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72 Immigration and diversity 05 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Explore reading: Sexual diversity in the workplace Read the text below, then choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D) for questions 1–6. Put a cross (  ) in the correct box. The first one (0) has been done for you. 36 What did you do this weekend? This seemingly innocuous question from a co-worker makes Sam uncomfortable and anxious. He lies or avoids answering the question altogether.  Sam is gay, and in the closet2. He has worked at the same place for 27 years, specializing in highway construction, and while he knows that some of his colleagues suspect he is gay, he has never revealed his sexuality at the office.  “I couldn’t come out3 in the 80s because the environment was openly hostile,” he said. “I’ve thought about coming out. The environment has changed, but my decision hasn’t. If I came out, I would be the only one.”  Though he knows of other homosexuals in his 4,000-employee workforce, he says no one is openly gay. “When people ask about who I went on vacation with, I tell them, ‘A friend’.”  Fear is also what drove Jason, a 25-year-old information technology professional, into the closet. Jason works at a major corporation in one of the 29 states where private companies can legally fire, or not hire, someone because she or he is gay.  “There is no protection,” said the gay rights activist, conceding that there is some hypocrisy in campaigning for gay rights while concealing his homosexuality.  He refrains from taking phone calls from his partner or talking about him at the office, even going to the trouble of creating two albums of vacation photos, one with his partner and one that excludes his partner to show people at work.  “You’re an at-will employee. So they could point-blank say, ‘I don’t want a gay person working for me. I’m going to let you go.’ I’m not saying that my managers would do that, but you never know.”  Such fears appear to be echoed by others in the LGBT community, where, according to a recent study by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy group, 53% of LGBT workers in the country hide their sexual identity at work and 35% feel compelled to lie about their personal lives while at the office.  “It’s really downplaying the parts of ourselves that are either our identity or our experiences,” said Christie Smith, managing principal of the Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion. “The LGBT community is the population that is most impacted by this concept of covering up and hiding their identity when they come to work. You could say they’re completely denying their sexual identity in order to conform.”  Of course, there are also LGBT individuals who are not out of the closet because they feel their sexuality is private and doesn’t need to be discussed at work.  However, Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly acknowledged that he is gay, becoming the only CEO of a Fortune 500 company to announce his homosexuality while at the helm of a major corporation.  “I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others,” Cook wrote in a Bloomberg Businessweek column. “So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”  The news came a month after President Barack Obama’s executive order banning federal contractors fromdiscriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation, which was welcomed by the LGBT community.  The presidential initiative helps to reinforce a changing social and legal landscape where, according to the Human Rights Campaign, 91% of Fortune 500 companies have policies that promote diversity and protect employees against discrimination.  Inclusive policies are not enough to persuade Brandon to come out at his job, where he is a project manager for a medical research firm.  “Policy doesn’t necessarily create safety,” said Brandon, a transgender man. The 33-year-old leads a team of 10 associates and recently opted to work from home, in part because he found it too stressful to go to an office for fear that he would be outed. “The main reason is I don’t know whether there would be a negative effect,” he reasoned. “I can’t risk that. It feels too much like a roll of the dice.” One job, two lives: LGBT1 in the American workplace Nur zu Prüfzweck n – Eigentum des Verlags öbv