The Effort to keep Openly Gay MBA’s out of the Closet
Corey Hodges spent several years keeping his sexuality off the record at work while he was a naval officer, and plans to never do that again. Hodges, a 27-year-old MBA student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Isenberg School of Business, says he’d rather hold out for an employer that isn’t squeamish about hiring a gay man.
“With our generation, there’s enough of a mentality where it’s like, ‘I’m not going to deal with this,’” says Hodges, who has paw prints tattooed on his right arm. “I will find someone who will find the value in what I have to provide, and if that’s not you, that’s fine.”
Hodges is one of about 1,350 people who are in San Francisco this week for a conference celebrating MBAs who are lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual. His desire to be openly gay in his professional life is one encouraged by Reaching Out MBA, the nonprofit running the conference. To make their support for this stance official, the group is announcing a new set of scholarships today, each which will offer at least $10,000 per year toward tuition for one LGBT student at six top business schools. “Our goal is to make it clear to those who are entering their career with MBAs that business is a place for them, and that they should be proud to be out,” says Matt Kidd, the executive director of Reaching Out MBA.
So far, the business schools at Columbia, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Dartmouth, MIT, and NYU have all agreed to fund one of the scholarships, which will be called Reaching Out MBA fellowships.
The initiative is designed in part to resolve a fundamental issue: The business world has not always been the perfect place for a coming-out party. There are still only two openly gay chief executives of public companies in the country, C1 Bank’s Trevor Burgess and IGI Laboratories’ Jason Grenfell-Gardner, according to news reports.
“We see a lot of MBAs in particular going back into the closet,” Kidd says.
Indeed, despite a marked increase in LGBT support groups in the workplace in recent years, 53 percent of LGBT workers conceal their sexual identity on the job, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation this year (PDF). A by-product of the Reaching Out MBA Fellowship is that accepting the funding would make it harder for young professionals to go back to keeping their sexuality under wraps once they finished their degree: Accepting the funding more or less requires making one’s sexual identity official.
“It is easier to be out in an academic setting,” says Sprague, explaining that the stakes are higher at the office. “In certain states, you could get fired. You could have a supervisor who is never going to mentor you.” It is legal under federal law to fire someone for being gay, although many states have protections for LGBT workers.
Hodges, the naval officer turned MBA student, says that living in the closet is a personal sacrifice he isn’t willing to make, even if it would boost his career. “For some people, it’s worth it. I’m not one of those people.”
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