Why Being Out at Work is Important #PrideMonth
Openly LGBTQ+ people spend their lives coming out.
Unless you don a full rainbow flag themed outfit every time you walk out of your house, most strangers will assume you are straight. It can be very intimidating to bring your authentic self to a job interview or your first day of work. You can be extremely proud of who you are and at the same time be uncertain about your future career and how you will meet the very real obligations of student loans, car and house payments, and countless other financial responsibilities.
If you don’t want to be out at work, that is totally your choice, and sharing personal lives at work isn’t for everyone anyway. But for those of us who would like to be open about ourselves at work, it can seem frightening if you are worried about how you will be perceived as a new colleague in your job and no idea how well the people around you are going to take it if you are openly gay. After all, coming out at work doesn’t just happen once, it happens every time you meet someone new or every time someone joins the business. It’s your choice not to come out and that should always be respected.
You might be wondering why it matters but think about it this way. It’s day 1 of a new job and you are about to join a business and meet scores of new people over the first couple of months and that will bring with it a lot of conversations about you because even though we come to work to do a job, housing is very much a people business and we spend the majority of our day with our colleagues in any case. Imagine someone asks you what you are planning to do at the weekend to celebrate a successful first week and you have to avoid using all pronouns, avoid mentioning certain places, events, music, perhaps having to avoid talking about a partner if you have one because you don’t want to take further questions or hear speculation on their gender. Try having that conversation with yourself, or someone else if you want to have it out loud. Do you find you don’t have much to say? Do you find it quite challenging to keep the conversation going? Imagine you had to have every conversation about your personal life like that. Would you give up having them?
So many people decide after having one too many of those conversations to stop having any personal conversations at work and that is a travesty. Equality is power. Equality is freedom. Equality is pride.
#BeyondFirstImpressions is a movement to show that there is so much more to us as the people that make up this business; we are all people with so many aspects and facets of our personalities. I know people see me as young, competitive and probably a little bit noisy, especially around involving tenants in service design and improvement! But you might not see me as a parent, as a cat person or as an openly queer person who has had to fight her entire life to get validation and recognition for her identity. In the 55 years since Homosexuality began to be decriminalised in the UK we have come a long way, but there is still so much more work to do and having strong allies will make an enormous difference for people who are still afraid to bring their whole selves to work. Being your authentic self at work can be exhausting but it’s not only been great for my sanity, I believe it’s made me better at my job too.
Trust is the foundation of all relationships and confidence is often considered key in winning trust. I get a huge amount of my confidence from being open at work, and I hope that can be true for everyone.
