Out and About: Predicting Lesbians' Outness in the Workplace
Open Access
- Author:
- House, Chloe Jean Casella
- Graduate Program:
- Counseling Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 24, 2004
- Committee Members:
- Kathleen Bieschke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Constance Matthews, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Brandon Hunt, Committee Member
Carolyn Elizabeth Sachs, Committee Member - Keywords:
- lesbian
workplace
sexual identity development
internalized homophobia
heterosexism
discrimination
self-disclosure - Abstract:
- Self-disclosure of sexual orientation in the workplace for lesbian women is a complicated issue because of the lack of national legal protection against sexual orientation-based discrimination in the workplace. However, employees who have higher levels of self-disclosure of a lesbian or gay sexual orientation also have higher levels of job commitment and job satisfaction (Day & Schoenrade, 1997; Ragins & Cornwell, 2001; Waldo, 1999). Exploratory studies have looked at what factors are related to disclosing a gay or lesbian sexual orientation in the workplace. The field is now moving toward hypothesis-testing of different variables as predictors of self-disclosure of sexual orientation. This study is based on theory by Super (1990) that a person and her or his work environment will play important roles for implementation of the self at work. Structural equation modeling was used to test a model predicting self-disclosure of sexual identity in the workplace with a sample of 398 lesbian women. Results suggested that a structural model including organizational tolerance of heterosexism, direct and indirect heterosexist experiences, and internalized homophobia as predictors of self-disclosure of sexual orientation in the workplace for lesbian women fit the data adequately. As operationalized, the sexual identity development variables violated the multicollinearity assumption of SEM. In a post-hoc sequential multiple regression analysis, the internal variables internalized homophobia and sexual identity development accounted for a small amount of variance after workplace and demographic variables were entered. Limitations of this study and implications for research and practice are discussed.