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David Pearson is a KPMG employee, but he also runs the LGBT network, Breathe, on a voluntary basis.
Accountancy Age discussed with him the experiences of LGBT people in accounting, about what Breathe is working on at the moment, and what the month of pride means to him.
1. What does your role involve?
I have a day job and then my role as leader of the LGBT network is a work of love, which is quite common for networks within organizations. So, I'm the president of the Network and I've been in charge for about four years. The network itself has been around since 2002.
2. What are you doing in relation to the LGBT network?
We have three pillars of the network where we focus on the activity. The network calls Breathe, which is not an acronym, it's just his name. Breathe in the Workplace, which brings together all the programs and activities of our colleagues at KPMG, aims to help our employees, provide networking opportunities internally, as well as a support network and a network. social for people who want to get to know each other, whether it's about LGBT people within KPMG or allies or sympathizers.
This includes all kinds of things like a mentoring or reverse mentoring program, a buddy system, where someone needs an informal conversation they have a problem in their personal or professional life in Regarding their LGBT identity, then they can make an informal pairing with someone and chat around a coffee shop. We have a number of other programs and initiatives related to that.
The second pillar is Breathe in the Marketplace, which concerns our customers and suppliers, and we are actively involved. We focus on our external relationships with our customers through networking events, how we can partner with customers and suppliers at events, such as conferences, and then we do more strategic things with our customers. we have a permanent strategic program of long-term change rather than one-off events.
The third and final pillar is Breathe in the Community, and it is there that we connect with charities, community groups and organizations. activities there. I will talk about what we will do for Pride later, but one of the groups we are heavily involved in is called Elock, which is a mental health charity and LBGT.
3. What is your perspective on the experiences of LGBT people at KPMG and what do you think needs to be done to further improve this?
I think that as an organization, with the Network, we are at a sort of maturity curve of LGBT Inclusion. We are probably a reasonable path along this curve because we have been around for 16 years, so we have been doing this for a long time. As you have noticed, we have gone beyond the simple internal focus and we are now in the community and the market, so for us, it's about how to harness the power of our people extraordinary to help them develop them. [19659002] We actually have a goal that the future of us is now on learning, leadership and legacy: focus on what Breathe means to us now. We are in phase 1 of learning, and this year is called the year of learning for us. What we are trying to do with the network in 2018, is to take our employees and offer them fantastic training opportunities. We have already organized a number of events this year for our employees in terms of skills that are relevant to their work and also for greater LGBT inclusion. One of them is our pronoun day, which we held earlier this year, where we focused a lot on how we can use language to create an inclusive and health-friendly environment. mental health and the general well-being of all.
We will focus on leadership, where we really focus on developing leadership with our employees, then we will bring them to evolve in the network to become leaders and 2020 will be the year of the year. 39, inheritance will equip people to create a legacy that they will leave to others to follow
4. Have you designed this three-pillar initiative yourself?
Yes, I did and like most of these ideas, I had it while I was in the shower! He came because I was thinking of how we could bring more structure to our work rather than mere random events. The risk is always that they are forgotten a week later, so we are looking for ways to make our work more coherent and we connect them much better to what we are as an organization, so that this be linked to who we are. are like an organization and our business strategy.
It's the same thing with this idea of learning, leadership and inheritance and I thought, "how do we distill even more what we are trying to create? Since then, the year of learning has been adopted by the organization, so we collaborate with various KPMG teams to make learning alive and fantastic. So it started as an idea in the shower, and it took root in the real world and is now a collaboration.
I spoke at the Stonewall conference in the UK. I have given two lectures and one on the training of all staff and the other on the commitment of senior leaders and sponsors. I mentioned the fact that I had the idea in the shower and that someone tweeted it!
5. What are the current barriers for LGBT people in accounting?
I think we have made tremendous progress as a profession. We have worked hard to be inclusive and to recognize that we have LGBT people and how we can provide them with an inclusive environment. Where I think there are still barriers, is that LGBT acronyms there are an equal acceptance and understanding of all elements. Yes, for homobadual white men, things are usually way better than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and again for gays and bads, that's not it. not so bad
. We do not always understand very well what it means to be bi and how it happens in the workplace and I think people are still traveling around trans inclusion. I think we are better off than we were a few years ago on trans inclusion but still a lot of misunderstanding, still a lack of awareness and in some cases a lack of skills and skills. Education, so for me there is a ladder. The lowest level is just to be aware, then there is education for you to have a better insight, and then you go from being educated to having tools that you can use to affect the environment by your behavior and the behavior of people around you
So I think that true LGBT inclusion is a challenge and I think that another is around an understanding of different aspects of their identity, what we would call intersectionality, which means we could recognize, for example a gay woman, but we can disregard the fact that they're a woman and we can do not take into account the fact that they are black or BAME or of a minority ethnicity. This can have a huge impact because the fact that they are a woman may not be the thing that is causing them problems. It could be the fact that this person is black, for example, who could be one of the biggest obstacles that she faces in the workplace. So, they may not be well received or understood in this context and you could say, it's good that they can join the gay network but if this network is not welcoming and understanding of their identity as a black person then they will be left out. Not so much at KPMG, although we still have work to do, but I know that there is a big feeling that in the profession and more generally there is still a lack of understanding of race in the context of LGBT people. the same thing about disability. LGBT people also have a disability and yet they may not be well accepted or understood in their disability needs because it is badumed that all LGBT people are valid, white and middle-clbad and this is not the case. not true.
6. What does the month of pride mean to you?
The month of pride means three things to me. On the one hand, it's a chance for people to get together. It's a focal point of the year and it's important because you hear people talking about the LGBT community, but you have to really remember that we're not a single mbad, so all these communities have the opportunity to meet. [19659002] The second thing is an element of celebration. The opportunity to celebrate who we are and celebrate together with our allies and supporters and our families and friends. Many people think pride is just for homobaduals, which I do not think is true. I think if you look at the pride of London for example, people who walk will include people who identify as non-LGBT and who are there because they are friends, family members or supporters and that people come to walk with their children. families walking with their children who may not themselves be homobaduals. This element of unity and celebration is really important.
I think the third element is for me a combination of remembrance and protest. Pride itself was born as a protest march, its origins and roads are in protest against the way LGBT people are treated, their lack of rights and the discrimination they suffer, and we lost a lot of things because the environment changed, the law has changed and many people think that we have evolved. Young people are not very much aware of its history, many people who come to Pride do not know it started as a protest march, but I think it's important to remember the # LGBT history
the opportunity to come together, the ability to celebrate, and a reminder of where we have come from and the fact that people have had to suffer and have suffered much suffering for us to have the rights we have now
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