Every June, rainbows shimmer across India’s corporate workplaces. June is the month of Pride and so, it is also when businesses awaken to the need to affirm support for their queer and trans employees. This year, major corporations such as Volvo, Hindustan Unilever, Godrej, the Tata group, Vedanta, and Future Generali organised a series of initiatives focused on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. These initiatives varied from company to company in their specifics, but they broadly included hiring drives, pride marches, and queer-themed cultural performances. However, across these varied programs, there was one constant: the LGBTQIA+ sensitisation workshop.
These workshops typically aim to increase their employees’ awareness about the needs and concerns of their queer and transgender colleagues. Think presentations that seek to introduce attendees to the basics of sex, gender, sexuality; talks on the importance of using preferred pronouns; panel discussions where queer and transgender people speak about the barriers they faced to their education and employment; data-oriented presentations on why a diverse workforce is beneficial for businesses. The ultimate goal: to make the workplace inclusive and supportive for LGBTQIA+ employees.
As queerbeat has previously reported, an increasing number of queer and transgender people are now entering India’s corporate workforce thanks to the sustained efforts of activists and courts. And LGBTQIA+ sensitisation workshops are, at least in theory, a vital part of corporations’ welcome wagons.
“Sensitisation events really help in building a larger culture of empathy [toward queer people] at the workplace,” Harsha Ravikumar, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft India and a gay man, told queerbeat. He believes that such events can help cisgender and heterosexual employees understand things like “why homophobic jokes are bad, why being inclusive of someone’s gender is important at the workplace, or why not having all-gender restrooms might bother someone.” Harsha co-founded the India chapter of Global LGBTQIA+ Employees and Allies at Microsoft (GLEAM) in 2018.
Yet—as queerbeat also pointed out in its earlier report— LGBTQIA+ people continue to face hostility and discrimination in corporate India. Deepthi Sirla, a queer woman who works as a project lead at Nirmaan Organisation, a Hyderabad-based NGO, has conducted over twenty such workshops for different corporations and educational institutions across India, and has attended many more. She described sensitisation workshops as “superficial checkbox exercises” that “really do not lead to any kind of change in employees’ behaviours.” Eight other trainers who conduct such workshops echoed her view.
In the process of reporting this piece, we spoke to a dozen queer and transgender employees, trainers who conduct LGBTQIA+ sensitisation workshops, workplace culture and policy experts, as well as workplace inclusion advocates. Many of them argued that sensitisation helps, but only to a limited extent. While these initiatives do help in making workplace culture, policy, and infrastructure inclusive of queer and transgender employees, their impact is often throttled by uneven reach, lack of engagement from upper management, and poor follow-ups.
Good for Business
Diversity training as a feature of the corporate landscape can be traced back to 1964, when the United States passed the Civil Rights Act. The law made it illegal for workplaces to discriminate against their staff on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin. To avoid potential lawsuits for civil rights violations, American companies began training their employees on “antidiscriminatory behaviour,” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters wrote in a 2008 paper published in the journal Academy of Management. These training sessions typically involved “recitations on the law and company policies, a litany of do’s and don’ts, and maybe a couple of case studies for the participants to ponder on.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, as more women and people from marginalised communities began entering the workforce, the focus of training sessions shifted to promoting “sensitivity and respect for difference, primarily to enhance working relationships,” Rohini and Mary-Frances observed.
By the 1990s, there was growing recognition that a diverse workforce was good for business. For example, in a highly-cited 1991 paper, University of Michigan researchers Taylor Cox and Stacy Blake argued that a more culturally diverse workforce would help businesses attract talent, become more creative in their problem-solving approaches, and respond more flexibly to changing environments. This insight, Rohini and Mary-Frances suggest, led to a new paradigm in diversity training: “Diversity and inclusion for business success.”
In the very year that Taylor and Stacy published their landmark study, India opened up its economy to the world. Through the decades that followed, global corporations began setting up offices in India. They pushed their Indian teams to “get on board” with the DEI goals of their parent companies, lawyer Meenakshi Vuppuluri told queerbeat. Meenakshi is a Senior Solutions Architect with Kelp, a human resources company that works with corporations to make their workplaces safe and inclusive.
But senior leadership at Indian offices often regard these sensitisation events as a performance for onshore managers reviewing their work, according to Lars Aaberg, Associate Professor at the Jindal Global Law School who studies gender and sexuality. In a 2024 paper on corporate India’s DEI efforts, Lars wrote about how the Indian vice president of a London-headquartered IT firm once told him, “I do not know much about this rainbow stuff. I just know they like it in London.”
According to Lars, corporate India’s efforts at queer and trans inclusion picked up steam in 2014, with the Supreme Court’s NALSA v. Union of India judgement that affirmed the rights of transgender persons. They were further accelerated in 2018, with the Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India judgment that decriminalised homosexuality.
In his paper, Lars argues that Indian companies—and the Indian branches of global corporations—are following the path set by American companies in the 90s. They are guided by the “business case” for LGBTQIA+ inclusion: making a workplace queer and trans-friendly positions the company as “modern and progressive”, which makes it more likely to attract employees from “a youthful, globally-oriented, highly-skilled talent pool.”
Ripples of Change
Anubhuti Banerjee, a transgender woman who is now a Senior Manager at Tata Steel, began to consider the possibility of medically transitioning in 2014. This entails using surgical and non-surgical procedures to align one’s body with their gender identity. According to Anubhuti, “the biggest hurdle” she faced back then was the “ignorance” of her peers. “Most of my colleagues had very little idea about LGBTQ+ issues. Neither did any of the company policies mention them,” she observes in a post on the Tata website.
This was when the company’s diversity and inclusion team stepped in to “sensitise other members of the organisation regarding what she was going through and what was expected of them,” the post noted. Anubhuti recollected that all her colleagues quickly got onboard.
In the same post, Sheetal Rajani, the then-head of Diversity and Inclusion at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), advocated for sensitisation programs as a way to promote an “intrinsic culture of diversity and inclusion within an organisation.” Like Tata Steel, TCS is a part of the Tata Group.
Harsha, the Microsoft employee, concurred with Sheetal. While inclusive policies and infrastructure are helpful, Harsha told queerbeat, “translating these changes to [workplace] culture is where sensitisation really helps.”
Can diversity training really change organisational cultures? Systematic data is scant, and we could not find any that focuses specifically on LGBTQIA+ inclusion in India. That said, limited evidence suggests that sensitisation sessions on topics like racial diversity, gender, and sexual harassment can indeed precipitate shifts in employees’ attitudes. For example, in 1996, University of Oklahoma researchers surveyed 739 managers who had attended a series of workshops on gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment. The researchers found that, after the workshops, attendees’ “readiness to value diversity” had increased and they were better at “identifying and preventing stereotypes and prejudices at the workplace”.
While reporting this story, queerbeat found considerable anecdotal evidence that suggests that sensitisation can indeed have tangible impact.
Consider the example of Sushanth, a 22-year-old transgender man. In 2024, he left his natal home in Hyderabad because his family refused to accept his transgender identity. He initially struggled to find employment. Eventually, an activist introduced Sushanth to Deepthi, the project lead at Nirmaan. At the time, Deepthi was collaborating with the Hyderabad office of the Canadian software firm OpenText to set up an on-site cafeteria that would employ people from marginalised groups. Sushanth was hired as an assistant chef there.
Sushanth was nine months into the job when he spoke to queerbeat. When asked if he had faced any discrimination at work, he replied without hesitation. “I have not faced a single discriminatory remark. This is because Deepthi ma’am sensitised them before I joined work.” The sensitisation sessions included training for both white-collar employees as well as janitorial and security staff, he added.
Patruni Sastry—a Hyderabad-based non-binary drag artist who is employed at a fintech company—also recounted an instance where they saw sensitisation sessions result in lasting change. Patruni uses drag performance as a tool to introduce corporate employees to queer and transgender lives. In 2021, they were invited by “a very popular MNC” to conduct a sensitisation session for its employees. They arrived in their drag costume, only to realise that the office had no gender-neutral washrooms that they could use to change after their performance. “I stormed into the washroom earmarked for people with disabilities and changed,” Patruni said. In a discussion with the audience that followed after, they brought up the issue. The next year, the company invited them once again. This time, there were clearly demarcated gender-neutral washrooms in the building. “These [sensitisation sessions] help us in pointing out a few changes within the infrastructure or within the policy of a company,” Patruni told queerbeat.
At other times, sensitisation sessions can provide cisgender and heterosexual participants with the space to reflect on how their actions impact queer and transgender people. Recollecting a session on bullying that Microsoft’s Hyderabad office had organised in 2022, Harsha said, “it opened a really vulnerable moment, where some colleagues had the courage to admit that they had been the bully. They also spoke about feeling bad about their actions.”
The merits of sensitisation, Harsha argued, could even extend beyond the physical confines of the company: “Employees could take lessons from sensitisation workshops back home,” he said. “Even though you are not queer, you could be a parent, a sibling, or a friend to a queer person. Sensitisation sessions can help you understand their struggles and see how you could be of help.”
The limits of inclusion
Individual instances of impact, while meaningful in their own right, do not necessarily add up to a significant overhaul of overall workplace culture. “I know so many queer corporate employees who are afraid to be out in their workplaces because they are afraid of being discriminated against,” Patruni said. “If workplace culture is truly changing, then why are they afraid?”
Although Sushanth, the Hyderabad-based transgender man, attributed his positive experience at OpenText to Deepthi’s sensitisation sessions at the company, Deepthi believes that “[sensitisation sessions] are not really impactful.” For her, Sushanth’s case was a welcome exception—one that was as rare as it was encouraging.
To begin with, there are simply not enough sensitisation initiatives. While an increasing number of corporations are organising these workshops, significant ground remains to be covered. The India Workplace Equality Index is probably one of the most comprehensive dataset on queer and trans inclusion in corporate India. Its 2024 edition surveyed 150 companies on various areas including hiring, policies and benefits, and procurement. The Index reported that only 54 percent of these companies trained their employees to reduce bias against LGBTQIA+ people in hiring processes. And only 39 percent of them trained employees in charge of goods and services procurement to increase the diversity of their roster of suppliers.
Even in companies that do conduct sensitisation exercises, impact often remains elusive because the workshops are seen as a “compliance activity,” said Meenakshi, the lawyer working with Kelp. In her view, organisations typically organise these sessions to comply with either DEI requirements of a foreign-based parent company, or to avoid lawsuits in India.
Meenakshi conducts sensitisation sessions for corporations that focus on the prevention of sexual harassment as well as on building safe work environments for queer and transgender people. The 2013 Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act mandates that employers “organise workshops and awareness programmes at regular intervals for sensitising the employees with the provisions of the Act.” While the 2019 Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Act has no such mandate, it makes discrimination against transgender employees punishable. And so, companies often organise sensitisation sessions to train employees on the requirements of the law.
The diversity trainers queerbeat spoke to also highlighted that sensitisation workshops often do not reach the two extremes of the corporate ladder: the ground staff (such as janitorial and security staff) and the upper management. “Managers are only concerned about training white-collar employees and don’t often think about sensitising ground staff,” Deepthi said. This omission leads to queer and transgender employees facing homophobic and transphobic comments from some members of the staff—even when policies and infrastructures are inclusive on paper, she told queerbeat.
On the other hand, employees in the upper levels of management often skip these sessions themselves because “they think they do not need them,” Meenakshi noted. Deepthi agreed, pointing out that “managers, particularly in the hospitality industry, often ask only ground-level staff [such as janitorial and security staff] to join sensitisation sessions.”
While sensitising ground-level staff is important, if representatives from the upper management are disengaged from such workshops, workplace policies and infrastructure are unlikely to change, Patruni said. Harsha, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, agreed, pointing out that bringing in inclusive policies at Microsoft required months of lobbying with the upper management.
The trainers we spoke to also claimed that the long-term impact of sensitisation sessions is rarely tracked. After she concludes her workshops, Deepthi hands out surveys and has informal conversations to assess the impact of her sessions. Even this basic exercise is largely a personal initiative. According to Deepthi, corporations are rarely interested in conducting such follow-ups.
Stepping stones
All the diversity trainers and queer and transgender employees queerbeat spoke to agree that diversity training sessions cannot make corporate India welcoming of queer and transgender people in isolation. Instead, they suggest, sensitisation sessions are a stepping stone for other initiatives.
Even in their 2008 paper, Rohini and Mary-Frances, the DEI experts, noted that diversity training initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s “fell short” of changing employees’ behaviours, attitudes, and mindsets, or the workplace environment. However, they contend that this does not suggest that diversity training failed; instead, they argue that it is “unrealistic” to expect “sustained change in what was typically no more than a 1-day exposure.” In other words, sustained change requires sustained exposure.
Zainab Patel, a transgender woman who has led DEI initiatives in multiple MNCs, echoes Rohini and Mary-Frances. Instead of sensitisation sessions that are organised only during the Pride month, “I would like to see meaningful inclusion throughout the year,” she told queerbeat.
Zainab’s desire resonates with what Canadian author L.M Montgomery wrote in her 1915 book Anne of the Island: “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.”
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Correction: The earlier version of the story stated that, in 2018, Sheetal Rajani was the head of Diversity and Inclusion at Tata Steel. Sheetal instead headed Diversity and Inclusion at Tata Consultancy Services, which is a part of the Tata group. We have updated the story. We regret the error.