Only 29 of the 350 companies on London’s two major stock-market indices have policies to increase the number of LGBTQ+ people on their boards, according to a new report.
The OutQuorum report, which has examined LGBTQ+-inclusive board diversity policies for US companies since 2015, today launched the first report to also include London-listed businesses.
Looking at the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250, it found that more than 90% of the UK’s top public companies did not have any policies in place to increase the diversity of their boards when it came to sexual orientation or gender identity.
Among those 29 companies, there’s not an obvious pattern in terms of sectors, with retail, finance, travel, tech, media and manufacturing all represented.
Todd Sears, founder and CEO of OutLeadership, which created the report, said he did not believe companies sought to exclude LGBT people.
“I don’t think there is a conscious effort to exclude LGBT people, but when these policies were written, LGBT people were not visible,” he said.
“We hope that companies will say ‘holy cow we didn’t know we didn’t have an LGBT inclusive policy.’”
Sears also noted that his organisation was not asking for companies to set specific target for the number of LGBT people that will appear on boards, but instead just hoped to see customers include
“I’m not a believer in quotas,” he said. “What we want is companies to expand their apertures for inclusion to include LGBT.”
“But if people of difference are not included in the definition, they are not included in the process.”
The number of US-listed companies with LGBTQ+-inclusive board diversity policies skyrocketed in recent years,, from two of the Fortune 500 in the first report to 112 today. Sears said his orginisation’s efforts to get the Nasdaq and certain pension funds to require these policies played a major part in the rise.
