New Joiner Spotlight - Georgie Williams

December has been a busy month for LGBT Great- especially for Georgie (GW, they/them), who joined us on the 4th as the team's new Insights and Content Analyst. Alex Gabbutt (he/him, ‘AG’), LGBT Great’s Executive Director and Head of Advisory chats with Georgie Williams (they/them, ‘GW’) about all things LGBTQ+ DE&I, tallships, and a shared vision for financial services. 

AG: Georgie, welcome to the team! It would be great to hear a little about what brings you to LGBT Great.

GW: Thank you so much, Alex! Honestly, joining LGBT Great feels like such a natural amalgamation of so many different threads of my career thus far. I started my work in the field of gender & sexuality diversity way back during my Psychology undergraduate degree, where my thesis investigated how socioeconomic inequality affected gender identity expression in adolescents. Then, I moved on to an MSc in Gender, where ¼ of my degree looked at the Anthropology of Kinship, Sex and Gender. This really piqued my interest in gender and sexuality from a global-variance perspective; as a consequence, I ended up deferring my PhD in Social Justice to establish my own independent research platform, /Queer. Through this, I produced a free-to-access, open-source oral histories archive of gender and sexuality diversity in the USA, Japan, Indonesia, the UK, Ireland, Malta, Turkey, South Africa, and Lesotho. These histories were recorded in the voices and words of people central to these cultures, whom I met during my field research.  

Making LGBTQ+ work my central focus in a more practical, hands-on capacity felt inevitable, and after working for several years as a freelance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultant, making the jump to working at LGBT Great felt natural and easy. It is lovely to be making my ‘gay job’ my ‘day job’. This is especially true in a company where addressing LGBTQ+ workplace inequality means enacting tangible, measurable change.  

In terms of other skills I hope to bring to the role, I also taught coding, data analytics, and quantitative statistical analysis for the better part of two years. I also spent the majority of the past year as a deckhand on the Eastindiaman Götheborg of Sweden, the largest ocean-faring wooden ship in the world! Our 80-strong crew was both female-majority and very gender-and-sexuality-diverse, which is why I also wrote the anti-harassment and safeguarding policy for the vessel. I’m hoping to bring both my data-driven mindset from coding and my enthusiasm for getting my hands dirty from my ship to this exciting role.  

AG: Basically, you were a queer pirate. Is that what I’m hearing?!

GW: Alex, you’ve already seen my quivering, ship-tattoo-clad bicep. You know my heart belongs to the sea. 

AG: I’m not sure I’ve quite got the sea legs for it myself! But this certainly represents quite a change of environment for you. What learnings from your pirate ship days will you be bringing to this role with us?  

GW: I think the most important thing I learned was how to avoid any ‘ship’ sinking, your whole crew has to be willing to get their hands dirty, regardless of rank and status. I’m trying to not learn too heavily into sailing analogies, but ‘all hands on deck’ is a real thing and a needed thing when a crisis hits. I want to know that whoever is hauling on my line is pulling as hard as I am. I’ve already used too many sailing references.

The point I’m trying to make is that I sincerely believe that a workplace thrives when your coworkers are your fellow humans- when you feel a sense of community and a shared mission with them.  

LGBT Great is an organisation dedicated to transforming gender and sexuality inequalities in the workplace and elevating LGBTQ+ workers within business structures and in the wider financial sector. I love knowing that when I sit in a room with my team, there is a single-mindedness to us - a desire to cross the same horizon.  

AG: For a small company like ours that is absolutely the mindset (and indeed the reality) here at LGBT Great. Perhaps more similarities between LGBT Great and the pirate ship than I first expected! I think your point about community support is a really important one and translates into so many different environments (financial services included). Was it this drive to supporting the community at work that brought you to financial services?

GW: With all the experience I’ve had in DEI consulting thus far, the elephant in the room in every corporate DEI meeting is financial inequality. We are much more comfortable talking about awareness and visibility than we are about how we address socioeconomic disparities for marginalised groups. Discrimination and prejudice affect more than emotional welfare; they affect access to employment (and promotions), housing, social support, and healthcare. Financial equity equals social mobility - and if we want to eliminate the symptoms, we have to treat the cause. Treatment requires practical solutions.

AG: Absolutely. What are some of your thoughts on what those solutions look like in practice?  

GW: First and foremost, organisations that already provide private healthcare to their employees need to ensure their healthcare packages are LGBTQ+ inclusive-, particularly trans-inclusive. This is particularly important in countries whose national healthcare services are trans-exclusionary, either due to inadequate services and wait times or due to normalised transphobia in the healthcare industry. Trans healthcare is, in the most literal sense, a life-saving service.  

LGBTQ+ inclusive policies are also essential, not just for the workplace (e.g. anti-discrimination, provision of gender-neutral facilities) but also with regard to parental and surrogacy support for rainbow families. Oftentimes in a workplace, inheriting a role means inheriting practices and policies put in place by people who were not fortunate enough to be knowledgeable in the matters of DE&I. Just because a policy has always been in place, doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be updated for the modern world!

Going one step further: catering our gender and sexuality inclusion policies for a global market feels increasingly important. My research specialised in looking at gender and sexuality diversity in ‘Non-Western' and/or colonised countries; the language used in these countries to describe their identities expands far beyond the LGBTQ+ acronym. Their understanding of it often does, too. Working with growing economies outside of the Western world, particularly a Global South, requires a progressive and identity-inclusive approach.

AG: How to enact this last point is a challenge that I have a few conversations with clients about in the past year, particularly given the current global climate for the LGBTQ+ community. In your work and studies, what have you seen working in this area?

GW: An evident pattern across multiple countries and communities is the misinformation and disinformation being propagated about trans and nonbinary individuals. Much of this scaremongering is being pushed through tabloid media and unregulated social media, and many of the themes in this misinformation have been seen before. The anxiety propagated about ‘turning children transgender’ is exactly the same as the panic around children being ‘made gay’ during Section 28 here in the UK, when gay teachers working in schools were not legally allowed to be out about their identity, lest it ‘influence’ children. If we go further back, we see in the civil rights movement the same propaganda about ‘perverse’ and ‘inhuman’ people of colour that was present in the response to the gay and lesbian movement and is present now in response to the nonbinary and transgender movement. Combating the proliferation of these misinformed and often a-scientific is something that can be done through effective workplace strategies and training.  

With regard to that misinformation, our global approach to gender and sexuality inclusion has to account for all the ways we may be behind other countries. I often talk about the court case in 2017 where a British trans woman was granted residency in New Zealand/Aotearoa because it would not be safe for her to return to the UK. Our unconscious biases about the non-Western world, which are often informed by persisting colonial prejudices, may lead us to believe that countries such as the UK/US are leading in the field of gender and sexuality inclusion. The truth is, as was the key outcome of my research, that many countries in the Global South have (or had, pre-colonisation), complex and nuanced understandings of gender and sexuality which resist the reductive boxes normalised in many Western cultures. Indonesia, the 10th largest economy in the world, has a community of 6 million citizens who operate under a 5-gender, 3-sex social system. Working with these growing economies, if we want to do it right, means approaching a learning curve with enthusiasm and curiosity. It’s a beautifully diverse world, and there is so much for us to still learn about one another.  

AG: This idea of a learning curve approached with ‘enthusiasm and curiosity’ is foundational, I think, to all conversations of allyship. Are there any areas of LGBTQ+ DE&I where you feel we have yet to focus that enthusiasm and curiosity?  

GW: A community I often think of when we discuss the nuances and complexities of allyship is the intersex community. Intersex people – or people with differences of sexual development (DSD) are individuals whose bodies do not fit the prescriptive boxes defined in the medical industry as exclusively male or female. Estimates put the intersex community at around 1.7% of our global population, which is more common than redheads! But although they are often discussed under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, I so rarely talk with clients who have intersex-inclusive healthcare policies or inclusion training in their workplace. There is little understanding of the support they require or the challenges they face, even when institutions claim a pro-LGBTQ+ mindset.

At this stage, I’d like to stress that there is no morality that hangs on this lack of awareness; you often can’t know what hasn’t crossed your path yet. You won’t know to learn about the intersex community if you don’t know that intersex people exist. When delivering training, I often say you cannot be an expert in the human experience. Even with my experience, I am only a specialist and never an expert. Allyship is more about respectful curiosity than expertise, more a continually enacted praxis than a test that you ace and never revise again. We all have something new to learn; I believe a good approach to DEI is remaining enthusiastic to learn, grow and innovate compassionately.

AG: Couldn’t agree more with respect to the intersex community. There are some amazing intersex organisations out there, like the OII (Organisation Intersex International Europe), and I think we in financial services, given our platform and reach, have a real opportunity to do more. Certainly food for thought for us in 2024. My last question for you was really to continue looking forward and to really get a sense of what your vision for financial service is with respect to LGBTQ+ DE&I progress.  

GW: I think what I envisage is very much what I described at our End of Year event to several of our Members, that organisations (especially larger organisations) are often perfect microcosms of our outside world; their politics, practices and dynamics. But the beauty of these microcosms is that they can be changed. We can control them, adjust them, formulate policies, and implement practices that, ultimately, right some of the wrongs we see in the outside world. It is amazing what marginalised people achieve in this world in spite of the challenges they face. Imagine what these people can achieve when you rip those hurdles out of the ground and build the climate where they can truly excel.

AG: Well said. I look forward to working with you to make that a reality!  

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