fabfemmeboy

molly-aster:

Title: Whitehouse.gov
Characters: Kurt/Blaine, Burt, Tina (Glee); Josh, Sam, Ginger, Ainsley (The West Wing)
Rating: PG for fleeting expletives
Words: 3,300
Spoilers: All aired episodes for both shows.
Summary: Kurt’s first day in the office. New job, new email address, new direction.

Here’s the next installment in my West Wing crossover ‘verse! (I guess it’s a verse now?) 

daxterdd:

I’ve seen a lot of posts on my Dash recently in support of companies like JC Penney and Oreo (well, Kraft really), and I wanted to make people aware of a great resource published each year by the Human Rights Campaign¹, which ranks hundreds of corporations on how they treat their LGBT employees and their engagement in the LGBT community.

The companies are graded on a scale of 1-100 and the listing runs the gamut.  For example, Kraft currently has a perfect score of 100/100, JC Penney has a respectable 85/100, and major gas company, Exxon Mobile, retains the honor of being the only company to receive a negative score (-25/100).

So for anyone interested in becoming a more educated consumer, the link takes you right to a pdf of the CEI, and the company listings begin on page 47.

^1. I realize that the HRC has a problematic history, especially with the Trans* community, but I don’t think that diminishes the CEI as a valuable resource.

The CEI isn’t actually a very valuable resource for a variety of other reasons.  First, it does skew heavily toward LG acceptance and not the T. 

Second, it has virtually nothing to do with the day-to-day reality of work in a particular company and only deals with policies as-written and responses to questionnaires put out by gay groups.  A large part of their computations involve things like benefits given to domestic partners specifically through the company, while a company that is based somewhere that requires partner benefits to be provided for all employees and therefore provides benefits but not through a company-specific policy would not be credited for its coverage.  

And more importantly, none of that has anything to do with what it’s really like to be an LGBT person who works at that company.  Or it does, but very little.  Because if a company offers health benefits to a partner because they’re required by law to do so, but they don’t intervene when coworkers belittle gay employees, they still get their 15 points.  If they have a nondiscrimination statement that includes SO-GI/E, they get 30 points even if they repeatedly refer to trans* employees by the wrong name or pronouns or won’t let them use the correct restroom. 

A related problem is that the index does not - nor could it ever - take into account the variances across workplaces under a single company umbrella.  For example, my partner worked at Toys R Us when he was coming out.  At his store, there were three different trans* individuals who had transitioned on the job without any problems, there were several other gay employees and a few partnered lesbians.  And yet Toys R Us scored only a 65 based in large part on their lack of company-wide diversity councils and other things that would be meaningless in a retail setting.

This also has nothing to do with any of the shopping or patronage experiences of LGBT customers, guests, or clients, which makes it less useful.  Wal Mart scored a 60.  You may recall that they literally called the police on a gay couple and tried to have their special needs adopted children taken away from them - because they were gay.  But they scored only 5 points lower than Toys R Us, thanks to a few corporation-wide diversity training workshops that so far haven’t done much to trickle down to the customer experience.  So how do you use the index to shop ethically, if that’s your intention?

If you need a clearcut example of why this index isn’t a useful resource, just consider this:  JC Penney and Target each scored an 85.  One of them has an openly gay spokeswoman and told the Million Moms to sit down and shut up and recently published ads for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day which featured gay couples - prominently, too, not a little picture down in the corner.  The other donated a bunch of money to someone who vocally opposes gay marriage and has a board filled with people who proudly give money to individuals based on their opposition to gay rights.  To look at this survey, both are equally gay-friendly, but anyone who reads a newspaper knows that’s not the case.