Beth Brooke serves as global vice chair iof public policy for Ernst & Young. That might not be such a big deal, except Brooke is openly lesbian, making her one of the few out members of leadership serving with an international or even national company.
Brooke came out in 2010 in a video for The Trevor Project. Her coworkers had long considered her an ally, which was why she was asked to participate in the video shoot. The company's LGBT group wanted a member of the firm's leadership team to close the video.
"They had written it and it was from the perspective of a straight ally," Brooke explained of the script she received. "I read it and I thought to myself 'I am talking to a kid at home who is maybe thinking about killing himself, how can I be inauthentic to that kid? What would I really like to say to that kid?'"
She decided to write her own script for the video. The video was shot months prior to when it would first be made public and Brooke had to wait, wondering what the impact might be, but despite offers to pull the video she didn't waiver in her decision to come out.
"The video ran the morning after I had to accept an award for the firm at the Trevor Project gala in June ...about three quarters of the way through the speech I had decided I'm going to say publicly 'as a leader who is gay,' and that was a Monday night and that was the most nerve racking weekend of my life."
Brooke said the response she received was better than she could ever have expected.
"It was really a fabulous experience," she said of coming out.
She had actually been anticipating that there might be criticism for the fact that she hadn't come out sooner, but she said instead the LGBT community and others embraced her.
"It was unbelievable," she said. "There were hoots and hollers, and then a five minute standing ovation, and I just stood there on stage and the tears just started flowing. I expected something so different."
She received emails from all over the world thanking her for her courage in coming out, both from within the firm and outside of it, and many from people who were not gay, but just felt like outsiders for whatever reason.
"All of them boiled down to one thing and that was that difference matters," she explained. "What I had said in the video was look I'm gay, I've struggled with it, I'm probably always going to struggle with it, I sort of wish I wasn't, but I am, but that is my deal its not anybody else's deal. What's important is you, teen, thinking of killing yourself, is that you value your uniqueness, your different perspective, because we value that. We love diversity. We want your diverse perspective in our organization. And don't ever think because you are different you aren't valuable, because you are different it makes you more valuable."
Ernst & Young has a long history of embracing diversity. It has several employee resource groups, including LGBT resource groups in multiple countries.
"We pride ourselves on [receiving] 100 percent on the Equality Index, and all the outside benchmarks and measures," Brooke said. "I will tell you its one of the most powerful groups in our firm in terms of visibility, marketplace and activity. They are just a terrific group of individuals.
"Of course we go out of our way to try and be leading edge on providing benefits those types of things. We were proud to be the only one of the big four, for example, to join in the amicus friend of the court brief for the Supreme Court talking about the cost associated with DOMA."
Ernst & Young has not taken a position on the constitutionality of DOMA, but the firm did want to provide information to the court about how DOMA affects its people and business and, in particular, the cost associated with it.
"The cost includes implementing," Brooke said. "We have a tax gross up policy for our people with same sex domestic partners in the U.S. Same sex domestic partners are actually disadvantaged when you provide them with health benefits, so we actually incur a tax cost to that, so we actually gross up, in other words reimburse them for that tax cost and that's a real cost, but we think it's the right thing to do to put them on a fair and equitable basis with our non LGBT people."
Brooke said there are also payroll taxes and costs to maintain two separate, but necessary HR processes.
In her own role with Ernst & Young, Brooke focuses on diversity in general, particularly the topics of change management and inclusive growth.
"It's very fascinating, in the last five years or so, the body of research around diverse teams," Brooke said. "The research shows that diverse teams either perform really well or they perform horribly ...the difference between a diverse team that performs really well and one that performs miserably is the leaders."
Brooke said Ernst & Young's goal is to create 167,000 inclusive leaders, which is the total number of employees the firm has across the 140 countries it's located in.
Brooke will speak during the The Executives' Club of Chicago's May 22 breakfast program, "The Growing Economic Power of Women," which is being held at Palmer House Hilton, 17 E. Monroe St., 7:15-9:15 a.m.
"I am really going to focus on the global economic potential of women," she said. "CEOs think about how they are investing in India, how they are investing in China, but they don't think about how they are investing in women, but women are an emerging market, very similar in size to the expected growth of India and China. The companies have to think about that and what you are doing around that. I think that is really a very interesting and compelling business discussion that needs to take place."
