Emerging

For the next week, I'll be in Warsaw, where I'm moderating the 3rd International GLBT Business Leaders Forum. I get a triple bonus out of this trip:

1. Being with friends who are flying in from all over Europe to discuss workplace diversity issues
2. Being at EuroPride in a Warsaw where gay and lesbian people are not safe and not accepted, which is why EuroPride was planned for Warsaw.
3. Being in a beautiful old city where there is less humidity than Dakar, which may seem like a really lousy bonus but it's not.

Had a great rest. Practiced my presentation. And now, I'm ready to meet the press!

Educating the media about GLBT workplace issues and marketing opportunities is critical to building support. It always has been. If the media understands that corporations value a segment market, whether women or Hispanic or GLBT, then reporting on it takes a different tone. Once the media get interested in a story, they become one means by which acceptance spreads.

The other channel is corporations: They invest in research, diversity education for their own employees, policies that protect their employees from discrimination, marketing programs to the segment consumers. And eventually, all these activities result in an increase in social acceptance. We saw it happen in the US starting in the early 90s. As corporations introduced diversity programming, tolerance spread throughout the culture reaching the point where today, nearly 90 percent of Americans believe that all people should have equal workplace protections, 75 percent believe that Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be repealed because it discriminates against GLBT servicemembers, and more than 50% of the US believes that same sex couples should have equal legal protection for their relationships whether they're called marriages or civil unions or .... fill in the blank.

The point is, diversity and inclusion in the workplace changes the way the world outside the workplace thinks and behaves. I'm glad to be here in Poland working on change.