Dive Brief:
- More and more businesses are offering to cover the cost of sex reassignment and hormone therapy for transgender employees—a gesture that’s relatively inexpensive for employers because few people use it. And soon, it may become illegal for employers’s health plans not to offer it, according to Quartz.
- More than 415 companies out of the 780 surveyed in a March study by the advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign offer benefits that cater to transgender employees, covering procedures such as gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy.
- That’s up from 49 businesses in 2009. The Human Rights Campaign expects that number to continue rising, Quartz reports.
Dive Insight:
Tech companies including Facebook, Netflix and Tesla are among the latest to offer these benefits, according to their responses to the HRC’s survey. They join well-known corporate brands including Coca-Cola and Time Warner Cable, which have offered transgender-specific benefits for years, Quartz reports.
Among the companies that the HRC surveyed, law, finance, and tech appeared to be the sectors that have taken most enthusiastically to the benefit.
Even with the upside of these health benefits, including talent retention, advocates consider the lack of protection against workplace discrimination the biggest underlying injustice for LGBT employees in many parts of the country, Quartz reports.
“In the U.S., an LGBT employee can get married on Saturday in all 50 states, but fired on Monday in 28 states for being gay or lesbian and in 31 for being transgender,” said Selisse Berry, founder and CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, in an email to Quartz.
