Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the board level and beyond have been a major topic in corporate governance for the last decade or two. Those efforts have mainly focused on gender and racial diversity, but initiatives (now struck down) in California and at Nasdaq have also included LGBTQ or queer people. Turning our focus to them reveals a unique challenge: the closet. Boards and C-suites probably already contain a fair number of queer people, but most of them are not out about their status. How does the closet affect efforts to diversify boards? Are numerical goals an adequate response, or does addressing queer exclusion require deeper changes in corporate culture? Might non-queer people also benefit from such cultural changes?
Darren Rosenblum explores these questions, among others, in Queers, Closets, and Corporate Governance. They start with a quick primer on “queer.” Activists started using the word in the late 80s and early 90s to help question efforts at assimilation by more mainstream people and organizations. At the same time, theorists like Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler called into question the stability of all sorts of categories and binaries that were at the heart of older versions of feminist theory. The theorists drew upon disciplines like structuralism and psychoanalysis to analyze subconscious, antisocial, and irrational desires. Activists and theorists both questioned prevailing sexual and gender norms and practices.
That word queer made a rather unexpected appearance in the Nasdaq DEI rule. The rule required companies to include (or, if not, explain why they didn’t) a certain number of “diverse” directors. “Diverse” included “LGBTQ+” persons, and that was defined as “an individual who self-identifies as any of the following: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or a member of the queer community.” Rosenblum takes this as an occasion to apply queer theory to corporate governance. Queer theorists have analyzed states and families at length. They have not so frequently studied corporations, but Rosenblum argues that queer theory can provide valuable insights there as well.
Rosenblum applies that theory to the corporate ladder. They consider the norms and practices that structure how prospective managers are selected, socialized, and promoted up and up until a privileged few make it to the C-suite or boardroom. They extensively deploy the concept of heteronormativity, a word which may grate for many corporate law scholars but which Rosenblum shows can shed new light on the corporate world. The unspoken heteronormative presumption is that most managers are straight men, with an interrelated set of norms and personality traits. They are confident, competitive, self-assertive, and risk-taking. They play golf, talk about sports, and flirt with their administrative assistants (who they still think of as secretaries and who are women, of course). The many LGBTQ persons who fall far outside these norms will not even attempt to climb the corporate ladder.
But some more straight-acting LGBTQ persons will attempt the climb. And some will succeed. The higher they climb, the straighter they need to act, and many will accordingly remain in the closet. By the very nature of the closet, these people are hard to study, but Rosenblum focuses attention on them. They emphasize the performativity of identity, drawing on the movie Paris is Burning, which depicts drag ball culture. Balls had competitions where participants strove to appear to pass in various roles, such as a supermodel or a member of the military. One category was “executive realness,” where candidates wore well-fitted suits and strode down the runway in a powerful fashion.
In real life, candidates for promotion perform executive realness. For most, that still entails remaining in the closet, though Rosenblum rightly notes that being in the closet versus coming out is not a simple binary. For LGBTQ persons who want to rise to the top, being in the closet is usually just too valuable, and coming out is too risky. Maintaining close personal ties to executives higher up the ladder is extremely important. Rosenblum notes that women and persons of color face similar choices, and even straight white men face pressure to conform to the demands of executive realness, though they are often less burdened and self-conscious in their performances.
Rosenblum concludes with some thoughts on the possibility of change. They are skeptical that a focus on the presence of one or two people on the board labeled as LGBTQ will have a huge impact. After all, under current circumstances, those who get that far are likely to be those who most conform to prevailing masculinity norms. Rosenblum calls for deeper structural and cultural change. Companies should actively support junior LGBTQ candidates for promotion. They should value leaders who display a wider range of traits with a more varied set of skills than the narrow model that prevails today.
Those suggestions are, I must admit, rather vague and not fully worked out. But they point in a direction worth exploring further. And Rosenblum concludes with some valuable reflections. Simply-defined identity may matter less than experience and personality considered more holistically—a point which differentiates Rosenblum from the standard progressive position and locates him in a more interesting ideological space. A broader, holistic focus would not benefit only LGBTQ board candidates. Everyone, including straight men and corporations as organizations, suffers from the pressure to perform executive realness. The Q in LGBTQ can also stand for Questioning, and Rosenblum argues that more questioning of identity and norms may lead to more effective companies that help their employees and leaders live healthier lives.
