(Photo credit: Mario Anzuoni | Reuters)

 
By their own account, the Human Rights Campaign  (HRC) is “America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality.” But transgender staff there feel tokenized and even unsafe coming out according to an internal report that paints a damning picture of an organization with a mandate of diversity ingrained into its DNA. That’s why the findings of the recent Pipeline Report (embedded below) are so troubling.

Among those findings:

• Staff at the HRC described the working environment as “judgmental,” “exclusionary,” “sexist,” and “homogenous.”
• “Leadership culture is gay, white, male,” and “exclusion was broad-based and hit all identity groups.”
• There exists a judgmental working environment, especially among women and feminine-identified staff.
• More than half of multiracial and Latino people, and 83% of gender-queer people feel they are not treated equally based on their identity.
• 100% of trans/gender-queer people feel a bias against them.
• 7 out of 31 men who have been promoted have been on staff for less than two years (some promoted two times). No women under two years have been promoted.

 
While the gender distribution at the HRC was generally equal, the racial distribution was not: within the board of directors and executive only 13 and 12 per cent respectively were visible minorities.

When shifting the focus to Canadian organizations the situation is better, though the percentage of racialized (visible minority) members within leadership and board positions still trails behind non-racialized members.

At Egale Canada Human Rights Trust, Canada’s equivalent to the HRC, half of the 4-member executive is made up of visible minorities, but their entire 5-member board of directors is non-racialized. The graph above also provides data on the ethnic and gender makeup for the 519 Community Centre and Pride Toronto.

Among these organizations gender is more equally distributed than race. In all but one instance, the gap is much bigger in terms of the percentage of visible minorities to non-visible minorities compared with female versus male-identified members.

Diversity has come up as an issue for Pride Toronto in the past. Currently 44 per cent of their board is female identified and only one member of their 9-member board of directors is a visible minority. But Pride Toronto has taken steps to include individuals with physical disabilities within their organization.

Since the release of the Pipeline Report, the Human Rights Campaign has taken a number of corrective measures to address the problem of diversity within their own membership.