WASHINGTON – Just in time for Black Friday and the holiday shopping season, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation has released its popular consumer guide to hundreds of American companies rated on their LGBT-inclusive policies and practices.
The Buying for Workplace Equality guide, first issued more than a decade ago, provides invaluable consumer information based on company scores reported in HRC’s annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), as well as HRC-researched data on additional well-known companies and their brands.
Through the CEI, the HRC Foundation proactively rates Fortune 500 companies and top law firms on LGBT-inclusive workplace policies and practices, and urges smaller companies to also participate. This year, new CEI criteria required that all participating companies extend explicit LGBT non-discrimination protections to their employees worldwide.
“Our annual Buying for Workplace Equality guide provides quick, user-friendly help in selecting everything from groceries to cars with LGBT equality in mind,” said Deena Fidas, Director of HRC Foundation’s Workplace Equality Program. “With the LGBT community’s buying power in the U.S. edging close to $900 billion, it just makes good business sense to embrace LGBT workplace inclusion. Every year we hear from members of the LGBT community and many other fair-minded consumers who want to choose brands that align with their priorities of workplace fairness. They check the buyer’s guide to ensure that their dollars go to businesses that support equality.”
The Buying for Workplace Equality guide sorts businesses by sectors, assigning them a score ranging from zero to 100 based on LGBT workplace equality, as measured by the CEI and HRC-researched data. Those include:
- Apparel & Accessories
- Banking & Finance
- Food & Beverage
- Home & Garden
- Restaurants
- Technology
Businesses and their products are divided based on their CEI rating into red, yellow and green categories so that consumers can easily determine which brands support LGBT workplace equality:
- Green (80-100): Businesses/brands with the highest workplace equality scores.
- Yellow (46-79): Businesses/brands that have taken steps toward a fair-minded workplace and receive a moderate workplace equality score.
- Red (0-45): Businesses/brands that receive our lowest workplace equality scores
The new guide includes more than 570 companies–449 of those are rated in the CEI, and an additional 121 have been independently researched by the HRC Foundation. A total of 5,496 affiliated businesses and brands are featured in this year’s report. Companies independently researched have declined invitations to actively participate in the CEI; their scores are based on publicly-verifiable information.
Note: Companies with scores listed in italics have not responded to the survey despite repeated invitations. They have been assigned an unofficial, estimated score based on publicly-available information that HRC has collected.
HRC welcomes new relationships with businesses that have not responded to attempts to gather information on LGBT workplace policies and programs.
For more information on the Buying for Workplace Equality guide and to search by company category, go online to www.hrc.org/buyersguide.
