Workin' Girl

The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) now offers job listings of known jobs that are transgender friendly. Certainly all jobs should accept you based on what your performance is in benefiting the company for whom you work, but, sadly, that is not the case (hence the reason for HB1722). So, to see some job listings that are transgender friendly, mouse on over to MTPC’s Trans-Friendly Job Listings to see what’s around.

Oh, if you know of a job that is trans-friendly, consider posting it at MTPC’s board to spread the word on the opening!

Beck’s Cafe also covered another list of transgender friendly jobs at our article, “Simply Hired and Transgender Friendly too” Go take a peek to see what you can find. Also, Southern Comfort Conference, on September 30 - October 5th, 2008 will be featuring their Second Annual Career Expo (a national event) in collaboration with Out and Equal Workplace Advocates. Exhibiting companies include GM, Raytheon, IBM, and many others

Your transgender, your unemployed and now your looking at your options. Should you just work for anyone and hope no one finds out your transgender? Should you just go find a job and just not worry about it unless the issue comes up? Maybe you don’t present as the gender you really are at all but it’s who you are and you need to take some action eventually and yet you still need to work. What do you do?

These are all very personal questions and effect each and every transgender person, regardless of if they are transitioning or if they’ve found a life balance that allows them to live productive, healthy and happy lives.

One resource that you may want to consider is from a relatively new job search engine called Simply Hired Job Search Engine. Simply Hired has coupled their search engine technology with the Human Rights Campaign list of companies the have studied that support LGBT employees (see HRC Corporate Equality Index Human Right Campaign Corporate Equality Index). It’s easy to do, you simply do a search with the Simply Hired LGBT filter on and out pops the jobs!

You can reach the Simply Hired Job Search Engine with LGBT Filter at their site HERE.

Also, don’t forget to checkout the SCC Transgender Career Expo or the Washington D.C. Transgender Job Fair. Finally Dr. Weiss over at Transgender Workplace Diversity has some excellent articles on this topic in general that are well worth a read over a tall, cold iced Americano.

Well, if one job fair weren’t enough for transgender folk, now there’s two. While the Southern Comfort Career Expo focuses on a national theme, the Transgender Career Day in Washington D.C. has a more local flavour and it’s happening on two different days. In the words of the organizers,

The purpose of these events will be to bring together representatives of government agencies, corporations and private businesses with interests in the District together with members of the District’s transgendered community for the expressed purpose of finding jobs and job training opportunities for them.

And what a list of organizers there are. It looks like people are rallying around the concept of getting people jobs. And for those of us in the transgender community this is great news. You can get a job, a new start, a bright future.

So here are the dates for our readers in Washington D.C.:

• August 18th, from 1PM-6PM will be cover topics such as resume writing, interviewing, dressing for job success, and the DC 2000 application.
• September 29th, from 1PM - 5PM will be a job fair with representatives from government, the nonprofit community and corporate employers.

You can get more details on the Washington D.C. Career and Job Fairs by visiting the District of Columbia’s LGBT affairs office at this link HERE.

Fenway Community Health did something similar in Boston in February. You can read about it at this post at Beck’s Cafe here. JobNET Boston led the career part of the Fenway Transgender expo in Boston. So don’t be afraid to contact them here in Boston for some help!

Southern Comfort Conference (SCC) is one of the most important Transgender Conferences in the United States. This year they hope to top 1000 attendees. I’ve had the immense pleasure of meeting some of their organizers such Lola Cola (in person, what a treat!) and CAT (only on the phone, but a delight none-the-less). They are so helpful in fact that both of them were important consultants to First Event 2007. How’s that for being a friend!

Both Lola and CAT are dedicated to making SCC fun, friendly and helpful. And the helpful part is something you don’t hear to much about but they blaze a trail of social justice that every trans-person should take note of and emulate even in some small way.

This year SCC’s innovative approach to helping the transgender community extends to finding a job! The Transgender Career Expo at Southern Comfort Conference. The Career Expo will run from 9:00AM until 4:00PM on Friday, September 14th (closed during lunch). It is an open event sponsored by SCC and The Human Rights Campaign and one need not be registered for the conference to gain value from this function.

The Transgender Career Expo is exemplary on a number of levels, from it being the first of its kind to the type of companies that are exhibiting. Here’s a partial list. Some will have actual HR Recruiting Managers present while others will simply be sending representatives as a show of support and to supply information Its a who’s who of corporate America:

• Alston & Bird LLC
• American Airlines
• Deloitte Ernst & Young
• GLAAD
• Hewlett Packard
• Human Rights Campaign
• Intercontinental Hotel Group
• JPMorganChase
• Lambda Legal
• Microsoft
• NCTE
• New York Life
• NGLCC
• Powell Goldstein LLP
• PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• Sprint / NEXTEL
• The Point Foundation
• The Mosaic Identity
• Turner Broadcasting

How important is the Transgender Career Expo? Let me quote Lola Cola and Kristin Reichman both of SCC:

Please be sure to spread the word to promote and support this extraordinary event. It is critical that we, as a community, step up and create our own place in the world just as these companies have stepped up to the realization that hiring and retaining quality employees is based upon talent and abilities and that being Transgender is irrelevant.

[information courtesy of Lola Cola, Kristin Reichman; Southern Comfort Conference]

Donna Rose was interviewed by Fortune magazine as part of their coverage on transgender folks in the workplace. It’s interesting reading with some very helpful references included. You can catch it at CNN by visiting their site at this link HERE.

Among the cool tidbits are:

• A bit about what Donna has been doing professionally
• A list of some companies that now include transgender protections
• Some reasons why corporate America seems to be moving to support the transgender individual

Well worth a read I’d say.

Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss has posted an aritcle on her blog, “Transgender Workplace Diversity” that is sobering. Entitled, “National statistics on Transgender Unemployment”, the article has some chilling facts for all of us:

• There is a 35% unemployment rate among transgender persons due to discrimination
• Of those employed, 60% are earning below $15,000 per year.
• Unemployment runs about eight times higher than the national average and the poverty rate is five times higher

But Dr. Weiss wisely asks the question, “how was the data collected”. Let’s face it, even in the transgender community the massaging of numbers and the tilting of data is not above some activists approaches. And Dr. Weiss is asking the hard question, “how did you find your subjects”? Her question is valid and her conclusions are well worth a read. You can read the full article to see what is going on at her Blog, “Transgender Workplace Diversity” at this link on her site HERE. You can read the full study, as done by Richard M. Juang at “Trans Group Blog” by visiting the story at this link HERE.

Finally, such an article as this begs the question, what do I do about being employed if I’m trans? Well, there are a number of strategies, but one that pops to mind is the Career Expo being held at Southern Comfort Conference. Companies such as Microsoft, Deloitte, JP Morgan, Starbuck and Turner among many other national firms will be there exhibiting at the Career Fair. It’s well worth a look see. You can visit the Southern Comfort Conference web site at this link here.

If you look around you might find a few, but not a whole lot. The “few” are women in management. Grant Thornton, a U.K. based international accounting and consulting firm, published an interesting study on March 5, 2007, to coincide with International Women’s Day. The survey solicited the opinion of some 7000 privately held businesses in 32 countries. To give you a sense for the size of these enterprises, they represent 81% of global GDP. The findings may or may not cause you to think.

• 38% of businesses do not have any women in senior management roles, a figure which has remained unchanged since 2004.

• 97% of businesses in the Philippines have women in senior management positions, the highest in the survey

• 25% of Japanese businesses have women in senior management, the lowest in the survey

• 18% of United States businesses have women in senior management, about in the middle of all developed countries

• The EU’s proportion of women in senior management has remained static at 17%, while NAFTA’s figure has increased from 20% to 23%.

April Mackenzie, Grant Thornton’s Executive Director of Public Policy had this comment on the survey. It’s a wonderful summary:

It is disappointing that the participation of women in senior business management has not increased more dramatically over the last three years. It is however encouraging to see some of the Asian economies leading the way. North American and European businesses in particular continue to disappoint. Hopefully we will see this change in coming years as more women play increasingly prominent roles in business and public life such as Indra Nooyi, the new chief executive officer of PepsiCo, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, Margaret Whitman, chief executive and president of eBay and Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of France’s state-owned nuclear group Areva.

You can read a brief on this fascinating survey at Grant Thornton’s website by visiting their site at this link HERE.

The Economist magazine posted a splendid chart form of the results. Well worth a quick visit by skimming to The Economist via this link HERE.

Finally, some thoughts on why this happens might be found in my post, “Pelosi media coverage covered by gender“. It’s an article on media coverage and women, but the why of it might apply here too.

(A hat tip to rebecca blood, author of rebecca’s pocket for the lead for this post)

Beck’s Cafe has a bevy of coffee swillers, ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds, glam girls and handsome men as patrons, one of our fav’s is a genteman from down South. He sent along what is probably the most unusual, but certainly memorable business card promoting a photography business that I’ve seen in a long time, “Brides to Bitches”.

Now, how can the name of a photo studio called “Brides to Bitches” NOT stick in your memory? What ideas can you think of to make your business memorable?

I couldn’t help but laugh reading a recent article in The Inquirer regarding the effects of going global when one nation observes Intellectual Property protection laws and another does not. Seems that Korean company, Lucky Goldstar’s (LG) Chocolate phone was such a hot item, yet slow in getting it into the Chinese market, that pirates copied the phone and beat LG to the Chinese market with their own product but with a twist. The Chinese pirated copy was a better phone than the original!

You can read the ramifications of that by reading the original story at The Inquirer site at this link HERE.

Product quality and I’d say product experience, whether it’s a service or a thing, matters. LG didn’t quite get that here for some reason, but each of us providing a service or product need to. Tom Peter’s, the WOW guru for business, has alot of valuable (and free) thoughts on this topic for your reading pleasure. You can get to Tom’s list of design blog articles by clicking to his site at this link HERE.  Business Week has an excellent article as well on Why Design Matters, you can click to Business Week’s article HERE.

(Picture courtesy of Olav.Mueller Photos, used under license of Creative Commons)

There are a number of outstanding updates on the whole area of workplace diversity at the Transgender Workplace Diversity blog site. In the words of the blog’s author, Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss:

This blog is for HR and Diversity professionals who are faced with issues of “transgender workplace diversity.” Here, every working day, I discuss resources, news, and issues of importance specifically for HR and Diversity professionals who need to know the latest on this fast-developing new category of employees.

Some of the new topics covered and well worth a read are:

• Kodak Corporation update trans health beneftis
• West Chester Pennsylvania Council moves gender identity ordinance forward
• Dear Abby weighs in on bathroom question, and what that means to us who are transgender
• Draft Agenda for Co-worker meeting regarding transitioning on the job and giving advice on what to do and how to do it
• Proposed Homeland Security Rules and what the effects could be for you should you transition

Dr. Weiss’s site is choc-a-bloc full of very valuable information on this critical topic for all us workin’ girls and boys - whether you are transitioning or not. Go grab a nice iced cappucino and have a read at the Transgender Workplace Diversity blog by clicking HERE, you’ll be glad you did.

(fish photo courtesy of Greenhem’s Photos, used under license from Creative Commons)