Corporate & Securities Law

So you are a gay lawyer . . .

Where do you get the best benefits? A friend who is speaking at a career fair for LGBT lawyers sent me a list of the benefits provided by major legal employers. You can find it here. Since I’m not gay or looking for work, the thing I find most interesting about the chart is that private employers provide systematically better benefits for LGBT lawyers than government employers. Consider two attractive employers, Fenwick & West, LLP, a 300-lawyer firm, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a government regulator of banks. (Chosen because they are next to each other in order to make cutting and pasting easy.) Along seven dimensions of potential benefits, the law firm provides six, while the government employer provides one.

This example is not cherrypicked. The government employers, like the DOJ, EPA, and FDA all provide worse working environments for LGBT laywers than their private counterparts. (Obviously this is a self-selecting group, since these firms are ones choosing to recruit at an LGBT job fair, but a quick perusal shows it represents most top national firms and some regional ones as well. The government employers are also subject to this potential bias.)

One obvious reason why the government is a laggard is the Defense of Marriage Act, which limits the government in some ways when interpreting rules and regulations. But this is not an insurmountable barrier, and, because of politics, the government continues to treat LGBT employees worse than straight ones, and, importantly, worse than private employers do.

The private employers providing these benefits are not obligated to do so. They are providing them to attract talent and provide a productive workplace. This is an obvious point, but one that is often lost in the demonization of private enterprise. Requiring everyone to agree politically about the treatment of LGBT workers is difficult and potentially divisive, while letting private employers provide benefits where there is demand for them allows locally maximized preference satisfaction in more places and situations. The more we make things political, the less likely we are to get along and to provide people what they want.

Full post as published by Truth on the Market on August 20, 2010 (boomark / email).