From Pride employee resource groups to a recurring wave of rainbow logos each June, LGBTQ+-friendly workplaces can feel more like the rule than the exception in 2024.
Yet, while corporate leaders pat themselves on the back, many queer employees across Canada are still quietly navigating challenging workplace dynamics tied to their sexual orientations and gender identities.
For these employees, true equity and inclusivity goes beyond gender-neutral bathrooms and company-sponsored Pride events. It means addressing deeper, often overlooked issues that remain largely invisible to those outside the LGBTQ+ community.
It’s an issue that Nate Shalev, an inclusivity speaker and adviser based in Brooklyn, N.Y., feels strongly about. They posted about some of those barriers in a LinkedIn post, where they are ranked as one of the U.S. and Canada’s Top LGBTQIA+ Voices.
“When I was told I would have to travel for work, my immediate reaction would be panic,” they wrote. “I was concerned about booking travel with my legal name and risking my team calling me by a name I no longer use, getting through TSA as a trans person with my dignity intact … [and] navigating queer and transphobia at hotels or in taxis, or anywhere, in front of my co-workers.”
Through their consultancy, Revel Impact, Shalev draws on past experiences with “really bad bosses” to help build more inclusive workplaces, educating companies on the barriers their LGBTQ+ team members may be facing – on top of simply getting their jobs done.
Barriers like: “Is the conference you asked me to go to safe? What about that client meeting? The whole team is going for a happy hour, but this bar isn’t LGBTQ-friendly. Should I leave? Would that make me look like I wasn’t a part of the team?”
Shalev says these sorts of concerns are routinely dismissed or there’s no clear channel through which to handle them since they don’t rise to a legal level of discrimination, despite having negative affects.
Gaps for parents trying to conceive
While most organizations in North America have anti-discrimination policies in place, Ottawa-based talent and brand specialist Lindsay Moorcroft says that doesn’t necessarily mean those policies are sufficient.
“Unless you’re building your programs and policies with the [affected] people in the room, there’s always the possibility for something to be forgotten,” Moorcroft says, reflecting on a previous job at a small startup where she was the only out queer employee.
“Pronouns weren’t being asked in meetings. They weren’t shared in e-mail signatures. There was no option to even talk about that. So then it’s like, do I want to be the person who brings it up?” she says.
For Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, a communications and advocacy director in Ottawa, the risk of speaking up paid off. Although she works for a national non-profit she calls “progressive” and “feminist,” bereavement leave didn’t include pregnancy loss until she advocated for it after experiencing a miscarriage herself.
“Even if it’s not a miscarriage, when a fertility treatment doesn’t work, when an embryo transfer doesn’t work, there is that grief,” she says.
Fertility issues aren’t specific to the LGBTQ+ community, but “gay couples, by definition, typically need to access fertility treatment of some kind,” as Geiger-Bardswich says. “So it’s more likely that if you have gay employees who are interested in parenting, they’re going to have to navigate this.”
According to Fertility Matters Canada, more than half of Canadian employers don’t provide fertility benefits, including drugs and treatment costs. And only seven provinces provide public funding to cover partial costs of fertility treatment. In Geiger-Bardswich’s case, she and her wife relied on limited OHIP coverage when trying to conceive, while paying thousands of dollars out-of-pocket for medication and donor sperm.
She says she was grateful to have flexibility in her work hours, which made it easier to attend doctor’s appointments throughout the in-vitro fertilization process without fear of repercussions.
Flexible work arrangements, including remote work, can also benefit transgender employees who are transitioning or who are repeatedly misgendered at the office, says Shalev.
Geiger-Bardswich notes that as anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric increases around the world, it adds another layer of concern for queer Canadians. She points to Italy’s push to remove non-biological parents from birth certificates as an example.
“I hope that’s not going to happen in Canada,” she says. “But with how things are happening around the world, there is nervousness around the legal benefits and legal situations for parents like us.”
‘Ask folks for what they need’
So, what can workplaces do to achieve real, meaningful inclusivity? Shalev says it’s about taking a pro-active, rather than reactive, approach.
This could look like ensuring there’s space for preferred names on all applications, forms and other communications. Before international trips, a systematic pretravel questionnaire might allow queer employees to request extra security, a travel companion, a NEXUS membership or a car service to make the experience safer and smoother, Shalev says.
“It doesn’t have to feel complicated. Actively create spaces for these conversations to happen. Ask folks what they need,” says Shalev, noting that this has been more difficult in recent years with LGBTQ+ issues growing increasingly politicized.
“Because queer issues have been politicized so much, there’s this sense that it’s a taboo topic. That’s a big shift I’ve seen, versus it just being inclusion work and wanting to support colleagues. Trans folks aren’t politics. We’re people.”
One organization that appears to be embracing a pro-active approach is Moorcroft’s current employer, ecobee, a home automation company headquartered in Toronto.
The company’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offerings include an LGBTQ+ allyship group, a private social channel for LGBTQ+ employees and a policy-focused working group. Most importantly, Moorcroft says, a variety of voices are in these rooms alongside her, including those of senior leadership.
“DEI means nothing if the top of the company is not supporting it, and it’s not in their [budget],” she says.
Inclusion that benefits all
Every organization has different needs and resources, which is why Shalev says, “It’s not one-size-fits-all.” Pride at Work Canada and Great Place to Work provide toolkits for organizations looking to improve inclusion, with strategies ranging from collecting data on employee demographics to administering queer mentorship programs.
While certain measures may seem niche, “LGBTQ+ inclusion benefits us all,” Shalev says.
“When I do workshops, of course I know there are other queer folks in the room. But then there are the parents of trans kids, or somebody with a partner who’s trans. Our workplaces are microcosms of our larger society, and if we create better workplaces, we can also create better communities and [and better] worlds.”
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