Free to be you

Article tags:
  • Diversity and inclusion

Your identity and gender orientation form the basis of your personality. Feeling free to be who you are is the highest form of freedom. Our bank is there for every new beginning and so we strive to create a culture in which everyone can be themselves and feel safe to express their identity or sexual orientation. Both in the bank and in society at large. How do we do this? Read on to find out.

Creating a more LGBTIQ+-friendly world begins at home. As a bank that takes its social responsibility seriously, we actively support the Dutch and international LGBTIQ+ community. To underpin our policy, we have signed the Declaration of Amsterdam drawn up by the international LGBTIQ+ platform Workplace Pride. This non-profit organisation is committed to achieving inclusion for LGBTIQ+ people in the workplace. In addition, we declared our support in 2018 for the UN Standards of Conduct, and signed the Sustainable Development Goals LGBTIQ+ Manifesto. This combination of declarations is a tangible reflection of our convictions. But the active measures we have committed to by signing them are even more important.

PRIDE+ network

ABN AMRO has various employee networks, including PRIDE+. This community consists of four hundred colleagues and aims to make ABN AMRO an organisation in which everyone is free to be exactly who they are, irrespective of sexual orientation or gender identity. To help achieve this, PRIDE+ organises internal events, such as around International Coming Out Day, Amsterdam Queer & Pride, and the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

This year ABN AMRO also continued its tradition of sponsoring the Roze Filmdagen in Amsterdam, the largest LGBTIQ+ film festival in the Netherlands, which screened 152 films from 40 countries. We also sponsor – sometimes as the main sponsor – of the Amsterdam Dinner and the Roze Zuidas Borrel, all of which are events where employees from various companies get together to celebrate diversity and inclusion.

Finger on the pulse, in and outside the bank

The freedom to be yourself is a great gift. So to find out if our employees feel free to be themselves and whether we can make any improvements in this respect, we carry out a five-yearly survey among our staff. A few of the questions are aimed specifically at LGBTIQ+ employees, which they are free to answer voluntarily. These could include a question about whether they ever experience negative treatment because of their sexual orientation, for example.

Internal and external studies show that we are an LGBTIQ+-friendly organisation. But this is no reason for complacency, so we check our LGBTIQ+ policy against the Workplace Pride Global Benchmark on a regular basis. Our score indicates how we are doing as a company, and identifies specific points for improvement.

If you’d like to know more about our diversity and inclusion policy, click here.