Why Pride at Work is important to me

Last week an event was held at KPMG in Toronto to launch a new job board for Pride at Work Canada. This new board, powered by the TalentOyster Diversity Network, can be found at http://Careers.PrideAtWork.ca

As part of this event I had the pleasure of speaking for a few minutes and I'd like to share the content of part of my talk here. This isn't the full text because at the end I spoke to the various organizations who attended the event about some technical information on how this new site can interact with their existing career sites. Which if you are a programmer or hiring manager is exciting (maybe) but if you're not is a bit dry so we'll just leave that part out. I think the rest of the story is worth sharing though and here it is.

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Good evening everyone. My name is Max Stocker and I am the Director of Technology for TalentOyster and I am here tonight to talk to you about the new Pride At Work Canada career site and my dad.

My dad is an immigrant, born in the UK, but raised and educated, including multiple universiy degrees here in Canada. My dad is also transgendered.

For many years she worked, in technology related fields for an enterprise level company. Then she worked as a contractor for several other large organizations but to conclude a long period of soul searching, about 5 years ago she went to Thailand and had a full sex change operation and hasn't had a real job since.

She still does work, on a volunteer basis for her church and for a local LGBT history organization but in terms of meaningful paid employment there is none.

To be honest there are many factors to why this is, but there is no doubt in my mind that the main reason that a highly educated, skilled and experienced person like my dad is not working is because of the way she looks.

At TalentOyster our diversity mandate covers many groups. Aboriginals, visible minorities, new immigrants, persons with disabilities and now, with Pride at Work Canada, LGBT. To us all of these groups, as different as they are all share a too common experience of bias and prejedice based ultimatley on who they are.

Defining terms like diversity or inclusion can be a navel gazing excercise but if I may define inclusion all the same I would say it is an environment in which nobody is being asked to, or forced to, leave part of their identity at home.

We don't ask people who have a different skin colour to leave that at home, or tell persons with disabilities that that's fine but leave it in the privacy of your own home. Things shouldn't be any different for LGBT.

I'd love to see, as Michael Bach was recently quoted as saying, our society move past tolerance in to acceptance but I don't think it will happen over night. What I do think though is that efforts by organizations like Pride at Work, and tonight specifically with this career site we can start to change these attitudes and encourage the formation of working environments, and, even a society that is truly inclusive of everyone. Including my dad.