Posted on: Sunday, October 5, 2003

Companies display new openness to gay workers

By Renee Ruble
Associated Press

MINNEAPOLIS — When 600 gay and lesbian professionals gathered last week for an annual conference, they had company — Best Buy, IBM, Target and other major corporations pitching themselves as fair, open, inviting places to work.

"Some of these companies I shop at every day. I didn't realize they were as open," said Carlos Trevino, who arrived from Dallas for the opening of the Out & Equal Workplace Summit.

Trevino's employer, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., was one of 60 companies that sent representatives to the three-day conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered workers, passing out free pens and flying discs to attendees from across the country.

Many cited improvements in work environments for gays, including company domestic partner benefit forms that increasingly list a "significant other" option, and employers whose senior executives serve on diversity boards.

Many attendees said just the presence of companies including Honeywell, Deutsche Bank, Motorola and DaimlerChrysler at the conference was a big step forward, but they also acknowledged critical shortcomings.

Candi Wallace, who works for Cargill Inc. in the Twin Cities, said gay workers face small challenges — like being allowed to hang a partner's picture on a cubicle wall — as well as larger ones like same-sex health benefits. Cargill does not offer such benefits.

Nearly two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies, according to an August study by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Seventy-one percent of the companies surveyed advertised to the gay community, up from 61 percent in 2002.

The report looked at 250 companies from the Fortune 500 and Forbes 200 lists.