We are delighted to share this guest post from Cleo Thompson, based in London and founder of The Gender Blog.

Last week saw women around the world celebrating the 100^th anniversary of International Women’s Day – a day marked on 8^th March every year to commemorate the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.

If, however,  you are a gay woman in Pakistan, Algeria or Uganda, then you probably have somewhat less to celebrate,  as it’s still illegal to be gay in those countries – and several others.  And if you’re a gay woman and fortunate enough to live elsewhere such as the US or the UK,  a country where you are,  in the recent words of Ulrike Lunacek, an Austrian Member of the European Parliament who co-chairs that entity’s LGBTI group, “… able to be open in your workplace; able to be free to be who you really are …”  but you travel overseas, then here’s a website that you may wish to check out. In addition to serving as a useful resource, it will help to raise your awareness of the other countries out there where the LGBTI community don’t enjoy the same level of personal and professional freedom.

Ulrike Lunacek was speaking at the recent launch of ILGA’s interactive website– a newly available resource for both employers and employees. Designed, hosted and supported by British Telecom , it’s an innovative tool, (accessible in French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English) which informs people of their rights and their risks when travelling – and as such serves as a wonderful – and timely – resource for both employers and individuals.

ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Trans & Intersex Association which was born in 1978 out of a grass roots movement aimed at creating global change and awareness of the issues facing the LGBTI community. They campaign on the two main pillars of homophobia – law and culture – and it is their hope that the new interactive website will support this vital work.

One of the senior BT developers who worked on the site asked the launch audience to imagine how it might feel to be a gay or lesbian member of staff who wasn’t “out” to their manager and who was asked by their employer to go to a country on assignment or on a business trip where their sexuality could put them at risk – how do you, as a gay employee, have that conversation if you don’t have the information to hand which informs both you and your employer of exactly what you could be facing? And how can a manager make appropriate resourcing and deployment issues about their staff without having an up to date awareness of the risks (both potential and actual) in the countries in which the company has a presence?

Thus, on ILGA’s home page you can see a map of the world, into which you can drill via a variety of datasets (such as female to female relationships, or age of consent laws) and then see how the map changes colour based on the legal status of that situation: so we can see that it’s illegal to be a lesbian in Angola and Botswana for example,  legal in many other countries and “legal only in some areas” in Nigeria.  You can also click on (or search for) a specific country of interest and see what the story is with regard to the law there; follow the links and read about the legal background, anti-discrimination laws, asylum and immigration issues and social climate.  There’s also an interactive section,  aimed at mimicking the social networking component of sites such as Trip Advisor,  where users are encouraged to post their stories of life in and/or visits to various countries,  to enable others to gauge the mood and “gay friendliness” (or otherwise) of hotels, bars, restaurants and the country and people in general.

This is a hugely impressive site and should be well used and added to by both travellers and those in the corporate space who are responsible for staff deployment overseas – HR and global mobility teams,  travel offices and so on.  Although a lot of corporate support in the diversity space often is about providing funding for a cause or a group, it does BT great credit that they’ve done so much more than that in this instance – they’ve put their massive technical and intellectual expertise to work to support this great cause and provided a genuinely useful tool which could really make a difference to both their own staff and to LGBTI people worldwide.  The site is very easy to use and there’s a wealth of information available;  it’s clearly been an enormous project and hopefully will have an even more significant impact both as an information source for women and men but also as a risk awareness and a consciousness raising tool.

TAGS: business travel, Cleo Thompson, LGBTI, The Gender Blog, travel