Our LGBTQ+ community is part of the Snowflake solution
Data doesn’t just provide us with information with which to make successful decisions. It also allows us to determine which of our hunches are nonsense and which are based on facts we’ve processed in our subconscious. One of those deep-seated feelings is that the more different types of people represented in a company’s workforce, the more likely that company is to find solutions to the problems that confront them.
As McKinsey notes in its 2020 report Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters, every uptick in inclusion sees a commensurate uptick in profitability. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability. Similarly, a recent study by the University of Vaasa’s Aalto University School of Business on publicly traded U.S. companies between 2003 and 2016 showed that those with LGBTQ+-friendly policies had both higher profitability and higher stock market valuations.
But as important as data is, the sources of data are equally important. And in this case, those sources are people. So in celebration of Pride, the half-century-old public celebration of queer identity and visibility, we spoke to some Snowflake employees in the LGBTQ+ community. Because just as our feelings need data to become decisions, our data needs people to become stories.
One thing they’ve all noticed is that the reality of gay marriage and the ability to use benefits for their loved ones have made their personal lives better than when they started their professional lives.
But aside from those commonalities, their stories are all as unique as, well, snowflakes. So to capture their distinctive portraits, we focused on the following questions:
- Given how often being LGBTQ+ has been considered an obstacle, what are you the solution to?
- What’s so cool about what you do?
- What does Pride mean to you?