This talk was recorded by Kees Waaldijk on 16 May 2021, for the (online) Conference on LGBTQI+ Workplace Inclusion, held at Leiden University 20-21 May 2021. Kees Waaldijk is professor of comparative sexual orientation law at Leiden University (www.law.leidenuniv.nl/waaldijk).
Outline: Over the last 30 years, more than 80 countries have prohibited sexual orientation discrimination in employment. Enacting such prohibitions has thereby become the most common form of legal recognition for homosexual orientation. The trend is quite global (ten countries in Africa, and even more in Asia/Oceania). It is not only reflected in laws of EU and OAS, but also in decisions of various UN bodies and of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Over the same period, decriminalization of homosexual sex took place in less than 45 countries, while also in less than 45 countries same-sex couples gained access to marriage or other civil partnership. On the basis of these numbers, Kees Waaldijk argues that in many more countries there must be scope for prohibiting employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation – also in countries where decriminalization of homosexual sex and/or recognition of same-sex families seems a distant ideal. Reasons for this include: covering sexual orientation in laws against discrimination is less controversial than the other two issues; it is easier to find allies for it among organized labour and business; it can build on laws against discrimination on other grounds; it speaks to the recognition of people as humans who need to work to live.
In this first part (15 minutes) of the talk, Kees Waaldijk uses a moving bubble chart to show in what years since 1992 countries across the world first introduced an explicit legal prohibition of sexual orientation discrimination in employment. The credits for this visualisation tool can be found in attachment. The data are based on the annual State-Sponsored Homophobia reports of ILGA World, and on Waaldijk's Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation (GILRHO). A full description of the methodology of GILRHO, and an analysis of its interaction with GDP per capita, can be found in the article: MV Lee Badgett, Kees Waaldijk & Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, ‘The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence’, 120 World Development (August 2019) p. 1-14, available in open access (including, in Appendix A under “Download Spreadsheet”, the provisional 1966-2011 dataset of the Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation, GILRHO).