What steps has your company taken to effectively combat homophobia in the workplace?

#discuss #career

Top comments (15)

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question.

As with any kind of systematically accepted discrimination, you have a couple of hard to swallow pills you need to think about:

How do my other coworkers react to homophobic comments? Are they also against it or they laugh and nod? Do I have any allies or am I going to be alone in this? Do I actually care what my coworkers think?
Is homophobia something that I can report to HR or is homophobia part of the culture of this company?
Am I in the possition to do the right thing and expose this kind of behaviour, or am I putting myself in a greater risk for retaliation, humilliation or even getting fired?

Having said that, if you feel that you are not risking yourself or your own job (or you don't mind the risks of doing so), then for sure you should point it out and try to create a less toxic workplace.

I'm a little biased because I've been working as a freelancer for a very very long time and haven'r had to deal much with this kind of office-related issues, and I can pretty much choose if I want to work with as a colleague or as a client. But I hope this helps anyway 😄.

Panda Quests • Aug 8 '20

Thanks for your insights

Ruan Linos Alves • Aug 7 '20

Hey, isn't homophobia a crime?

Panda Quests • Aug 8 '20

Which country are you from?

Ruan Linos Alves • Sep 2 '20

Im Brazilian. It is very sad to think that people have no respect, I feel sorry for you

Panda Quests • Sep 3 '20

What do you mean?

Ruan Linos Alves • Sep 9 '20

i'm not sure, for sure it's something very difficult, and i'm sure you've already tried to talk to your superiors, in case you didn't succeed, in the last place i would try to change my place of work. this for sure should be a crime all over the world!

Panda Quests • Sep 9 '20

I agree. But in my country (Germany) it's not a crime to be homophobic. It's a crime to discriminate. But being homophobic, racist, sexist, etc. is a different thing. They can always say it's not discrimination, but they don't like a certain person. And no law can force other people to be friendly towards each other. Also it's hard to prove.

Panda Quests • Aug 7 '20

Not, where I'm coming from

Sunit Katkar • Aug 7 '20

In office, it's best to never ever let your political and social views be ever expressed. It's best to talk anything else like sports or some other dumb harmless topic like Geology and tectonic plate movement. There are far too many overly sensitive people these days who can get offended just because you didn't use proper punctuation. I'm just exaggerating but trying to share what I've seen in bay area. So it's best to appear dumb and insipid than get on someone's shit list or the HR's list.

So my motto usually is 'Smile, everybody loves idiots'

Panda Quests • Aug 8 '20

Lol. I kinda agree

Sunit Katkar • Aug 8 '20

And as I added in another reply - Go to work, smile like an idiot :p and collect a paycheck. There is no point getting into political and social arguments and campaigns. Unless you hear something very very dangerous like a terrorist plot or something, just move on.