http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26940690/americas-shift-attitude-toward-gays-started-at-workAmerica's shift in attitude toward gays started at work11/15/14
WASHINGTON -- In the beginning, it was about money as much as rights.
Long before America started rapidly changing its mind about gays, corporate America set the stage. From companies such as Marriott, founded by socially conservative Mormons, to technology giants led by libertarian-minded gurus, business started thinking in the last decade that it was in its best interest to treat gays the same as straights.That approach is now taking hold more broadly, as a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage for the first time, forcing politicians to jump on the bandwagon and likely changing the country's politics. While this social change is driven by many factors -- a new generation that's more open, an older generation adjusting to gays in their families and lives, courts opening the doors -- it first took hold at work.
Marriott International, for example, was founded by Mormon John Willard Marriott. By 1999, his son and successor, Bill Marriott, worried about losing highly trained employees to competitors and decided to start providing health benefits for partners of gay and lesbian employees.
"Bill Marriott got it immediately," said Apoorva Gandhi, Marriott's vice president of multicultural affairs. "He thought of it as a business judgment and a fairness judgment."
"It was really about attracting talent," said Bob Witeck, a marketing expert who's worked with the executives at American Airlines, Marriott and other big-name companies to provide same-sex benefits and ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. By easing into it, Marriott avoided the backlash that Walt Disney Co. suffered in 1997 when it offered same-sex benefits and allowed Gay Days at theme parks.
"They treated it as a business decision. They didn't make a public expression of it," Witeck said of Marriott. "They didn't put it out in a press release. ... That approach certainly helped."Times have changed rapidly since then. Today, Marriott aggressively courts gay consumers. It sponsors floats in gay-pride parades. Its home page includes a section courting gay travel that features photos of men kissing. "At Marriott," it says, "there is no room for inequality."
"The backlash is almost nonexistent," Gandhi said. "Some people will say, 'I'm not going to stay with you anymore.' Where are they going to go? All of the hotel chains are doing this. The blowback does not ring true on this."
The need for a skilled high-tech workforce also drove the initial push for same-sex benefits elsewhere.
Companies didn't care whom employees slept with as long as they could write software programs and understood the fast-moving technology that would change American life."Tech companies were desperate for employees who could basically expand their business," said Cathy Woolard, the first openly gay City Council president in Atlanta, who now advises corporations on nondiscrimination policies and same-sex benefits.
"The tech companies were headquartered in Silicon Valley," she said, "and the places tech companies expanded were places like Austin, Texas, New York and Seattle, where you had large gay communities."One such pioneer was the software company Lotus, which was later acquired by IBM. Apple was another.
Companies operating in multiple states also needed uniform rules.
That need drove more than 100 name-brand corporations such as Nike, Starbucks and Johnson & Johnson to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In a joint brief to the court, the companies cited "unnecessary cost and administrative complexity" and said the law "forces us to treat one class of our lawfully married employees differently than another, when our success depends upon the welfare and morale of all employees."
Corporate America also is speaking up in other venues.
When Arizona's Legislature passed a state law that would have allowed businesses asserting religious objections to refuse service to same-sex couples, Apple, American Airlines and many other companies threatened to withdraw investment from the state. Their arguments persuaded Republican Gov. Jan Brewer to veto the law in February.
When Georgia debated similar legislation, the chief executive of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, Richard Anderson, warned that the measure would cost local jobs as employers shunned the Peach State. His position helped quash the legislation.
The changes have been rapid.
When the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, started to rank gay-friendly policies with a Corporate Equality Index in 2002, 319 companies participated and 13 received top scores.
This year, 734 companies participated, and 304 received top scores.
Some big-name companies such as Apple, General Motors and Chevron got perfect scores. But billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. got a zero and energy titan Exxon Mobil got a negative score, penalized for actively working against internal policy changes to allow same-sex benefits, the report said.
"The report is inaccurate," said Richard D. Keil, a spokesman for the energy company. "Exxon Mobil's global policies prohibit all forms of discrimination in any company workplace, anywhere in the world. This includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity."
In 2002, 61 percent of Fortune 500 companies provided explicit nondiscrimination protection on the basis of sexual orientation. This year, it's 91 percent.Federal legislation to do the same passed the Senate a year ago but is stuck in the House of Representatives.
Corporate America is now rated by investors as well.
This year, Denver-based ALPS began offering investors a chance to buy shares in an exchange-traded fund that tracks the Workplace Equality Index. The index was created in 2001 by Denver Investments in response to requests from foundations and endowments looking to invest in companies with gay-friendly policies.
The 162 companies on the index have outperformed companies on the S&P 500-stock index from 2009 forward, data show.
