Transgender Employees in the Workplace by Jennie Kermode

Author:Jennie Kermode [Kermode, Jennie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies, Business & Economics, Office Management, Human Resources & Personnel Management
ISBN: 9781784505448
Google: wGHFDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2017-09-21T05:15:31+00:00

Yoyo changes

Annette, a trans woman who works as a software engineer, recalls the early stages of her transition at work:

A lot of the time was spent doing IT things, changing usernames and so on. That went smoothly but because we’re a tech company there was a lot to do. Some systems handled it better than others. Some treated it as ‘a new user has been created’ so stuff had to be copied over. For a couple of weeks the odd thing would turn up and even a few months later a colleague said when they forwarded my email my name appeared wrong. It turned out to have been caused by an obscure setting and we had to go in and change it manually.

It is highly frustrating for customers to change some aspect of their personal information, only for the change mysteriously to undo itself some months or years later. For example, a business changes a customer address, gets the address right for two years – and then simply reverts to the old address. This is especially the case for trans people, who may have expended significant effort getting name and gender data changed within an organisation’s systems, only for it to go back to what it was held as before, suddenly and without explanation. And while the consequence of address data returning to what it was some years back may cause annoyance and irritation, the consequence for a trans person of gender data suddenly reverting can be far more serious, outing them to people unaware of their past history and potentially placing them in real physical danger.

There are two common reasons why this may occur. Often, changes are applied only to current data, and not to previous data history or archived data. As a result, if the system needs to be reset to a point before the change took place, or old data are re-accessed, then the result will be as though the change was never implemented.

Organisations should therefore always be very careful, when restoring systems from archive data, that old names and titles are not carried forward.

The second reason that changes may not ‘stick’ within an organisation is because that organisation uses multiple systems: for marketing, for accounting, for services, etc. When updating name and gender data, the change may only be implemented on one or two systems, with the result that when the third system is accessed, no change will have been made.

Alternatively, the change is carried out on some systems – but the business later decides to update all records from an internal source that has not been updated, and which over-writes updated data with non-updated data.

Best practice for all organisations is the implementation of a single view, whereby all personal data are maintained in the form of a single aggregated, consistent and full representation.

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