Jen Wong and Marty Chavez on the importance of bringing your ‘whole self’ to work

Pride Month is a time for celebration, but it’s also an opportunity to look critically at how welcome LGBTQ workers feel in their workplaces. According to a recent Glassdoor survey of LGBTQ employees, half of respondents reported they were fearful of consequences of being out at work, such as being passed over for promotions.

In this interview for The Work in Progress video series, Fast Company spoke with two executives in the business world who have made a name for themselves as LGBTQ leaders: Jen Wong and Marty Chavez.

Wong, who took over at Reddit as COO in 2018, has overseen the company’s impressive trajectory in advertising growth. But she wasn’t always out at work. “[Early in my career, I] didn’t openly share about my personal life, because I didn’t feel safe being a junior person,” she says. “[When] I went to business school, that was the first time I met other gay professionals, and suddenly there were people who are out and not out. And that was interesting to hear about their life experience; you could see the topography.”

Seeing more openly queer people in a business setting sparked something for Wong. “That seemed pretty amazing, if that could happen for me. That started to motivate me. And when I started to go into operating and working in consumer media and tech, I realized that that was possible for me. That’s when I started to bring my full self to the table as a leader, came out, and shared more about my life.”

Marty Chavez, who spent decades at Goldman Sachs and is now a senior adviser at Sixth Street, had a somewhat different experience. “I think rather than having concluded that it was a gay-friendly place, it might’ve been more accurate to say that Goldman Sachs in those days didn’t care if I was gay or straight—as long as I was really good at math and software,” he says.

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