Koji Ueno, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, was the lead author of “LGBTQ Young Adults’ Attitudes Toward Workplace Antidiscrimination Policies: A Cross-National Analysis Between the US and Japan.” The article was published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy alongside Lacey J. Ritter, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Mercy University; Melinda Kane, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University; and FSU graduate students Skyler Bastow, Rachael Dominguez, and Jason D’Amours. The following summary was written by Joseph Martinez (B.S. Political Science ‘26).
Florida State University Professor of Sociology Koji Ueno, Ph.D., was the lead author of “LGBTQ Young Adults’ Attitudes Toward Workplace Antidiscrimination Policies: A Cross-National Analysis Between the US and Japan.” The article was published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy and examines how national contexts shape LGBTQ workers’ attitudes toward workplace antidiscrimination policies by comparing the US and Japan.
Previous U.S. studies showed that LGBTQ workers played a key role in persuading their employers to include LGBTQ workers as a protected category in antidiscrimination policies. These studies tend to assume that LGBTQ workers are generally supportive of the policy change, but this assumption has not been directly examined. Further, it may be unrealistic for countries where LGBTQ worker activism is uncommon. The results of the research team’s study indicated that LGBTQ people’s attitudes toward antidiscrimination policies differ between the two countries because their experiences of social marginalization differ.
In the US, LGBTQ workers expressed strong support for antidiscrimination policies because they believed the policies helped the LGBTQ community and allowed them to come out at work and to be “true” to themselves. These views seemed to reflect their strong sense of collective identity and their discourse about coming out as a political action, which LGBTQ people have developed through a long history of LGBTQ collective movement in the country.
Like other US collective movements, the LGBTQ movement had strong emphasis on formal recognition of equal rights, and it made sense that US participants endorsed formal rules against discrimination in their workplaces. In expressing support for antidiscrimination policies, US participants also showed their trust in formal rules and their assumptions that policies would function in the ways they were designed.
In contrast, Japanese LGBTQ workers’ doubts about the need and effectiveness of workplace antidiscrimination policies seemed to reflect their invisibility and pressure to remain in the closet due to the discourse that non-heterosexual or non-cisgender identities are private issues that need to be kept to oneself.
Specifically, these structural and discursive conditions increased Japanese participants’ concern that antidiscrimination policies would draw too much attention to their sexual and gender identities and undermine their relationships with colleagues. Those conditions also reduced their perceived effectiveness of antidiscrimination policies because they would not be able to use the policies due to the risk of outing themselves.
Labor market conditions and workplace practices also shaped LGBTQ workers’ attitudes toward antidiscrimination policies. In Japan, many LGBTQ workers were skeptical of antidiscrimination policies because they believed that employers were primarily interested in improving their public image, rather than changing employee behaviors and firm climates. This view echoed a discourse in Japan that employers implement diversity policies mainly as their responses to external pressures from governments and foreign investors as well as a broader legal consciousness in the country that formal rules are institutional tatemaes (public expressions of intent, rather than private, honest thoughts).
The project team analyzed data from in-depth interviews with LGBTQ young adult workers. The data was collected in the U.S. between 2011 and 2020 (n=27) and in Japan between 2018 and 2022 (n=29).
The project team believes that future research should examine these possibilities by expanding the sample, using a wider age range and longitudinal data. They believe that longitudinal data will be useful in understanding how LGBTQ people’s attitudes change over time.
To read the full research report, click here. To learn more about the FSU Department of Sociology, click here.
APA Citation:
Ueno, K., Ritter, L.J., Kane, M.D. et al. LGBTQ Young Adults’ Attitudes Toward Workplace Antidiscrimination Policies: A Cross-National Analysis Between the USA and Japan. Sex Res Soc Policy (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-023-00872-6