Gender Diversity and Non-Binary Inclusion in the Workplace

The Essential Guide for Employers

Sarah Gibson, J. Fernandez

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781784505233
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Helping to create inclusive work environments for non-binary people, this book builds knowledge of non-binary identities and provides practical solutions to many of the basic workplace problems this group face.

Working with and including non-binary people in the workplace is beneficial for both employer and employee, as it attracts and retains younger and non-binary workers by helping promote an inclusive brand, as well as satisfying equality obligations.

Based on novel research of non-binary inclusion within businesses, it provides a basic overview of non-binary people, a business case for inclusion, a brief description of how non-binary people fit into current equality laws and likely future developments in the area. An ideal introduction for companies wishing to embrace all genders in the workplace.

Chapter 1

Non-Binary Inclusion

Welcome to Gender Diversity and Non-Binary Inclusion in the Workplace: The Essential Guide for Employers. In this book we will be guiding you through the process of making your organization inclusive of non-binary people. While society has made great strides in recent years to becoming a more open and friendly place, it still remains harsh and unforgiving to many people who are targeted simply for being themselves. Non-binary people are one of these groups, still waiting to be afforded many civil rights that most would take for granted. The purpose of this book is to break new ground – to be the first book of its kind to tackle many of the issues non-binary people face. We hope that after reading this you will have a better understanding of non-binary people and that you will know how to make your organization more inclusive.

As media coverage around transgender people has increased, so too have the number of people asking questions: How are trans people challenged in society, and what sort of issues do they face? Could any of my friends or colleagues be trans? How do I feel about trans issues? While individuals have been challenging how they think about gender, organizations have been working to respond to the needs of all trans people, including non-binary people. Powerhouses like Facebook and HSBC have thought about inclusion and what it means, introducing new policies and outward displays of appreciation of gender diversity. Not only in the UK or the US, but worldwide, LGBT+ and trans-specific organizations have been working to ensure transgender people are included in workplaces, government legislation and everyday life.

Non-binary people – those who don’t fit into the categories of men or women – are often a forgotten ‘subtype’ of trans people. While many organizations are fantastic at making sure trans people are supported and are helpful in facilitating transitions, including offering support for coming out, taking time off for medical treatment and making a switch to a different name or uniform, there are complexities which non-binary people face that trans men and women often don’t. For example, how do you record an employee’s gender if they’re not a man or a woman? Does a trans support group automatically include a non-binary person? What does it mean when a member of staff wants to go by the pronoun ‘ze’?

All of this, and many more questions, are things that employers may need to consider when recruiting people, thinking about new equality and diversity policies or when a member of staff might come out as non-binary. It helps to be prepared and to think about these questions ahead of time, rather than being forced to react in haste. Moreover, even if an organization thinks it doesn’t have non-binary members of staff, formulating a policy for including non-binary people can help to improve the workplace for all employees.

We have aimed to make this book accessible to as wide a range of people as possible. We begin by introducing you to the basics of who non-binary people are and what daily life is like for them. We then move to the workplace, giving you an overview of UK law, considering why you should make your company inclusive of non-binary people and, most importantly, how you can achieve this. Discussions of non-binary people are frequently carried out in an academic style, but we have attempted to make this book as jargon free and as practical as possible. While we have focused on the UK, the majority of the book applies worldwide.

This book is aimed at human resources professionals or anyone responsible for equality and diversity within an organization, but the tools and practices it teaches are relevant to everyone. If you don’t know what the word non-binary means, this book is for you. If you already know the basics of what it means to be non-binary, but want to learn how to better support non-binary people, this book is for you too. If you are a non-binary person and want help and support within the workplace, then this book is also for you.

Making this world a better place benefits us all. We are excited to travel this journey with you.

Diversity strategy

Before beginning with the substance of our subject matter it is worth setting out how we intend to approach the process of greater inclusion and how the information we provide fits in with this. When looking at the inclusion of different groups some areas are significantly more mature than others, for example, work surrounding race and ethnicity or women’s rights. By this, we mean that many of the basic premises are widely understood and long-term plans and monitoring schemes have been established. With growing areas, such as our own, there has been a need to take people from no knowledge to a better understanding or to replace misconceptions and stereotypes.

What naturally follows from this situation is the question of ‘How can we do better?’ Tied in with this is a set of rigid minimum standards imposed by law. As a result, inclusion guidance in growing areas has tended to suffer from two problems: of supplying too much and largely irrelevant information to the reader, with little practical help; or providing formulaic advice that has encouraged generic approaches.

Diversity is largely a dynamic, rapidly changing sector being fuelled by our growing interconnectedness and the willingness of people to explore and articulate new ideas. A strategy for improving diversity and inclusion must match this; in essence it must be a process of continuous learning.

What we do not intend to do is to provide a set of templates for policies or processes for you to use. What we will do is: introduce some of the basic premises; discuss why inclusion is beneficial; give you a snapshot of the current knowledge about the key issues and UK legislation; and provide some practical pointers on where to start change. We will attempt to walk the tightrope between too much and too little information, between being too abstract and too simplistic.

If there is one message to keep in mind while you are reading this book it is this: you won’t learn everything about non-binary people from reading this book, and neither would we be able to tell you all there is to know, for we, ourselves, are still learning.

Chapter 2

An Introduction to Non-Binary People

Who are non-binary people?

What does it mean to be a man or to be a woman? You might think that is a somewhat odd question to ask in a book specifically about non-binary people or that the answer is just so plainly obvious that it isn’t worth taking the time to ask. The vast majority of people will never have thought in any great detail about why they are the gender they are or, more importantly, why they are not some other gender, which makes it an excellent starting point for us.

We don’t put much thought into our gender because the answer has been embedded into our lives. We are socialized into our roles throughout childhood, divided by our gender and taught what we can and cannot do and how we can and cannot act. No only do we copy how adults act, we are given active encouragement through phrases such as: ‘that’s not very lady-like’ or ‘boys will be boys’. In later life we tend to subconsciously reproduce the same messages we have absorbed. You can find these subtly in adverts, in the way characters in films or in novels speak or even in the way we interact with each other. From the emphasis that is put on parents to find out and celebrate the gender of their baby, hold pink or blue baby showers, buy certain toys and disregard others, to the reinforcement of separate and distinct genders through school uniforms and stereotypes (girls can only join the netball team, and all the boys are expected to like football), the idea that there are only men and women surrounds us through life. This is what we refer to as the ‘binary’, the idea that there are only men and women, and there is nothing outside of this.

If pressed for an answer on what it means to be a woman or man, some may start by listing off stereotypes: men are strong and women are pretty and social. A cursory glance around in a public place will likely find you someone who doesn’t fit that stereotype, as probably will a glance into a mirror. So, we need to broaden our categories a little.

What about our bodies or sexual organs, do these determine your gender? People who reject the idea of non-binary identities may recruit ‘science’ to describe why people can only adhere to the categories of men and women; chromosomes, anatomy, brain structure and sex hormones are employed to slot us into one box or another whether we like it or not. But is this really the case? Biology tends to be a major stumbling block for people, mainly because we don’t really teach each other very much about our own biology, just enough to get on with our daily lives without being too concerned about what’s going on under our skin. We all believe that our own bodies match one of the two templates we were shown: we have an XX or an XY chromosome pair, plenty of oestrogen or testosterone and a set of primary and secondary sexual characteristics to match.

In reality, when we have a few billion humans each with a few trillion cells in their bodies, things tend to be a little more messy. For example, genetic sexual characteristics are determined by the interactions of many chromosome pairs, but even the most well-known one (XX and XY) can come in variants such as XXY or XO and many more. Sex hormones get similarly complicated, with different kinds and different levels as well as how receptive we are to each of them, as does the structure and function of our reproductive organs. We term people with these physical variations ‘intersex’, because they are different from what society considers typically male or typically female bodies and they account for around 1 per cent of the population. It is important to note that not all intersex people are non-binary and not all non-binary people are intersex; being int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Non-Binary Inclusion
• Chapter 2: An Introduction to Non-Binary People
• Chapter 3: Key Issues
• Chapter 4: UK Law Background
• Chapter 5: Why Include Non-Binary People?
• Chapter 6: Practical Steps for Inclusion
• Chapter 7: Closing Remarks
• Glossary
• References
• Index