Yesterday
The job seekers that Nick Ebbadi-Cook works with have two things in common.
The first is that they’re LGBTQ2S+. And the second is that almost all of them have faced discrimination in the workplace because of it.
“We’ve had about 40 participants come through, and the majority of those folks have faced discrimination,” said Ebbadi-Cook in an interview earlier this month. “They’ve been misgendered. They’ve faced harassment. They’ve been let go because of their identity.”
Ebbadi-Cook is the program manager of Prism Employment Support Service, a program specifically designed to help LGBTQ2S+ people in Greater Vancouver learn skills, navigate workplace issues and find jobs. “The base of our resources are the general employment resources but with a queer lens,” he said.
The program, a collaboration between the YWCA and Vancouver resource centre Qmunity, is in part a reaction to what Ebbadi-Cook says is becoming an increasingly understood gap in work outcomes for LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada.
A growing body of research suggests people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities make less money than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. Community advocates say that reflects persistent problems of discrimination in Canadian workplaces, which are causing some LGBTQ2S+ workers to either leave certain jobs or simply not apply for them at all.
“These experiences seem to add and compound over peoples’ careers that result in lower overall earnings,” said Basia Pakula, a senior researcher with the non-profit Social Research and Demonstration Corp. “You may be choosing a pay cut in order to work for an employer where you are feeling safe.”
The SRDC partnered with Pride at Work Canada on a series of reports into the experiences of LGBTQ2S+ Canadians in the labour market. One of those studies, published this spring, linked demographic data collected by Statistics Canada with tax filings. It found heterosexual men, on average, made $55,959 a year, compared to $50,822 for gay men; $44,740 for lesbian women; $31,776 for bisexual men and $25,290 for bisexual women.
For gay men, the analysis found the gap in earnings was explained by other factors. But those factors couldn’t explain the gaps for any other demographic groups.
The centre also performed a second, qualitative analysis interviewing queer workers about their experiences. The findings were complex: in some cases, challenges with mental health contributed to the wage gap. In others, Pakula, one of the study’s authors, says it became clear some workers believed discrimination had affected their earnings, or had chosen to not apply for jobs in certain well-paying sectors — like the skilled trades — out of concern about discrimination.
“These experiences are not uniform. There is a tremendous amount of diversity within the community,” Pakula said.
Colin Druhan, the executive director of Pride at Work, has worked as a business advisor for members of the LGBTQ2S+ community for years. “It didn’t matter what part of their life they were in. The employment piece was always a thorn in their side,” he said.
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But he said that doesn’t always mean they’ve made workplaces welcoming.
“A lot of people have questions: if you’ve got that rainbow flag out, what are you doing?” Druhan said.
Ebbadi-Cook said some employers, for example, may not know about their obligations pertaining to pronouns, or may not have amenities like gender-neutral washrooms. In many ways, he said, LGBTQ2S+ people are navigating an extra set of job politics; one of the services Prism hopes to soon offer is a workshop about how to come out in the workplace.
They also compile an internal job board, he said, list companies who have responded to a survey about their values and how they accommodate employees of diverse sexual and gender identities.
In other cases, though, Ebbadi-Cook says there can be explicit discrimination. He recalls one of the first jobs he ever worked in the service industry after coming out.
“I faced a lot of harassment. I guess at the time people would have considered it light-hearted ribbing. But it’s hard to feel safe and show up as your true self in places… it’s really demoralizing, and it really makes you question whether you belong in the space,” he said.
Druhan says many queer workers simply choose to not come out to their colleagues or employer, particularly those who are already part of other marginalized groups.
“They know they are perhaps already disadvantaged, and they don’t want to disadvantage themselves further. That tells us about how privilege operates in our communities,” Druhan said.
The problem is well-known, which is why Ebbadi-Cook says the YWCA and Qmunity partnered to create Prism. He says their goal is to serve approximately 60 people in their first few months of operation. If successful, he says, the goal would be to seek more funding to expand the program to the rest of the province. They also hope to work more directly with employers, he said.
On a larger scale, though, Pakula says government responses are restrained by a dearth of data. For example, the SRDC’s research couldn’t determine what real wage gaps were between heterosexual men and people with different gender identities, such as non-binary people or transgender people. Statistics Canada began asking census respondents in 2021 whether their sex assigned at birth differs from the one they currently identified with, something policymakers said would offer a national-level snapshot of the population.
She said there was a need for more “intervention-oriented research” focused more on determining needed solutions rather than drilling down on the well-known problems.
But Pakula said the national-level data picture is still far too weak.
“You just cannot understand what’s going on and why it’s going on just by looking at the numbers,” she said.
Zak Vescera, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Tyee
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