Come Out. Move Up?

By Andrea Sachs

Tim Kincaid, an analyst at American Airlines, was tired of hearing about the wedding plans of the woman in the next cubicle. "You would have thought it was the Von Trapp wedding from The Sound of Music," he recalls. But it rankled for reasons other than gossip overload. Kincaid was a closeted gay man, living under a "self-imposed silence. My assumption was, 'Don't ask, don't tell.'" Although he was openly gay in the rest of his life, he was afraid to let anyone in hisoffice know. "I had worked a long time to get to this dream job," he says. "I thought, Do I want to risk it? I was really unsure of the atmosphere." But Kincaid finally felt that he needed to come out to his boss. "I went in and said, 'I need to tell you something: I'm gay.' He was a busy guy, and multitasking while we were talking. But he noticeably focused on me and listened. It was a powerful moment."

Kincaid is now American Airline's manager of corporate communications, living what he describes as a "more authentic life. I'm bringing my whole self to work. I'm not spending any energy hiding or shape shifting into something I'm not. What they see is what they get." It's a transition that more executives are choosing to make.

Gay managers work differently than straight managers, and they may be better in some respects, says University of Southern California teacher and researcher Kirk Snyder, author of The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders...and What Every Manager Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass). Snyder who personally interviewed 150 gay male executives who have come out in the workplace, the largest study of its kind. His theory is that such gay corporate leaders show higher levels of seven desirable management skills, such as creativity, intuition and collaboration.

The cornerstone of Snyder's findings and the message of gay business advocates is that gay workers should be willing to come out. Says Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, a marketing and public relations firm in Washington that specializes in the gay market: "The sea change that he reflects is that he found enough openly gay managers to study."

Snyder and many other gay executives and leaders (all the people quoted in this article are openly gay) believe those superior skills are born of the challenges that gays must overcome. Says Snyder: "It wasn't as though gay executives all said, 'Oh, let's go to Fire Island [a beach resort in New York with a substantial gay enclave] this weekend and decide what kind of managers we should be.' This emerged independently of any kind of organized effort. It's the experience of being gay in a straight world that has manifested itself in these characteristics when you get in the workplace."

As rancorous as the debate over gay marriage has become, gay executives are increasingly being welcomed in corporate America, which is to say that they are as hassled as all the other wage slaves. According to State of the Workplace 2006, a new study by the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, a majority of FORTUNE 500 companies--254--now offer health benefits to domestic partners.

As corporate policies have become more gay-friendly, more executives are being supported by their companies in their decision to come out. Says Daryl Herrschaft, who is in charge of workplace issues at the Human Rights Campaign: "What we've been seeing is a very real acknowledgment from businesses that allowing diversity in all of its forms to flourish ... is the right thing to do, not because it feels good but because it's going to make them money." But, cautions Herrschaft, that reaction is far from universal. "We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is still not safe for gay or lesbian executives to be open about who they are." Employers in 33 states are free to fire people for being gay.

Sexual orientation influences your paycheck too, says Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. "Gay men in particular have earnings similar to other men, but partnered gay men have earnings quite substantially below men who partner with women." Gates has a theory about the disparity: "Being gay has impact, particularly on the executive level. You can't go to the golf club with your wife. Your wife can't entertain the spouses."

For lesbians, the story is somewhat different. "They still don't do as well as men, but lesbians tend to do better than women with male partners," says Gates. "They are less likely to have children and are in the labor force more consistently."

For Cynthia Martin, coming out didn't stand in the way of a financial boon. "I was given a very substantial promotion after that," she says. Martin went from a high-profile job at Kodak as the chief aide to the CEO to president of global customer service and support, supervising more than 3,000 people worldwide. "Coming out was really frightening, to be honest," she admits. "I had never done anything like that in my life." She feared that her credibility with colleagues would suffer. Martin, now the vice president of corporate marketing for Blue Shield of California, says the reaction from her Kodak staff was "very, very positive and kind. One woman said that I was the first lesbian she had ever met. We worked on it, and it turned out fine."

Even when the transition isn't smooth, money is a great equalizer, says Mitchell Gold, a co-owner of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, a furniture manufacturer with revenues of more than $100 million a year. Both owners are gay, and although the factory is located in Taylorsville, N.C., a small, conservative city ("there are 14 traffic lights and 135 churches," jokes Gold), there has been little friction with employees. It's not a mystery to Gold: "We pay better than anyone [else] in the area, with better benefits." There have been small problems along the way, says Gold. "There have definitely been times that I've heard about when people haven't come to work for our company because we are gay." A self-described "redneck" once called Gold "faggot" after he was fired, but overall, Gold has 18 years of business success to crow over. "I've heard from a lot of people that there's a lot of tolerance because of economics."

Is there a "pink ceiling" that holds gays back? Yes, say workplace experts, but it's fading. "I don't think all of corporate America has jumped into 2006 yet," says p.r. expert Witeck. For the gay executives themselves, the challenge continues. "Coming out in business is something we do every day. It's not a one-time event," says Claudia Woody, the managing director of IBM's Nokia account worldwide. Author Snyder is ever optimistic, though. "Within the next five years," he says, "we will see the first openly gay CEO of a FORTUNE 500 company." By which time it should shock absolutely no one.