The Proud Science Alliance is a collective of healthcare and life sciences sector LGBTQ+ networks who work together to raise the bar on LGBTQ+ inclusion within their organisations and the sector as a whole. We do this by sharing good practice and collectively sponsoring programming designed so that we achieve more together than we could individually.
Almost a third of non-binary people (31 per cent) and one in five trans people (18 per cent) don’t feel able to wear work attire representing their gender expression
- Stonewall [1]
62% of generation Y LGBTQ+ graduates return into the closet upon taking their first job
- Human Rights Campaign [2]
Why we exist…
Employees in the Healthcare and Life Sciences Sector who identify as LGBTQ+ commonly fear negative consequences of being open about their sexual orientation and/or gender identity at work.
Practicing caution not to reveal this information has a negative impact on an individual’s ability to perform their best, compromising their abilities to engage fully in the creative innovation process and to inspire the trust of others.
Removing the real or perceived necessity for this caution and unlocking the full potential of LGBTQ+ employees would directly enhance their productivity. Further, creating an environment of openness will improve the performance of our modern workforce as a whole.
70% of closeted middle managers reported that their careers have stalled, versus 51% of openly LGBTQ+ middle managers
- Harvard Business Review [3]
Almost one in five LGBTQ+ staff (18 per cent) have been the target of negative comments or conduct from work colleagues in the last year because they're LGBTQ+
- Stonewall [4]
It all started when…
The origins of the Proud Science Alliance are in Pride in London 2015 where GSK and the Francis Crick Institute both marched separately that year in the Pride in London march.
Two blogging partners, one from each organisation who took part in the event, noticed an opportunity to connect LGBTQ+ network leaders to talk about what they could do together.
That led to connecting in network leaders from the Wellcome Trust and all agreed they could do more together than separately, starting with joining together to participate in Pride in London 2016.
The Proud Science Alliance was born. The partnership continued with an even bigger Pride in London presence in 2017.
Later that year, LGBTQ+ network leaders from Bayer and GSK were connected and talked about how they could share good practice to help each other to support LGBTQ+ inclusion at their organisations. Those discussions led to a workshop in January 2018 that quickly expanded out to include network leaders from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
The group quickly realised the same potential to do more together and in spring 2018 formally adopted the Proud Science Alliance name while adding Lilly to the working group.
During 2018, the working group agreed our problem statement, vision and aims as foundational to what we would do together. We agreed our governance structure, including a formal Steering Team, to ensure we put in place a sustainable framework that will allow us to achieve our aims. We again participated together in Pride in London and started programming with a webinar on Leadership from an LGBTQ+ perspective, available to employees from all our organisations. In 2019 we formally launched the Proud Science Alliance and completed leadership appointments while we established how we work and delivered programming to achieve our aims.