Hong Kong Business Moving to More LGBT Diversity

Although legally less restrictive than Singapore and with an ever-growing number of gay venues, on the surface Hong Kong still has remained very slow to embrace the ideals of the LGBT community.



These may get a much-needed boost in October when a special Summit Conference will be held on 24 October (ironically just a couple of days before Taipei’s Gay Pride Parade). The motivator is Todd Sears, founder of Wall Street’s LGBT leadership organization ‘Out on the Street’. In 2011 this brought together the main US banking and financial organisations for a Summit in New York. It was followed last year with one in London. Now it is Hong Kong’s turn.



Sears is clearly a man driven by his mission to make the banking industry more open to the LGBT community. He was hired by Merrill Lynch, on the basis of a business plan he presented to focus on the LGBT sector. This eventually grew to bring in over US$1.5 billion to the bank. He then led more diversity initiatives working for Credit Suisse. He now heads up an organization named Coda: The Intersection of Business and Diversity.



A few years ago, some of Hong Kong’s banks started an Interbank LGBT Forum to link the banks' various diversity organisations. On June 16, HSBC invited Sears to address a dinner for executives from many banks at its imposing Hong Kong headquarters specifically to discuss diversity and what more the banks should be doing.

 

Views were many and varied, including suggestions that the Summit should invite local corporate leaders, not just of the financial services, to speak and that it should also assemble a panel of the eminent to discuss why diversity matters to them from a human and from a business perspective. There seemed to be general agreement that it was time now for the financial sector to go public on the good work it has been doing in diversity since Goldman Sachs kicked off with its LGBT network here in 2005. It was time, many suggested, for the banks themselves to come out.

 

An article in fridae.com previewing the October Summit suggests –

 

The October conference promises to publicise the case for business diversity at a level not so far seen in Hong Kong, let alone in the rest of Asia. Sears aims it to be a truly Asian conference.


http://www.fridae.asia/newsfeatures/2013/07/01/12356.out-on-the-hong-kong-street