Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

📖 The Glass Closet

8 min read

Why did I want to read it?

Read in preparation for ✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management. It is the story of John Browne, who had to leave as CEO of BP after being outed.

What did I get out of it

Prologe

Typical: “you are already fine!”

‘How unusual,’ one of them said. ‘This problem is already solved. We don’t have any problems at all in academic life, the Church and politics.’ (Location 78)

There is a lack of awareness, even among highly educated people, of the difficulties that still plague LGBT employees. (Location 80)

Tim Cook was the first on Tim Cook Speaks Up.

at the end of 2013, there was not a single openly gay chief executive in the Fortune 500. (Location 84)

If we were to assume that 5 per cent of the population is gay, there should be five gay chief executives among FTSE 100 companies, and some twenty-five in the Fortune 500. (Location 1133)

I wish I had been brave enough to come out earlier during my tenure as chief executive of BP. I regret it to this day. I know that if I had done so, I would have made more of an impact for other gay men and women. It is my hope that the stories in this book will give some of them the courage to make an impact of their own. (Location 123)

4. Phantoms and fears

Maybe René Girard:

The lesson of history and that of today is that minorities are used as scapegoats when things go badly for society. (Location 1073)

‘I did not think that I would be fired if I were out or outed,’ he says. ‘But I thought it could be detrimental to further progress in the company, and that it could attract unwanted attention to Ford.’ (Location 1078)

📖 Subtle Acts of Exclusion:

Gilmour says he does not know whether his sexuality played a role in being passed over, though others have suggested that it did. (Location 1086)

At the tops of corporations

Surveys of the diversity of boardroom members have so far not measured the presence of LGBT people. So we do not know how many are on boards. In 2013, (Location 1115)

[Corporate Boards] they tend to be conservative and risk averse, and that they have behaved in ways that reinforce the division between insiders and outsiders. (Location 1128)

Hidden biases

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) demonstrates that all sections of society are subject to hidden biases. (Location 1141)

Research consistently indicates that people more easily associate the concept of good with white, young or straight people than they do with black, old or gay people. (Location 1145)

‘Lesbian and gay people demonstrate a very slight preference for other gay or lesbian people, but it is not nearly as strong as the pro-straight preference among straight people. (Location 1148)

Stereotyping gay people as flighty, promiscuous, infected with disease and prone to drug and alcohol addiction inevitably colours judgements of their abilities. (Location 1156)

A study by András Tilcsik, “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States”, in which two similar (randomized) CVs are sent, to open positions, one with previous experience in a gay student association, the other with a left-wing campus one (the “Progressive and Socialist Alliance”). There…

gay applicants in the study received fewer invitations to be interviewed than usual when they responded to job advertisements that explicitly sought candidates who were ‘assertive’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘decisive’, three stereotypical traits of heterosexual men. (Location 1172)

When openly gay men do secure a job, they may be more likely to earn lower wages than their straight male colleagues. A dozen studies published in the US in the past ten years have found that gay men earn between 10 and 32 per cent less than their heterosexual male colleagues with similar characteristics. (Location 1176)

In most cases, there was no discrimination against lesbians. (Location 1179)

Subdiscriminations. Not being married and not having children. The things I do on my spare time have been frequently dismissed by coworkers as “yeah, you don’t have kids”

It might also reflect a premium for married men, who consistently earn more than single heterosexual men. In an effort to explain that apparent premium, some have suggested that more productive men get married, while others have suggested that marriage makes men more productive and that employers therefore favour married men. The wage premium for getting married is also likely to be at least partly a result of a preference for heterosexual workers. Whatever its origin, the premium is real and it is used as a tool for advancement. Straight men frequently note in their professional biographies that they are married and have children. (Location 1181)

Lesbians, however, tend to earn more than their heterosexual female colleagues. There are several possible explanations. Because lesbian women are less likely to have children, they do not experience delays in their career progression as frequently as heterosexual women. Research has also shown that, compared to straight women, they work longer hours and, on average, have obtained higher educational qualifications. That behaviour may be part of a strategy for survival, in which lesbians realise that they will not marry a man who will be likely to command a higher salary, and therefore overcompensate in the pursuit of economic security. The earnings advantage may also be a reward for perceived masculinity. In any case, earning more than straight women does not put lesbians on an equal level with men. Women, gay or straight, earn less than both gay and straight men. (Location 1191)

Explicit biases

Anti-gay attitudes are not the only risk that gay employees face when they come out. Popular culture frequently depicts gay men as frivolous and irresponsible. There is a risk that managers, even open-minded ones, will take them less seriously. It is not an overtly hostile attitude. It can, however, affect whether managers give gay employees the same levels of respect as their straight counterparts. (Location 1246)

5. Coming out is good business

Paul Reed, my former colleague at BP and now a senior executive there, puts it best: ‘I don’t want people saving a quarter of their brain to hide who they are. I want them to apply their whole brain to their job. (Location 1327)

Hidden costs

Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles found evidence to support their hypothesis that participants paired with an openly gay partner would outperform participants paired with someone ambiguously gay when given the same task. They concluded that ‘not knowing the identity of one’s interaction partner may be more harmful to performance than knowing the identity – even a stigmatised identity’. (Location 1466)

Many economists have also examined tolerance of homosexuality and its correlation with economic performance in the rest of the world. Marcus Noland, executive vice president and director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, found that attitudes towards gay men and women correlated highly with a country’s ability to attract foreign investment and the level of its sovereign bond ratings. (Location 1487)

… political scientist Ronald Inglehart has argued that the acceptance of gays and lesbians is the most sensitive indicator of an advanced society’s well-being because homosexuals are typically ‘the least-liked group in most societies’. Essentially, he called them the final frontier of diversity. (Location 1493)

Hidden stigmas

Psychologists have noted that, when embracing their own sexual orientation in the face of society’s expectations, members of the gay community develop a heightened sense of perception. This experience forces them to think deeply about their feelings from an early age, and to consider constantly the reactions of others, from their parents to siblings to strangers, each of whom could potentially reject them. Navigating those situations and pondering the outcomes leads to a high degree of self-awareness. (Location 1506)

Gay people hone their sensitivity to situations by having come through adversity. This might explain why gay managers are apparently better at motivating their employees. In his study of more than three thousand employees over five years, Snyder found that employees working for gay male managers demonstrated significantly higher satisfaction with their jobs compared to the typical US employee. (Location 1514)

Gays are also communal:

Subsequent investigations and interviews revealed that these employees were not responding to their managers’ sexual orientation but to a certain style of leadership. (…) ‘In our study they proved to be much more motivational and more focused on the employee as an individual.’ (Location 1518)

Markets

‘LGBT marketing isn’t just to influence the 5 to 8 per cent, but the 50 to 75 per cent who want to see the world they live in welcome their gay teacher or best friend or cousin.’58 (Location 1560)

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