Ad Council CEO Lisa Sherman stayed in the corporate closet for 17 years — Here's how witnessing disturbing homophobia motivated her to fully embrace her identity as a gay businesswoman and change workplace culture for the better. (In partnership with Time's Up) » Subscribe to NowThis:
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In US news and current events today, Ad Council CEO Lisa Sherman spoke to NowThis News about being a gay woman in the workplace and how she fought to change the workplace.
Sherman: 'I started my career at the telephone company. The company we know today is Verizon. And at that point in time, I was quite I was closeted and didn't feel comfortable, especially cause it was a very different time of life being my whole self at work. I like to joke that on Monday mornings I'd come in and I had mastered the black art of pronoun puppetry. And I would substitute him, he and we for her and she in my narrative. And that just got harder and harder to do.'
Sherman says during a diversity training program at work, a word-pairing exercise exposed disturbing biases from her coworkers
Sherman: 'And at the top of each easel, it said something like, men are dot, dot, dot, women are dot, dot, dot, black people are Hispanic people are and gay people are. And we're supposed to go around and just be candid and write the first things that come to mind. It felt like an unconscious bias exercise as we would know it today.
And I read things like ‘Gay people are sick. Gay people spread disease. Gay people will hurt our children.’ Those were my colleagues, the people that I was working with every single day. And really, it was in that moment that I knew that I couldn't I could no longer stay there. I just couldn't work in an environment where that's really what people thought.'
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