July 24: Chelsea Gilbert, Lehigh’s Pride Center Director

By: Mericel Mirabal

Following our meeting with the Global Village team, we scheduled a meeting to sit down with Chelsea Gilbert, who is the director of the Pride Center here at Lehigh. We wanted to see if she knew of any data or research we could look into about the LGBTQ+ community following the lack of data we were able to collect.

She helped to identify a website that has research on how inclusive some of the Fortune 500 companies are, but she also came to the conclusion that there isn’t much out there. The site she directed us to was the HRC: Corporate Equality Index, which can be used to rank almost half of the Fortune 500 companies and discloses their nondiscrimination policies, the areas of support, and their benefits. Along with that, she highlighted that there is a Lehigh career center blog found at Hirelehigh.com where she and Scott Burden, the associate director of the Pride Center, both wrote articles pertaining to inclusive workspaces and being your authentic self at work. Some other resources she noted were the Bradbury Sullivan LGBT center, which is a community pride center, and the LGBTQ Business Council.

Gilbert highlighted that some of the difficulties about discrimination in the workplace is that local businesses have to abide by city and state laws. In Pennsylvania, there is no statewide protection for gender and LGBTQ+ minorities. However, there are some citywide protections in Bethlehem. This can garner lots of confusion as it is all not unified.

To increase inclusivity, she said, “it has to be a comprehensive strategy” because there are multiple levels and areas in which it needs to occur. There are interpersonal and institutional levels. For her, it is imperative to take a look at hiring policies, nondiscrimination policies, training for employers and employees, a more open dialogue even if it makes you uncomfortable, and dedicated spaces for certain marginalized groups but also spaces where everyone can come together. The Pride Center is one example because it is widely open to all regardless of identity, but it also has support groups specific to identities. Therefore, people can discuss these issues adequately because “not talking about these things and ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.”

From our conversation with Gilbert, we learned of more resources that we can look into and how we can at first influence our own sphere, but then later branch outside of our comfort zones in order to increase inclusivity. In an example she gave us, a transgender women was escorted outside of a women’s bathroom in a bar in South Bethlehem, which then made the business owner respond with more training and competency. This is because it will end up hurting the business more if you don’t treat everybody well and the same. We hope to share with others that being inclusive not only improves people’s interactions and treatment of each other, but it also benefits the success of businesses and the economy as a whole.

Leave a Reply