This article mentions a suicide attempt. Readers’ discretion is advised.
In April 2022, Sravan joined the Hyderabad office of an American multinational finance corporation as a technical operations analyst with a head full of curly hair and eyes full of dreams. The company’s public profile boasted of its commitment to LGBTQ+ inclusion at the workplace. Sravan, a queer non-binary person, recalls this promise being reiterated to them at the end of their interview for the role.
However, a few months later, Sravan saw the first red flag unfurl. At an annual marathon organised by the company for its employees, they heard “the manager of their manager” mention their sexual orientation casually to other employees. Sravan was surprised. They had not consented to their sexual orientation being publicly disclosed.
Sravan brushed it off as a one-time incident. But it happened again. And again.
In multiple casual office gatherings, the manager would tell other employees, “I have three queer people working under me, and Sravan is one of them,” Sravan recalled. They felt increasingly uncomfortable with their sexual orientation being the subject of casual office conversations. “My sexual orientation is a very personal piece of information,” they said, “and I felt that it was not being handled with care.”
In April 2023, a year after joining the company, Sravan decided to confront the boss publicly, asking them about the company’s confidentiality policy. Sravan recalls the manager dismissing and laughing at his concerns.
But over the next two days, the retribution, by Sravan’s account, was swift. First, they were accused of sexual misconduct towards other employees—an allegation that Sravan vehemently denies. Then, other members of their team stopped speaking with them—an act of social boycotting that Sravan suspects was ordered by the boss.
Soon after, Sravan filed a workplace harassment complaint against the boss with the HR team, which they remember having no queer representation. But Sravan claims he did not hear back from them for two weeks.
It was only when Sravan approached drag performer and tech professional Patruni Chidananda Sastry, who escalated the matter via Pride Circle, a consultancy firm that had facilitated Sravan’s recruitment, to the company’s global HR team, that action was taken. The company launched a six-month investigation, which ultimately led to the manager being found guilty. The result? Sravan was transferred to a different team under a different boss, but Sravan said the HR team declined to reveal what action had been taken against the manager.
By then, however, the workplace environment had soured beyond repair for Sravan. In August 2024, after dealing with months of mental distress, Sravan resigned. The company, a multinational finance empire with an annual turnover around the billion-dollar mark, continues to flourish.
Concerned about the repercussions of discussing their experience, Sravan requested that queerbeat use a gender-neutral pronoun for the boss and not reveal the name of the company. They also requested to be referred to only by their first name.
While queerbeat could not independently verify Sravan’s allegations, workplace culture and policy experts we spoke to agreed that discrimination against queer and transgender people remains commonplace in India’s corporate workforce. As is the practice of retaliation against those who decide to speak up.
“Corporations see themselves as these benevolent and kind people who are ‘allowing’ and ‘tolerating’ people from marginalised groups,” said Asiya Shervani, a senior workplace equity consultant. “Any complaint, or even feedback, is seen as betrayal.
Sravan is likely one of many queer and transgender people in India whose dreams of finding sustainable employment in India’s corporations have been blunted by workplace discrimination that targets their sexual orientation or gender identity. These experiences are in stark contrast to the public messaging by these corporations. For example, a 2023 annual report from the company where Sravan worked mentions the company’s commitment to “continually… create and reinforce a culture of respect, equity and inclusion.” The report also mentions the company having an office dedicated to “LGBTQ+ Affairs,” which “focuses on advancing a culture of inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees… and driving equity and inclusion for the LGBTQ+ community globally.”
In the process of reporting this story, queerbeat interviewed queer and transgender employees, scholars of gender and sexuality studies, workplace culture and policy experts, and representatives of organisations that liaison with corporates to increase queer and transgender visibility in the workforce. These conversations revealed that behind the rainbow banners and inclusive slogans that are becoming increasingly commonplace, the reality of queer inclusion in corporate India is a story of uneven progress and continuing exclusion.
While more queer and transgender people are entering the corporate workforce of late—mostly in entry-level positions—they often find themselves forced to quit due to explicit and implicit discrimination, poor complaint-resolution, and harsh retaliation when reporting unfair treatment.
From adversary to ally?
When India opened up its economy in 1991, global corporations scurried to enter the Indian market. And they brought with them the idea of “LGBTQ+ inclusion,” according to Pushpesh Kumar, a professor of sociology at the University of Hyderabad who has studied the lives of “urban corporate gay [men]” in India.
At the time, queer inclusion was a relatively new concept even in their home countries. Carlos A. Ball, a professor at the Rutgers Law School, writes in The Queering of Corporate America (2019) that until the 1970s, large American corporations were adversaries of queer and transgender people. According to him, in that decade, the many “gay liberation” and “LGBTQ Rights” organisations that cropped up in the backdrop of the 1969 Stonewall Riots began to actively challenge that stance.
By the turn of the century, this activism had resulted in many American corporations slowly becoming more welcoming of queer and trans employees. Corporations also began recognising that “adopting and supporting LGBTQ rights positions could help them maximise profits by reaching new customers while hiring and retaining the most qualified employees,” Carlos writes. This is perhaps what Starbucks’ then-CEO meant when he told Politico in 2012 that supporting same-sex marriage had been “good for business.”
In the early 2000s, as these global corporations began establishing offices and campuses in Indian cities, they pushed the Indian teams to “get on board” with the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals of the parent company, lawyer Meenakshi Vuppuluri told queerbeat. Meenakshi works as a subject matter expert on the prevention of sexual harassment and DEI with Kelp, a company that supports corporations towards making their workplaces safe and inclusive.
The winds of change also began to reconfigure some Indian workplaces. According to Parmesh Shahani’s book Queeristan: LGBTQ Inclusion at the Indian Workplace (2020), starting in 2010, the Indian conglomerate Godrej revised its anti-discrimination policy to explicitly forbid discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender expression; extended health insurance to same-sex partners of employees; and began to pay for gender affirming surgeries. Similar initiatives have also been instated by Tata Steel & Tata Consultancy Services, and Axis Bank. Tata Steel modified its HR policy in 2019 to make it “LGBTQIA+ inclusive,” a representative told queerbeat over email. “This policy recognises same-sex partnerships” and provides benefits such as “gender-neutral parental leave, nursing breaks for adoptive and LGBTQIA+ parents, medical coverage for partners, joint housing benefits, domestic travel assistance, annual health check-ups, and financial support for gender assignment surgery,” they added.
Official communications from these companies’ websites attribute these initiatives to the momentum generated by the Indian Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA v Union of India and the 2018 Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India verdicts. In the 2014 judgement, the apex court formally recognised transgender persons as ‘third gender’ and upheld their right to self-determination of gender. In the 2018 judgement, the court decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual activity.
Over the years, thanks to the combined efforts of activists and courts, more corporations appear to be gradually joining the bandwagon of change. According to Srini Ramaswamy, co-founder of Pride Circle, a Mumbai-based consultancy firm that liaises with corporations to assist their DEI initiatives, the firm has enabled the hiring of over 1600 queer and transgender people in various companies over the last six years. Most of these appointments have been in the IT sector, Srini told queerbeat.
Given the increasing recruitment of queer and transgender employees, companies have also been working to devise inclusive policies to help them feel supported. The 2024 India Workplace Equality Index (IWEI) assessed 150 companies—most of them large Indian companies or multinationals operating in India—on their inclusion of queer and transgender employees. It reported that over 90% of these companies now offer health insurance to same-sex partners. Nearly 70% provide gender-transitioning support to transgender staff.
Cracks in the gloss
While it is undeniable that change is happening, it is far from being systemic. The rosy proclamations of corporate DEI brochures often tend to gloss over the many cracks that continue to haunt Indian workplaces when it comes to queer inclusion.
The rising number of queer employees being hired for instance, while heartening, only represents a foot in the door that had previously been slammed shut. According to the Godrej DEI lab’s latest annual report (2024-25), the number of LGBTQ+ employees at the organisation is 245—about 0.5 per cent of all employees at the company. At Tata Steel, the number is at 110, a company representative informed queerbeat. While these numbers are minuscule in the larger context, it is also important to note that these companies have made far more progress than their peers.
These numbers, which group all queer and transgender employees under the “LGBT+” label, invisibilise the fact that transgender people are especially under-represented in the workplace. According to Zainab Patel, a transgender woman who has led DEI initiatives at several multinational corporations, trans people find it much harder than cis queer people to find corporate jobs. She points out that one major reason for this gap is the limited access transgender people have to educational opportunities. A 2017 NHRC survey found that fewer than 20% of transgender respondents had completed school, and under 10% had earned undergraduate degrees.
Further, most queer and transgender people are hired in entry- and mid-level roles, Pride Circle’s Srini and Mobbera Foundation’s Savithri told queerbeat. (Like Pride Circle, Mobbera Foundation helps multiple corporations in Hyderabad recruit queer and transgender people.) Savithri pointed out that most of the hiring she has been involved in has been for “ground-level positions”: those consisting of “security staff and people sitting at the front desk.”
Srini explained that this trend is “partly due to corporate hiring practices that reserve senior roles for employees who have been with a company for a relatively longer term.” But Patruni, a Hyderabad-based drag performer and IT professional, suspects a more sinister reason: those hired in entry-level positions are “easily replaceable.”
Disposable employees
Hiring is only the beginning of a queer individual’s corporate journey. What follows after a queer person enters a corporation?
Patruni’s experience suggests a grim answer. Patruni had worked for ten years in the Hyderabad office of a multinational auditing and consultancy firm, until an encounter with corporate queerphobia forced them to quit in May 2021.
In late 2020, the company’s intranet forum featured an article about Patruni’s journey as a queer dancer and data analyst. They recall the article making them feel like they could trust in their workplace, and as a result, they came out as genderfluid to their colleagues. Later, it became all too apparent to Patruni that they had mistaken a formal, tokenistic gesture to be reflective of the company’s larger attitude towards queer people.
Patruni worked under a manager whom they suspected was biased against queer people. They claim that soon after the article was published, the manager became hostile. Per their account, she started assigning them an impossibly high workload. “There was always a new project to work on,” Patruni recounted, adding, “My job role did not involve taking client demos, but my manager added that also to my workload.”
When they took up the issue with the company’s Internal Complaints Committee—set up under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013—it was dismissed because Patruni was regarded, officially, as a man and the Act provided no redress for men. Patruni said that their complaint was instead registered as a case of workplace harassment with the company’s internal compliance team.
The team formed a committee—which did not have any queer or transgender representatives—to investigate the complaint. After four months of investigation, the committee found the manager innocent, Patruni told queerbeat.
Patruni could not share with queerbeat a copy of their complaint and the committee’s decision because the communication took place over the company’s internal mail, which they no longer have access to. However, screenshots of WhatsApp communication between Patruni and a member of the company’s DEI team, reviewed by queerbeat, confirmed that the manager was found innocent because of a lack of proof.
In retribution for the complaint, Patruni said they were declared an underperformer by the manager. To prove their commitment to the job, they recalled being told to work at odd hours over and above their regular working hours. Then came heightened scrutiny and comments on their English-speaking skills. “My manager started telling me—sometimes during calls with clients—that I speak English with an accent,” they recollected.
Patruni felt discriminated against. And with the internal compliance team having closed its doors to them, they also felt trapped. In March 2021, they attempted suicide within the premises of their workplace.
The suicide attempt should have ideally made the company take Patruni’s complaints more seriously. Instead, they were asked to take an online “support session,” and given a ten-week notice to resign, Patruni told queerbeat.
A year and a half later, when they applied for a different job in the same company, they said they were told that the company had blacklisted them. queerbeat has not been able to independently corroborate this claim.
Cut to June 2024, and the company’s Hyderabad office commemorated Pride Month by unfurling the pride flag like it had always belonged there. “And my manager is still there,” Patruni said, their voice low.
In 2021, after leaving their previous job, Patruni briefly joined the India office of a Canadian IT firm, whose name they requested queerbeat keep confidential. Patruni says the company had no policies for queer or transgender staff. When they raised this with HR, they were told the firm treats everyone “equally.” When Patruni said they felt unsafe without such protections, the HR manager suggested termination.
“Let us figure out how to relieve you,” they recall being told. Ten days later, Patruni said they were out of the company.
“They do not want to resolve, only relieve,” Patruni said.
Sastry’s and Sravan’s experiences are not isolated examples. In both cases, the pattern was the same: lack of queer representation in complaint-resolution teams and brutal pushback when employees complained of being treated unfairly. These are two reasons why queer and transgender people who have breached the high walls of corporations choose to—or are forced to—leave.
Restricting queer and transgender people to lower rungs of the corporate ladder means that they remain inadequately represented in key decision-making bodies. “Even if a corporation hires 100 [queer and transgender] people in a year, how many of them will become a director ten years down the line? That is where the real visibility and decision-making power is,” Zainab told queerbeat.
This process of people leaving a company is called attrition. And it appears to be common with queer and transgender employees. In their survey of 300,000 employees across 28 organisations in the United States, University of Michigan sociologists Erin Cech and William Rothwell found that about 38 per cent of LGBT employees intended to leave their workplace within a year.
In India, there is scant data on attrition with regard to queer employees. Even organisations such as Pride Circle and Mobbera Foundation do not track attrition after six months of joining, Srini and Savithri told queerbeat. Similarly, while Godrej DEI Lab’s annual report documents the attrition percentage of women employees, it does not currently provide the statistics for queer and transgender employees. The Tata Steel representative told queerbeat that they have had “very few attritions” of queer and transgender employees.
Essentially, while more and more corporations are adopting queer inclusive policies and there is some evidence to suggest that an increasing number of queer and transgender people are being recruited, little is known about whether these policies are working to support and retain queer employees.
Potential solutions
A publicly-available code of conduct from Patruni’s previous company—the one they worked for until 2021—says, “We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any nature on the grounds of gender, race, religion, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation…”
Asiya, the workplace culture and policy expert, said that the experiences of queer employees reveal the huge gap between “a very nice policy document” and “completely wrong implementation.” According to her, the implementation fails, at least partly, because of the lack of queer and transgender people, or allies, in complaint-resolution committees. Many people who serve on these committees are “perpetually scared about their own careers and promotions,” she told queerbeat. This compromises the committee’s neutrality.
As a solution, she suggests that complaint-resolution teams in cases of workplace harassment include external members, i.e., those not associated with the organisation. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, suggests a similar model for internal complaints committees that deal with cases of sexual harassment. Asiya acts as an external member in several such committees at corporate and non-corporate workplaces. “There are a lot of things I can say as an external member, which even the chairperson [of the committee] cannot say,” she told queerbeat.
Meenakshi, the lawyer, agreed with Asiya. She also advocated for stronger confidentiality practices when a complaint of workplace harassment is filed, in addition to “escalation matrices” that do not push the employee to rely on the HR or their manager to handle their workplace complaints. An escalation matrix is a set of procedures that outlines different individuals to whom a workplace harassment complaint can be raised.
Finally, Meenakshi also suggested that employees be informed about these policies and escalation matrices through periodic training sessions. “One can openly address the question of retaliation in these training sessions,” she added.
A rocky path ahead
Parmesh, Godrej DEI Lab’s head, agrees that the status quo with regards to queer and trans inclusion in India’s corporations is “not ideal.” “But then, what is?” he asked, adding that “I think it’s okay to start from somewhere, anywhere, and go on the journey, rather than not go on it at all.”
At the time of writing this report, a global force threatens this journey. As of March 2025, US President Donald Trump signed executive orders banning DEI programmes in government, leading to the closure of diversity councils and withdrawal of funds for DEI initiatives. Following the order, it has been reported that nearly 37 major firms—including IBM, Google, and Deloitte—began rolling back queer and trans-inclusive policies, events, and hiring initiatives.
Patruni said that the effects are showing up in India too: unlike the 15-20 invitations they would get every June to participate in events to sensitise company staff about queer and transgender lives, this year they have gotten only five. Srini, Pride Circle’s co-founder, said that hiring of queer and transgender people through online and offline job postings has remained largely unaffected. However, while 35 companies signed up for Pride Circle’s RISE job fair last year, only 17 signed up this year. The RISE job fair is Pride Circle’s annual event that brings queer and transgender people seeking corporate employment face-to-face with corporations willing to hire them.
As global corporations go back on their promises of queer and transgender inclusion, several people see this as a moment for homegrown Indian corporations to fill the gap. “[Multinational companies] provided the ignition,” Harsha Ravikumar, product manager at Microsoft and a gay man, told queerbeat, “but now [Indian] companies are taking it upon themselves to be more sustainable with their DEI initiatives.” Zainab, the ex-DEI lead at multiple global corporations, agrees: “This is a pause in the movement, not a full stop.”