So we’ve had the results of our office diversity survey back. Participation was desultory - just under half of the 3500+ employees responded (1710) and all the questions have at least 2% respondents answering “Prefer not to say” to such challenging questions as what their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation etc is.
That said, there were a few surprising results. 4.9% of respondents said they had had gender reassignment and were “living in a different gender to the one assigned to them at birth”. 4.9% seems unusually high to me. That’s, what, about 85 people in my office? Is that a lot? I mean, I work in London which is very cosmopolitan but that seems like a high percentage for a sample population.
Another surprise: for the religion question, following Christianity (45%) the next most common answers were None (15.9%), Atheism (13.4%) and Agnosticism (7.4%). Islam and Hinduism creep in at a lowly 2.9% and 2.0% respectively, and Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism even lower. We are a remarkably heathen lot.
I don’t have a particular point but then this is MPSIMS. So I’m sharing.
That does seem like quite a lot; nobody is certain how many people are trans, but even the high figures are quite a bit lower than that. However, if your company has gotten a reputation as being safe and welcoming from trans folks (and good for them if they have!), that information may have been shared in the community, leading to more people applying and a “pocket” of trans folks. That happened at a company where some of my friends worked.
That’s an interesting perspective that never would have crossed my mind, neat! I just figured a few people decided to screw with the results but what you said makes a lot of sense.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some of the answers are indeed people screwing with the results but it’s a pretty relaxed office for all that, and I was previously aware of two or three trans people here and there.