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How these LGBT executives broke the ‘gay glass ceiling’—and how they’re helping future leaders

Queer business leaders have identified a common element in their rise through the ranks.

How these LGBT executives broke the ‘gay glass ceiling’—and how they’re helping future leaders

[Photo: butenkow/Getty Images]

BY David Salazar5 minute read

In 1995, WPP US Public Affairs Lead Brian Ellner was a summer associate at his first law firm, taking a bus to a company golf outing. When he’d come out as gay in law school, he’d resolved not to hide his sexuality for the sake of his career, but surrounded by his predominantly straight coworkers, he didn’t feel so brave. 

Sitting beside Ellner on the bus was Elaine Johnston, a senior associate at the firm who had recently come out at work and was on track to make partner. After introducing herself on the bus, she became his mentor, including serving as a senior sponsor of pro bono work he did as a first-year lawyer, and letting Ellner borrow her ABBA VHS tapes when he used the treadmills at the company gym.

“It was clear that she had done her background [research], probably knew who I was, and sought me out. She made it much easier for me to be open,” says Ellner. “It took someone like that; it took a mentor and a courageous person who was out at a very senior level at a prominent law firm when very few people were. It made it clear that I could succeed here and be true to myself.” 

Since then, Ellner has embraced LGBT activism in his career, encouraged to pursue civil rights work by Johnston. During his unsuccessful 2005 bid for Manhattan borough president, he became the first candidate for the job to run an ad featuring a same-sex partner, and he devised campaigns championing gay marriage legalization—in New York and four other states—in the early 2010s. He was also a founding member of the nonprofit Athlete Ally, which is focusing on LGBT inclusion in sports. 

Ellner is part of a growing group of people who have managed to break through the “gay glass ceiling” of anti-gay sentiment that has held back generations of LGBT professionals—thanks in part to changing societal attitudes and mentorship from queer colleagues. But recent research highlights barriers that still exist to getting rid of that glass ceiling for good. 

In January, University of Sydney researcher Ben Gerrard published findings from a study in which he created a mock TV commercial casting brief for a campaign promoting tourism in Sydney, using six gay actors who were instructed to perform the same script in both feminine and masculine manners. Then, 256 gay and heterosexual men chose the candidate who they would characterize as a “leader.” Both groups overwhelmingly preferred the candidates who were more masculine, highlighting that among gay men, more feminine gay men are less likely to be preferred for high-status roles—which Gerrard says has implications for their hiring and promotion opportunities. 

Gerrard’s study also cited research from the Institute of Labor Economics in the UK that found while gay men and lesbians had a higher likelihood of attaining workplace authority than their straight counterparts, it was driven entirely by their higher odds of being low-level managers. They were significantly less likely than comparable heterosexual men to be in the highest-level managerial positions with higher status and pay. 

“While organizations value the amount of responsibility and efficiency [LGBT employees] bring, there is still resistance toward an official recognition and endowment of true authority in the form of upper managerial positions,” Gerrard says. “Perhaps there is an unconscious reticence toward their ability to engender trust and influence over teams who carry outdated biases.”

That reticence has long translated into explicit anti-gay discrimination at work, which made Boy Scouts of America-Cascade Pacific Council CEO Gary Carroll—the nation’s first gay scout executive and the first Black man to lead the council—conceal his sexuality while he was rising in the ranks amid the organization’s blanket ban on gay employees and scout leaders, which ended in 2015. “I tried very hard to keep attention away from me, especially my personal life,” Carroll says, noting that he changed his mannerisms, avoided higher-ups, and would find himself working odd hours to limit interactions and prevent others from coming too close. “It felt like I was constantly working with one hand tied behind my back.”

When the Boy Scouts ended its ban on gay employees, Carroll—then a field director in Portland, Oregon—spoke to his boss to reveal his sexuality, making him the organization’s first gay executive. He then began building a support network for his LGBT colleagues, formalizing the informal relationships he had built with coworkers he trusted enough to reveal his sexuality into the company’s LGBT employee resource group, which he still leads. 

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“When I was able to be fully out, it felt [like] I was able to integrate all parts of my life into something more—a calling towards the mission of helping other people and creating opportunities for young people and families,” Carroll says. It’s stance that could help address the trend among LGBT workers to avoid working in same-gender-dominated occupations—a tendency that some estimate has lost STEM industries as many as 120,000 viable candidates due to perceived anti-LGBT bias.

Researcher Gerrard says the challenging prejudices gay men face share similarities with those that women face. Add to that the irony that traits like warmth, empathy, and good communication—often associated with femininity—are actually qualities of effective leadership, and he says his findings “should be seen as further support against outdated expectations regarding what qualities modern leaders should possess.”

As a gay leader, Ellner is focused on helping younger colleagues come into their own the way that Johnston helped him. When Alana Spellman, a junior strategist at WPP, was hired to support Ellner in growth and marketing in March 2020, she says Ellner became involved in steering her on the right path in the company even before she told him she was gay. Spellman says Ellner has included her in his pro bono work fighting anti-trans legislation and partnering with LGBT groups.

“He is at the top of the organization and so deeply respected by everyone at the company. It helped me feel a sense of comfort,” Spellman says. “Nobody cares [about his sexuality], and everyone cherishes him, so it would probably be the same for me. A lot of the people leading the charge on LGBTQ+ work are gay men, and they’ve risen significantly to higher ranks. But Brian has always made me feel like, as a gay woman, I have just as much agency and opportunity to make an impact as anyone else.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Salazar is an associate editor at Fast Company, where his work focuses on healthcare innovation, the music and entertainment industries, and synthetic media. He also helps direct Fast Company’s Brands That Matter program More