Anti Gay Exxon Backtracks after Ruling
A day after the United States Supreme Court affirmed same-sex marriage as a right, more than 125 Exxon Mobil employees marched in the Houston L.G.B.T. Pride Celebration for the first time. They carried an Exxon banner and wore rainbow-hued Exxon T-shirts — all with the company’s approval.
That Exxon, long excoriated by gay rights advocates, would allow itself to be identified with a public expression of support for gay rights is perhaps even more surprising than the Supreme Court’s historic ruling.
Protesters at the 2008 Exxon annual shareholders meeting in Dallas. Its new policy will cover 77,000 workers and retirees.Exxon to Extend Health Care to Married Same-Sex CouplesSEPT. 27, 2013
Common Sense: Exxon Defies Calls to Add Gays to Anti-Bias PolicyMAY 24, 2013
In the Human Rights Campaign’s most recent Corporate Equality Index, which ranks companies based on their treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees, Exxon again ranked last, with a score of minus 25 — the only company ever to have received a negative score. After Exxon acquired Mobil in 1999, Exxon rescinded Mobil’s policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and ended its policy of providing benefits to same-sex partners. Many gay and lesbian drivers have boycotted Exxon service stations ever since.
None of this has had much effect on Exxon’s bottom line. It’s the world’s third-largest company based on market capitalization (after Apple and Google) and earned $4.9 billion in its latest quarter, even with a downturn in oil prices.
But Exxon is doing more than just allowing employees to march in support of gay rights under the company’s banner. Earlier this year, after decades of resistance, Exxon formally amended its anti-discrimination policy to include sexual orientation and gender identity. In October, the company will for the first time be an official sponsor of the Out and Equal Workplace Summit, a conference dedicated to “workplace equality inclusive of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.” Last year, it recruited new employees at the Reaching Out M.B.A. job fair, an annual event for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students enrolled in M.B.A. programs. Exxon is hardly a pioneer when it comes to gay rights, and it still lags far behind most major American corporations. Some of the recent changes were imposed on the company by federal law and Supreme Court decisions. Others, like endorsing employee participation in a gay pride parade, seem aimed at recruiting and retaining talented employees.
“Like other major oil companies, Exxon is increasingly a technology company,” said Steve Coll, author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” and dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism. “They need to attract and retain the top scientific and engineering talent. They’ve been slow to recognize that it’s in their interest to move to a culture of inclusion.”
Whatever the company’s motives, next year the Human Rights Campaign may have to re-evaluate its scores and rankings.
“It’s a bit of a stretch to say the whole place is loosening up,” J. Chris Martin, a refining and supply operations manager in public affairs based in Houston, told me this week. Mr. Martin is president of Pride, the company’s resource group for lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people, often referred to as L.G.B.T. “I think what’s changed is that we’ve been able to show there’s a business advantage to the company,” especially in recruiting.
Now that they have gained the right to serve in the military and to marry, the workplace remains one of the last battlegrounds for gay rights advocates. There’s no federal law prohibiting discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Twenty-nine states, including Texas, where Exxon has its headquarters, don’t prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 32 states fail to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
For Mr. Martin, 54, an electrical engineering graduate and Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps veteran who started working for Mobil at its New York City headquarters 27 years ago, progress at Exxon has been a long time coming. He helped negotiate Mobil’s gay-inclusive policies, so it was especially disheartening when Exxon rescinded them.
Gay rights advocates at the company “pretty much went underground” after that, he said, until he and other gay employees sought approval for a company-sanctioned gay employees organization in 2006, soon after Rex W. Tillerson succeeded Lee Raymond as the company’s chief executive.
The blunt-spoken Mr. Raymond was chief executive when Exxon rescinded the Mobil protections, and he repeatedly brushed the issue aside at shareholder meetings. But even with a new and potentially more open-minded chief executive, it took over a year of discussions. The company clearly didn’t want an attention-getting activist group in the mold of Act Up, which used confrontational public protests and street theater to draw attention to the plight of AIDS victims. “We stressed that we were interested in collaborative advocacy,” Mr. Martin said. “That was always our plan.”
Exxon approved the formation of Pride in August 2008. Today the group has eight chapters and over 700 members (out of more than 83,000 employees worldwide), although it’s not certain how many are themselves L.G.B.T., since all groups at the company are open to all employees. Members can also choose to be blind-copied on emails and other announcements so their identities aren’t disclosed. But Mr. Martin said the number of members choosing that option has now dwindled to about a dozen.
Like all affinity groups at Exxon, the group has a company executive who acts as an adviser, or sponsor. Pride’s sponsor is Bryan Milton, president of Exxon Mobil Global Services. Though Mr. Milton isn’t gay, Mr. Martin credits him with helping raise the group’s profile within the upper ranks of Exxon. Pride also has an advisory council of four higher-ranking executives, all of them openly gay.
Progress has been incremental, but it seems to have accelerated since the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage act barring same-sex partners from federal marital benefits. In September, Exxon extended marital benefits to same-sex spouses in the United States, and noted that it did the same in 30 countries where same-sex marriages were recognized.
Last July, President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, and in late January, Exxon quietly followed suit for all employees in the United States.
Exxon has long maintained that such policies are unnecessary because the company is a meritocracy and doesn’t discriminate against anybody. As Ken Cohen, an Exxon vice president for public affairs, put it in a blog post last year: “It’s not uncommon for large companies such as Exxon to be the target of political campaigns, which has been the case with efforts by a small number of very vocal advocates of the L.G.B.T. community.” Nonetheless, he wrote, “Let us be absolutely clear: Exxon does not discriminate, will not discriminate, and has not discriminated against members of the L.G.B.T. community. Period.”
Since I first wrote about the issue in 2013, several current and former gay employees have told me they agree with that claim. “I’ve never experienced any discrimination that I’m aware of,” Mr. Martin said. “It’s just not an issue.” He feels the public perception that the company is anti-gay “is very unfair, and we know it’s not true.”
Still, Exxon retains a conservative and meritocratic culture, in which singling out any group is seen as a potentially dangerous step on the road to affirmative action. And the company has long prided itself on resisting pressure from outside activists, whether the topic be social issues or global warming. Even with its latest more inclusive policies, it’s far behind the 366 businesses with 100 percent ratings at the top of the Human Rights Campaign equality index, such as Apple, JPMorgan Chase and Pfizer.
Exxon “has been the subject of every pressure campaign the world could conceive of,” said Mr. Coll. “So their initial reaction is always to put up a moat defense and resist.” He noted, too, that Exxon is heir to the old Standard Oil culture, “which drew no distinction between ardent Protestantism and business principles.” Exxon meetings often began with a prayer as recently as the 1980s, he said.
The energy giant was “the last of the Fortune 10” to ban anti-gay discrimination in the workplace, and “one of the slowest of the Fortune 500,” said Cece Cox, chief executive of Resource Center Dallas, who has met with Exxon executives at its headquarters in Irving, Tex., to advocate gay rights issues.
“But I guess that makes it all the more remarkable,” said Ms. Cox. “I’m certainly glad they’re taking the steps they’re taking.”
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