The 2009 Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is out this week. I’m not sure why, but HRC chose to release the survey in the middle of the Republican National Convention when it would likely not receive much coverage given the near total focus on convention coverage by most media outlets. The survey release doesn’t appear to have generated much attention so far, but I hope that will change over time. The survey contains a lot of good information about what companies are doing to include LGBT workplace protections in their employment policies.
The headline for this year’s survey is that even more companies – 259 – received a "perfect" score of 100. That means these companies are complying with all of the employment policies and community activities HRC deems important to measuring corporate engagement with our community. This year’s number represents a one-third increase from last year when 195 companies achieved a perfect score.
As several readers have commented in the past, the CEI score should not be the "be all and end all" for measuring corporate engagement. Policy changes do not always result in cultural changes: there are likely LGBT people who work for companies with high (or perfect) scores who must deal with negative work environments or outright discrimination, harassment or worse even though their companies’ policies expressly forbid it. And there are companies with high profiles in the LGBT community that have higher/better scores than competitors with a lower or no profile in the community. It’s an imperfect science to be sure.
The point here should not be that a high CEI (or other) score means that a company is beyond reproach. In my mind, it means that those companies get that they must begin to change their policies – and their cultures – to be fully representative of the diversity of their employee and customer base. There is strength in numbers and when hundreds of industry-leading companies take a stand to say they believe in fair employment policies, that has an impact. Just do a simple Web search and look at the press releases from companies as diverse as CarMax, JCPenney, Cummins and Subaru that have all issued press releases touting their perfect scores this year.
A high corporate equality score should be the beginning of a company’s involvement with our community, not the end. And it should be seen as part of the broader conversation about corporate engagement in our community that is beginning to generate more attention and interest…and action. That’s a good thing and I hope we’ll keep talking about those issues as we all work to ensure even more companies are moving towards full inclusion and engagement in the future.
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This make’s little differance since HRC Equality Index doesn’t include a fair rating for the Trans /and Gender Variant Community. This Index is flawed since companys lie in oreder to get perfect ratings trying to attract the GBLT dollar. Thier needs to be accountablity for theses companies and for HRC for that matter.
Brandi Parker
SWVA Rep Equality Va