Sunday, December 21, 2008

’Harvard Business Review’ tackles trans issues in the workplace

From the Boston Edge,

The Harvard Business Review (HBR), which reaches an elite readership of corporate CEOs and high-level executives, published a case study in its December issue highlighting the issues that companies face when an employee announces plans to change his or her gender.

"As we started to talk to experts in the field, for example human resources lawyers, they told us that the part of their practice that was growing the fastest was companies that had concerns about their employees transitioning," said Gary, who is associate director of leadership development and public affairs at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

"In this environment companies want to make sure that they’re doing nothing to put off or scare away potentially excellent talent," said Gary. H.R. executives from Raytheon and Prudential provided commentaries to the case study, as did Stasha Goliaszewski, a transgender employee at Boeing.

Trans issues may seem like the next frontier to some companies, but in researching their case study Elliot and Gary found that for other companies the gender changes are old news. In the commentary section following the case study Linda Taylor, an H.R. executive at Raytheon Missle Systems in Tucson, explains that in her seven years on the job she has overseen three gender changes, and she said her predecessor was aware of at least four others. Beginning in 2005 she worked to create a standard procedure to accommodate gender changes, leading gender identity training sessions for employees and instituting rules to ensure that coworkers use appropriate pronouns and names…

"I hope that it serves to legitimize trans issues in the workplace. Now that it’s out there there’s a resource that can be used by trans folks in the business community, by trans allies in the business community, that they can take to a CEO when these issues arise or before these issues arise and say, ’This is an issue, it’s in HBR,’" said Elliot.

1 comment:

  1. How fantastic that they're creating (or have had one previously) a standard for such issues!

    ReplyDelete