Why no Pride Logo? We haven’t earned it yet.

By Marie Downes, Chief Talent Officer at Adaptive

I was speaking with our CEO, Matt Barrett, recently about the huge number of companies who have changed their logos to show the Pride rainbow. It’s fantastic that so many companies are marketing themselves as positive workplaces for the LGBT community but that got me thinking, what have we done at Adaptive to actively be an LGBT-positive workplace and therefore have the right to a rainbow logo?

Apart from being clear that we treat all staff equally and not discriminating, not much, and frankly, it’s not enough. We’ve not earned the right to ‘Pride-i-fy’ our logo….yet. 

So, this conversation got me thinking about what we can do to be a better LGBT-positive (and beyond, of course) place to work and to chat with colleagues who are highly motivated to make us a truly inclusive place to work. 

Do we ask for gender information at any point in our onboarding process? No because it’s not relevant to us. Do we ask about preferred pronouns? Also no, but this is changing come early July 2019.

Do we call out inappropriate gender references/’jokes’/language? Yes. But do we seek to educate our staff as to appropriate language and how to be a great ally to the LGBT community and beyond? No.

Do we have a Pride bake-off whereby all money raised for slices of cake goes to local LGBT charities and is matched by the company? Yes. However, do we make sure that the hotels that we use when staff are travelling are not owned by people such as the Sultan of Brunei who introduced a law making homosexuality punishable by dealth? No, we don’t. 

Do we promote LGBT networks such as Interbank and myGwork (with whom we have a partnership) to our staff? Yes. Have we ensured that all contract documents issued to staff are non gender-specific? No.

I know that it’s not the normal thing to post about how a company is not good enough about something but to pretend that we are wouldn’t be authentic and we have to hold ourselves to higher standards. The points listed above are just some of the things that we need to do/change to make us a more LGBT-positive employer and we’ll be tracking our progress over the year, with the commitment to have earned this right in time for Pride 2020.

So, no, whilst we would have loved to have a rainbow logo for Pride month, we’ve not done anywhere near enough to earn it and until we change, our logo won’t.