India Inc taking baby steps to hire transgender employees

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Reflecting the changing attitude of the broader society towards transgenders, Indian businesses are increasingly employing them, seemingly setting a welcome change of inclusivity despite small numbers. Among the companies that have begun to include them in their regular workforce are Tata Steel, RJ Corp and Publicis Sapient, The Economic Times has reported.

Some companies are also tweaking their policies to accommodate them and skilling trans employees, working out more roles for them and even paying higher stipend for hormone therapy that they might need.

Tata Steel, a company that has been consistent in its CSR efforts down the years, has more than 100 transgender persons employees and is going to hire at least 50 more. “Tata Steel currently has 106 transgenders who are working across all locations,” a company spokesperson informed the newspaper.

The 117-year-old Indian steel manufacturer undertook a drive in February this year to recruit transgenders and the drive is still continuing. The company received over 300 applications.

Another company that is gearing up to be more inclusive in its employee policy is Publicis Sapient, one of the world’s biggest advertising companies. It has trained hired transgender workers in the country through special drives such as the Rainbow Internship. “The trans profiles we are looking for are not restricted to one area, but extend across different fields including operations, HR, marketing, engineering, and product management,” Vieshaka L Dutta, senior director, diversity, equity, inclusion, for India and APAC of Publicis Sapient told the newspaper.

ESL Steel is a company that is part of the Vedanta Group. It is drawing up a plan to hire transgender employees who are to be deployed in the company’s administration/security functions. It doesn’t have any transgender persons in its rolls now. “We are looking forward to hiring two transgender employees at ESL in the upcoming financial year of 2024-25,” said Khirod Kumar Barik, deputy CHRO at ESL Steel.

A significant development is that most of the employers are offering health insurance benefits to transgender employees. The benefits extended include gender reaffirmation surgery and hormone replacement therapy. “Our stipend for skill enhancement training programmes is definitely higher for trans people than the other stipends that we offer to other industrial trainees…by almost 300%. This is because a lot of trans people are on hormone therapy,” Akshay Tyagi, head-diversity, equity, inclusion, The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group told the newspaper.

Companies seem to be building policies around transgenders. In 2022, InHarmony, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy firm, was working with only one manufacturing company on transgender inclusion. Today, it has got the same mandate from four large organisations.

Anupama Easwaran, the founder of InHarmony revealed that while many companies earlier used to conduct programmes to sensitise their employees towards transgenders only during the pride month, now they organise such sessions monthly. Other incentives that companies are extending to transgender employees include insurance coverage for live-in and same-sex live-in partners, employee assistance programmes. Internal mental health helplines are also extended to LGBTQ+ employees. Other initiatives include gender-neutral washrooms in offices and gender-neutral policies.

“In 2023, we embarked on a journey to actively create employment opportunities for transgender community and foster an inclusive workplace environment. As we look ahead to 2024, we are eager to build upon our progress and open more doors for employment within our manufacturing and sales functions for transgender individuals,” Varun Jaipuria, executive vice chairman of Varun Beverages, which is Pepsico’s largest franchise outside the US, told the newspaper.

InHarmony’s Easwaran thinks equal opportunities policy of the government is nudging companies to contemplate more inclusive policies on this front. In February, the Centre formulated an equal opportunities policy for the transgender community. Among other things it forbids disclosure of the gender identity of a transgender without the person’s consent.