Remote Work Eases Coming Out for Transgender Employees
For those who decide to come out as transgender, the workplace can be a big hurdle—using the bathrooms, keeping up a new appearance and dealing with reactions from co-workers. But with many offices going remote, more transgender employees are concluding they can come out while letting their work—not their gender identity—speak for them.
River Bailey, 41-year-old software developer, says she doesn’t know if she would have come out as trans at work if not for her ability to work from her home in central Texas. “It gave me the freedom to just be able to exist,” she says. She made the move in late 2019 via a Slack message to colleagues at her all-remote software-consulting agency. She considers herself lucky to work in a sector that can offer remote positions, because most of the trans people she knows have jobs in stores, warehouses, and restaurants.
“Before I was even considering [coming out at work] I checked the company’s policies, the code of conduct and various other policies that the company has to make sure that identity and gender expression and things like that were covered,” she says, adding that the company’s human-resources team tweaked the guidelines based on her feedback. While she was nervous when sending her message, she says, it helped that everyone was physically remote.
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About 1.4 million U.S. adults, or roughly 0.6% of the population, identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on LGBT legal and policy issues based at the UCLA School of Law. Before the pandemic, transgender adults in the U.S. were more likely to be unemployed or have poverty-level income than the general U.S. population, according to the institute’s most recent U.S. Transgender Population Health Survey. The annual unemployment rate for transgender adults averaged 12% from 2016 to 2018, the survey found, more than double the average unemployment rate in the general population reported by the U.S. government from the same period.
Still, the work-from-home shift has shown how successful remote work can be, says Carol Cochran, a vice president at the remote job-listings website FlexJobs. She says offering remote jobs can help level the playing field for underrepresented workers, such as those who are LGBT, nonwhites and disabled employees. It “gives them at the very least a running chance to let their talent speak first,” Ms. Cochran says. Remote workplaces can also help eliminate unconscious bias in hiring, for example, when interviews are conducted over the phone instead of via video interviews.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/coming-out-to-co-workers-11610298000 (subscription)