GOOGLE LAUNCHES GAY RIGHTS CAMPAIGN

Google has not only been participating in Pride events around the world this past month, but will also roll out a global gay rights campaign.

The company recently took part in Pride events in Sao Paulo, San Francisco, London and Singapore. In New York, more than 700 Google participants marched in the Pride parade alongside a Google double-decker bus.

At Mardi Gras in Sydney, Google hosted two ‘Queer Thinking seminars on Activism in the Internet Age and Queer Careers’.

The company has now gone further by launching its ‘Legalize Love’ campaign in Poland and Singapore this weekend.

The search engine giant said that the initiative was started in these countries because Singapore still has some anti-gay legislation on its books and Poland does not recognise gay unions.

“‘Legalize Love’ is a campaign to promote safer conditions for gay and lesbian people inside and outside the office in countries with anti-gay laws on the books,” said Google in a statement.

The initiative will, according to dot429.com, expand to all of Google’s offices around the world and will focus on places with homophobic cultures and where anti-gay laws exist.

The campaign will help develop partnerships between companies and organisations to support grass-roots campaigns.

“We want our employees who are gay or lesbian or transgender to have the same experience outside the office as they do in the office. It is obviously a very ambitious piece of work,” said Google’s Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe at a Global LGBT Workplace Summit in London.

He said that Google could play a part in convincing countries that “being a global centre and a world leader means you have to treat all people the same, irrespective of their sexual orientation”.

Palmer-Edgecumbe noted that anti-gay laws are bad for business. “We operate in many countries and have a very globally mobile workforce. We have had a number of instances where we have been trying to hire people into countries where there are these issues and have been unable to put the best person into a job in that country,” he said.