Growing up as a LGBTIQ kid in India is a very isolating and difficult experience. There is this sense of being different from the other students in the class, other friends in the neighborhood. A difference that becomes more dominant and evident closer to puberty, when all your other friends are excited about someone of the opposite gender. The isolation comes from being alienated by your peers, amplified by lack of awareness, homophobia, and a lot of negativity about queerness from religion, movies, press, and literally every source of information.
It gets worse when accompanied by bullying, name-calling, and harassment by fellow students, teachers, and family members, the very people you look up to for support. This bullying from various sources (verbal and physical) acts like a hammer; each blow diminishes the self of the individual, chips away their self-confidence. It’s like plucking the leaves of, and trampling on, a growing plant every other day. How long can that plant sustain injury and still grow?
All of this for no fault of the person, just because of who they love or how they identify.
Unfortunately, the negativity does not end in the school or home or the society we live in, it carries forward to the workplace. Many workplaces reject candidates from prospective jobs just because they look “different” or just because they won’t “fit” in, and this is especially true for the more visible transgender candidates. Those who “pass” off as cisgender/heterosexual candidates, they make it to the workplace but are subject to bullying and harassment.
In MINGLE’s research, titled “Workplace Climate Survey 2016”, it was found that 40% of LGBTIQ people face harassment at the workplace, 2/3rd hear homophobic jokes, and a fifth of them face discrimination from their own manager/HR. Planet Romeo research says that only 6% of LGBTIQ Indians are really out, and about 30% of closeted individuals are married to opposite gender.
While a lot of organizations are realizing the challenges faced by LGBTIQ employees and working on sensitization and policy changes, the majority of workplaces did not even engage with this topic. Only recently after the September 6, 2018 Supreme Court verdict on IPC Section 377 are organizations looking into this aspect of inclusion.
The millennial generation has grown up with more exposure and positive role models and they expect an equal-opportunity workplace, but they struggle in identifying these. More and more organizations now want to hire LGBTIQ talent, but find it difficult to reach out to and source candidates from this talent pool.
Pride Circle takes immense pride in conceptualizing and organizing RISE: Reimagining Inclusion for Social Equity, with an aim to make workplaces more inclusive of and accessible to the LGBTIQ talent pool, enable hiring, and, in turn make a collective and long lasting impact. I personally have been deeply involved in this journey of LGBTIQ inclusion of various organization, talking to their leadership, curating & facilitating workshops for NASSCOM and sharing my story, my voice: while a lot of good has come of it, and many organizations have begun to be more actively inclusive, a lot more needs to be done.
Pride Circle started with a dream of building a community for people passionate about inclusion, and through face to face monthly meetups, city based WhatsApp groups and other initiatives we enabled seven organizations to start their LGBTIQ ERG and many more found sustenance in their effort. Livelihood is such a central element of our lives and sets the discourse in terms or our self-reliance, our aspirations and Pride Circle wants to positively impact that.
A lot of LGBTIQ people, particularly transgender people are either unemployed or underemployed. A lot of time an energy is spent in hiding and covering, of trying to fit in which takes additional effort and takes away bandwidth from productive work. I know the cost of covering, the constant effort to fit in, to keep a distance, the fear of being found out and possible repercussions to the job. We don’t do our best work when we are shackled with fear. Our aim is to have people build the career they deserve, at a workplace they belong. Hence RISE: India’s First LGBTI Job Fair—a place for the LGBTIQ talent pool to find inclusive employers, where they can spend all their energy on the work and not need to hide.
RISE aims to bring inclusive organizations and LGBTIQ talent under the same roof. It is about changing the narrative that “You will not be hired despite your skill because you are different” to “We welcome you for your skill and celebrate the difference”.
Join the inclusion revolution.
The Job Fair will be held on July 12, at Lalit Ashok, Bangalore. Learn more about RISE here, and check out the event on Facebook.