When you come out on the job there's usually a euphoria that goes along with it. A weight is lifted, stress is reduced, you're able to relate to people more honestly. Everything changes. Even people who suffer negative consequences usually find the overall experience positive and report that they have no regrets. Once you make the move, the Genii is out of the bottle and you quickly decide it's NEVER going back.
Then it's time to look for a new job, and suddenly the world hits you in the face again.
What are you going to do about the job search? The risks of being out while interviewing are obvious: the possibility of being rejected out of hand, possibly even by someone with whom you would have little or no contact; the possibility of not being taken seriously or of the interviewer being able to think of nothing but who you sleep with. This weighs against the pain of squeezing back into the closet.
It's an especially common scenario for college students like Jennifer Rust, coming from campuses where the attitudes tend to more more liberal than those of society at large: "It is upsetting to have to closet myself again, after a long process of coming out more and more publicly over my college career. I am BDOC (big dyke on campus) here -- when people think of lesbians here I am one of the first they think of. I am active in the GLB group and out to the administration. I am totally comfortable speaking out on queer issues in the classroom and writing in the school paper. I am able to simply be myself in all aspects of my life here. But now that I am beginning to think about the real world, I have to reconsider all of this...I worry that if I am out I will hinder myself. So I have reluctantly decided to (for the most part) leave my glb activities off my resume except when applying to jobs where it will help."
According to James Woods, Assistant Professor of Communications at the College of Staten Island and author of the upcoming book "The Corporate Closet", the job search question is one of the toughest. "It distills all of the issues that are on the table. It's the situation that gay professionals very often site as the most problematic."
When many of your defining experiences come from political or social activities, it's natural to want to put them on your resume. After putting all that energy into something so important, it hurts to have to leave it off. Even more so when it might be relevant to the job in question. Woods says, "As a gay person I've had unique experiences, I've had unique insights. I want to let the employer know that."
But Woods, who interviewed over 200 gay men for his book, has found very few people who have put anything on their resume that would indicate their sexuality. Most of those who chanced coming out did so during the interview process.
Daniel Gilly, a Senior Technical Writer at Oracle, decided to be out in his job interviews. But that wasn't how he started his job search. Originally, he was concerned that he would be asked why he had left a good job and moved to California, and he wasn't comfortable giving the real answer. "In my first interview I tried to hedge around it. I said 'California has better job opportunities', but it became obvious I was hiding something. The lying caused difficulties." So he decided to handle the issue ahead of time. "In my cover letter for my resume I said that my fiancee had gotten a job transfer, and that I had decided to move with HER."
He sent the resume out to several places, but before long he felt things were getting out of control. "When I interviewed at Oracle, I became concerned. The lie had spread. People in the office had heard about my fiancee, and they would ask me about her."
Daniel wasn't comfortable with this and felt he had to clear up the situation, at least with the people representing him. "I went to two of the recruiters I was working with the most and said 'There's something you need to know about my cover letter...the part about my fiancee...'" He was nervous and wasn't sure what else to say, but one of the recruiters he talked to saved him the trouble. "Oh, are you gay?" she asked. "Well, so am I!"
The positive response gave him confidence. He decided to also clarify the situation at a company that had already received the original cover letter, so his recruiter spoke to the hiring manager ahead of time and laid the groundwork. Then, at his interview, Daniel brought up the subject of the cover letter and said, "I didn't want to misrepresent myself..." Before getting any further he was told, "That's not a problem; we're a diverse company."
After that he approached the situation differently from the beginning. "Once I made the decision to be up front about it, when people asked 'Why did you leave your job?' I would say 'My significant other got a job transfer, and I decided to move with him.'" None of the interviewers ever reacted or followed up on the issue. "People are looking for signs from you about how to react. If you treat it very seriously and like a big secret, then they do the same. If you treat it casually, then it's just another factoid to them, as if you'd said you'd been in the industry for five years. This is a liberal area."
What's the most effective way to come out on the job search? "Unfortunately, there's not a good answer," says Woods. "The thing to be aware of is that there are trade-offs. Each option has its pluses and minuses that you have to be aware of. A technique that's often effective it to bring it up in the final interview. Or try to target someone during the interview process with whom you can speak freely.
"I would encourage people to realize there are penalties of being in the closet just as there are to being out. That's also true during an interview. When you are shut down during an interview over this subject or over anything else, you are not in a position to make a good impression. If you don't reveal your needs and you don't reveal your concerns, your opportunity for a good fit is lowered."
Some people take the risk of coming out on the job search because they don't want to work anywhere that wouldn't accept their sexuality. Others need to find out important information, like whether their partner would be covered under a domestic partners plan. Some are too uncomfortable with the inevitable lying that goes with being in the closet.
Nonetheless, most of us are just working on whether to be out on the job we have; thinking about being out to strangers in an interview situation is pretty far off. But now the option is a reality, and some are taking it.
The workplace is changing. |