person.
And that sort of thing is quite an issue because sometimes that indication might come in somebody having, run a staff network or something like that. So, essentially delivering leadership skills that you might want to talk about in an application, but at the same time, that disadvantaging you because of conscious or subconscious bias against LGBTQ+ people. But even just getting to that interview in the first place could be quite challenging. We are more likely to suffer from imposter syndrome and internalized homophobia, thinking that we are potentially not good enough for that job or not having the confidence to go for it. And quite often, managers will actually make that worse. I reinforce views that perhaps you might want to present as “less gay.”
Quite a lot of people that I interviewed for the book, I interviewed more than 40 senior LGBTQ+ leaders around the world in all sectors and settings. And lots of them told me that their managers had encouraged them to act less gay or dress less gay or modify their voice. Just really homophobic things that maybe their managers didn’t even realize was homophobic. And those things have a huge impact on people’s confidence and feeling that they’re ready to go for a promotion, and it has an impact on whether managers deem you suitable and put you forward. Loads of interesting research about how managers can quite often require LGBTQ+ people to be performing at a higher level than others to be seen as equivalent. Obviously, that’s an experience that quite a lot of minorities have and the research tells me that it is the case with LGBTQ+ people.
And sometimes we’ll feel, because there is so much discrimination around. If you’re in a team that is quite supportive to you and you feel like you have a good place where you feel able to be out and authentically yourself, sometimes people will not apply for that promotion because they’ll think, “What better the devil you know, going to stay here where I’m thriving, able to succeed. Don’t rock the boat and take chances with somewhere else.” Then, of course, there’s things around for example, location quite a lot of roles require relocation, and that might be to places that are less welcoming, even less safe for LGBTQ+ people.
And there’s all other interesting things that came up in the book. Things that I hadn’t really thought about in terms of, do you go for that senior role where you’re really going to be in the public eye? because what might the impact be of homophobia if you’re in a prominent position on your family, perhaps you have a partner who isn’t out and is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. So, yeah, there’s a very wide that’s only just a small selection of the very wide range of interesting and quite worrying reasons that LGBTQ+ people do seem to have more challenges in getting promoted to those higher-level positions.
Matt: Hi, it’s Matt and we will be back to the interview very shortly. Is your career future proof? Can anyone’s career be future proof? These are interesting questions in talent acquisition at the moment. In several decades of working in this industry, I’ve never seen a time of greater disruption and change. And we really are still only at the beginning. With technology advancing as quickly as it is now, there’s a tendency to believe that we have no control over the future. This is wrong and I passionately believe that this is the precise time when we should be inventing the future. I want to see talent acquisition thrive and I want recruiting to be transformational in getting everyone into the right job for them with the right skills at the right time. So, I’ve built a course to help and it’s called Trend Spotting.
Trend Spotting is an on demand digital course that examines the forces driving change and assesses the emerging trends in talent acquisition. It also teaches a simple but robust model to help you understand, plan for influence, and invent the future. Trend Spotting is for everyone in talent acquisition. It will help you future proof your career, create future focused talent acquisition strategies, and build your influence within your business. I’ve split Trend Spotting into nine short lessons to easily fit into the flow of your busy day. The feedback from the TA leaders who’ve taken the course so far has been amazing, and I know you’ll find it will really help you future proof your career. You can find out more by going to mattalder.me/course. That’s mattalder.me/course.
[music]
Matt: You mentioned that for your book, you interviewed a large amount of senior leaders. What were some of the solutions that they told you about to some of the issues that they’ve been facing?
Layla: Yeah, there are quite a lot of things that came up. One of them, well, I guess there’s things that LGBTQ+ people can do for themselves and then there’s things that managers can do. I think that in terms of what managers can do, there are probably five main themes around which people identified opportunities, and one of them is simply giving LGBTQ+ identities parity of esteem as a protected characteristic. There obviously shouldn’t be a hierarchy of diversity, but what I heard consistently throughout this book is that it feels like in the workplace, sometimes there is a hierarchy of diversity because most employers don’t have the capacity to work equally on every area of diversity all at once.
And quite a lot of people reflected that, they got the impression from their employers that the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ people at work are maybe not as bad as those for other minority groups or making an assumption that by improving things for one minority group, it may help everyone. And it might, of course, we’ve seen plenty of research that shows that it can help to some extent, but for LGBTQ+ people, the challenges do have such different root causes and manifestations that it is really important to look at separately. So, I guess on that note, many leaders called for employers to be monitoring demographics properly. So, splitting down your staff survey along LGBTQ+ lines, for example, and really looking at what are those different experiences? Why are those happening? Are there ways that we can take action to make things more equitable? Then there’s the responsibility for creating a safe, conducive working environment.
Obviously, this is not a rocket science, but as an employer being responsible for creating that work environment, we know that LGBTQ+ people are much more likely to be bullied, harassed, intimidated, and obviously, all of that means they won’t be able to do their best work. But there is that specific issue for LGBTQ+ people of feeling that they’re not safe to come out at work and be their authentic selves. And that’s really important because when people feel they’re not able to come out, they are having to expend a certain amount of energy maintaining that disguise, worrying about being outed, doing things to police themselves, avoiding conversations.
Some of them refer to it as Monday syndrome, where everyone comes into the office and chats about what they did at the weekend, and if you’re not out, you’re on high alert, having to make sure you don’t say something that would reveal your sexual orientation or your gender identity. All of that really gets in the way of people developing relationships, doing their best work. So, there’s a lot in this book about coming out. It’s a huge issue for LGBTQ+ people, especially leaders who didn’t come out at the start and are now thinking, when is it safe and appropriate for me to do that? And employers can really improve the opportunity for people to come out and be able to have that weight off their shoulders by essentially making sure that prejudice and discrimination isn’t tolerated.
And sometimes it’s not just as simple as that, but really the need to consistently emphasize your commitments to inclusion, sometimes even overemphasize it, in order to make the point across the organization, you do understand that. There’s another thing that people raised, which is having a strong knowledge base. So, obviously, it’s a cliche that loss of prejudice and discrimination comes from a place of a lack of knowledge. But people told me over and over again their staff diversity training didn’t really include that much of LGBTQ+ people. It referred to us as some big homogenous group, whereas obviously, people with all the different types of identities within that spectrum can have completely different needs and people are not necessarily aware of that.
So, making sure that people are able to understand that a bit more and understand a bit more about the intersectionality of LGBTQ+ identities with other minority characteristics. And people did consistently say that using real stories from staff in the organization can be particularly helpful in giving that insight, although they also said some people felt like they really came out and provided those staff stories, perhaps even provided publicly facing stories to demonstrate that the organization is diverse and that could be really impactful. If you’re an LGBTQ+ person and you see that an organization has others, people like you thriving in that organization, it can have a huge impact on whether you apply. But some people did reflect that they felt they were then potentially disadvantaged further on when there was discrimination around hiring and promotion.
And speaking of promotion, there’s actually a really important bit here about talent management. There is loads of evidence that LGBTQ+ people are at risk of falling through the cracks. So, for example, mentioned imposter syndrome, LGBTQ+ people are particularly less likely to have mentors and sponsors. So, there are things to think about when you’re looking at promotion pipelines, about how can you support your LGBTQ+ staff to get them ready, make sure they’re not missing opportunities that you theoretically think are open to all, but might be taken up in an inconsistent way.
And the fifth and final thing that I would say is, if you are an LGBTQ+ person who is also a manager, if you can, if it’s safe, if it’s appropriate for you, then if you can come out and be visible, because being visible is such a high impact thing to do for the other staff in the organization, more junior people will see you and it will matter to them and it will empower them and it will affect their level of ambition. I think that that is incredibly important and impactful. In the book, there’s a quote, “What’s in it for me to come out?” And quite a lot of people do come out because they want to do that altruistic bit of supporting others. But nobody I spoke to said that they regretted coming out.
People did refer to it as being a weight off their shoulders and enabling them to be their best selves, do their best work, and obviously that’s a big incentive for any employer to be able to support that. It’s a complex way in which the rainbow ceiling has been built and the ways of dismantling it are similarly complex. But that’s not to say it can’t be done.
Matt: You mentioned hiring and promotion there. Just to dig into the hiring part of this, what advice would you give employers around recruitment in terms of everything that we’ve been discussing?
Layla: I think there are lots of things that you can do to really make sure that you’re thinking about things in that sort of way. So, for example, thinking about your recruitment pipelines, are you actually advertising in the right places? Are there ways in which you might modify job description wording to be as inclusive as possible? There are quite a few examples in the book of people saying, “Nothing makes you feel othered having to click the other box on a form.” So, in the application process, quite often people will have to fill in forms, quite often things like sex, gender, sexual orientation, all these things will be asked for. And thinking about how can you widen those options so that people can see that they are seen and valued by an organization, it’s quite an impactful way of kicking off.
Then when you’re at the interview, recognizing that there is this risk of more harshly judging people who are LGBTQ+, there is the likelihood that people will be rated lower, particularly incompetence, social skills and higher ability. It’s important to recognize that often it’s not direct prejudice, but more indirect that has the impact. So, for example, LGBTQ+ people are quite often involved in activism because of the discrimination that we face. But quite often, hirers will be anxious about the concept of anybody having been involved in activism in certain sectors because they’ll be keen to stay away from politics. There are all sorts of other conscious and unconscious biases. So, for example, I think we’re all very familiar with the concept of hiring people in your own image, which recruiters do continue to tend to do, even though they are aware of it.
And that is because there are fewer LGBTQ+ people in those more senior roles that does particularly disadvantages, then there’s this concept of role congruity theory. So, if people opt for a role that you might stereotypically associate with a different gender, then employers can see that as so incongruous that it does affect the assessment of that person’s competence. Quite often, people who are LGBTQ+ may have worked in roles that are specific to that. Certainly, in the book, there were some people who had started their careers by working in LGBTQ+ related fields, and that has the risk of pigeonholing people so that sometimes employers can struggle to see beyond that in a way that they wouldn’t struggle with other topic areas that people might have worked in.
There were a few people that said that because they had held that role of LGBTQ+ liaison or whatever it may be, they then struggled to get a role that was in a completely different topic area, even though they had the transferable skills. And I think that that’s quite interesting, that sort of pigeonholing. And then, of course, many people referred to the concept of having been seen as a diversity candidate, so really feeling after the interview that they were never really a genuine contender, that they had been invited in order to tick a box and keep people right. And obviously, that is a real challenge that needs to be addressed.
There’s some logistics as well that are probably worth mentioning as well. So, for example, if people are coming to an interview, how to make sure that there’s nothing that they’re experiencing that might put them off. So, for example, famously in the media, lots of challenges with what bathrooms people may be allowed to use. If somebody comes to an interview and is not able to safely use a bathroom with dignity, then that is obviously going to be a huge off-putting factor for that candidate. And then, for example, if somebody has changed genders, then that needs to be recognized when you’re asking them for references. It may be the case that the last manager was homophobic or biphobic or transphobic. It may be the case that the last manager would know that person by a different name, and there’s a real need to make sure that you don’t accidentally out somebody or put them in danger.
But ultimately, when I spoke to LGBTQ+ leaders across the country and said, “Why do you think you don’t get some of these jobs that you go for?” They said that not being a good fit is such a common reason that they were given for not getting a role. I think that not being a good fit is a bit of a coverall phrase, isn’t it? But when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, quite often people will think, not a good fit for reasons that have to do with prejudice. And I think that’s really important to be aware of so that you can really think about it.
Matt: So, final question. Remind us of the book title and where people can get hold of a copy.
Layla: It’s called Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling: How LGBTQ+ people can thrive and succeed at work. Obviously, it’s by me, Layla McCay. It’s published by Bloomsbury and it comes out 21st of May in the US, 23rd of May in the UK, and it is available from anywhere that you would buy books.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. Layla. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Layla: Pleasure.
Matt: My thanks to Layla. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
[music]
