what pride looks like at work
June is for Pride, yes, but also for reflection. At Tennie, we’re trying to build a better future for all women at work, and we know that building anything worth keeping means understanding what came before. And when it comes to LGBTQ+ women in the workplace, that history is both upsetting and - based on the political events of this year - all too familiar.
Let’s talk about what’s changed and what hasn’t.
from hiding to hustling: a brief history of lgbtq+ labor
Mid-20th century America is often remembered as a “golden age” of work - steady jobs, pensions, upward mobility. But for LGBTQ+ workers, it was an era of fear and forced invisibility. During the 1950s and ’60s, the Lavender Scare led to the systematic firing of thousands of federal employees suspected of being gay. It's giving Trump's DEI executive order. A single tip, a roommate’s phone call, or even subscribing to a physique magazine could trigger a brutal investigation and ruin someone’s livelihood.
Women were hit especially hard. Government jobs - among the few stable options available for women - became traps for those who couldn’t safely live authentically. Some were expelled from college or the military for “homosexual tendencies,” derailing promising careers before they could even begin.
Still, LGBTQ+ people worked. They played the game. They created coded communities. They navigated “straight” workplaces while forming hidden support networks. Margot Canaday, an author and History Professor at Princeton who I was lucky enough to meet in my law class last semester, notes in her book Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in
Modern America that LGBTQ+ workers “coped fairly successfully with the straight world” - a phrase that sounds modest, but was, in context, a radical act of endurance.
today’s progress and persistence of bias
Fast forward to 2024, and the picture has changed… but not nearly enough. According to the latest Women in the Workplace report by LeanIn and McKinsey, LGBTQ+ women still face the highest levels of microaggressions and workplace undermining of any group surveyed.
They face competence-based microaggressions…
… as well as othering microaggressions.
And this problem is bigger than just an annoyance in the everyday lives of working women. Microaggressions have a macro impact on women’s experience; a woman experiencing microaggressions is…
In other words: LGTBQ+ women are still coping. And that’s not good enough.
where do we go from here?
At Tennie, we’re not just thinking about better outfits for young women at work (though we are very much thinking about that). We’re imagining better conditions for the people wearing them. And for us right now, that means learning up on the queer corporate experience.
we see you
To every LGBTQ+ woman navigating work with hope, exhaustion, or both: you are part of a long legacy of courage. You are not just surviving; you are shaping the future. And we’re so glad you’re here.