Equity

Leaning into Your Community to Express Solidarity and Recognize the Spirit of Pride

The intersection of this year’s Pride celebration with the Black Lives Matter movement has our heightened awareness of the need to advance equality and justice for our diverse communities. To support Pride month and the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re introducing new features to help members express solidarity with Black and LGBTQ+ communities on LinkedIn.

This week, we’re rolling out new stickers you can add to videos and images, as well as new profile background images in support of these communities. And, in recognition of Pride, we’ve temporarily updated our logo on our desktop homepage.

Our recent virtual event with Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown underscores both the challenges and the path ahead. Karamo shared his views on recent events surrounding racial injustice, ways to recognize Pride this year, the impact of COVID-19 on LGBTQ+ professionals, and how to confront bias to build a better workplace.

One of my favorite quotes from Karamo reads: 

“The spirit of Pride is empathy, education and equality. It’s about people saying, I want equality and deserve equality. It’s about asking people to be empathetic to our experiences, and to understand what we’re going through, so that you can join our fight. I mean, we just saw yesterday where the Supreme Court finally said yeah, we can’t fire you because you’re gay. I want people to think about that. Yesterday, people finally said, we can’t fire you because you’re gay. That means that we should still be in a space of understanding. That as we’re going to Pride and we’re celebrating where we’ve come from, we’re also educating ourselves on where we need to go and having empathy as allies and as members of the community ourselves, and continuing to try to stride and fight.”

You can watch the full recording here:

Building on Karamo’s point about education, there is no better time to learn how we can each contribute to building a better workplace and society by acknowledging and confronting bias, learning to discuss differences, and taking action to create change. That’s why we’ve made this LinkedIn Learning path on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for All available for free through August 31. Courses within this unlocked path include:

Whether you’re an ally or member of the LGBTQ+ community, you can help take the spirit of Pride beyond June. We’re encouraging our employees and members to share their personal stories and experiences, and how they’re keeping the spirit of Pride alive using the hashtag #OutOnLinkedIn.