Celebrating Pride 2011

More than a thousand Googlers participated in Pride celebrations in a dozen cities to support equality and remember the sacrifices of those who have made life better for members of the LGBT* community today. While we celebrated the legalization of marriage equality in New York, the state where the gay rights movement in the United States began more than 40 years ago, our participation was especially global this year: we were at Mardi Gras in Sydney, Australia for the first time and supported Pink Dot in Singapore. From San Francisco to Dublin to Tel Aviv to Boston, we stepped out in large numbers for Pride parades around the world in a colorful swirl of Gaygler and Android Pride t-shirts. As in years past, we featured a month-long easter egg in our search results worldwide to celebrate Pride, adding a rainbow next to the search box for a number of Pride-related queries including [lgbt], [marriage equality] and [pride 2011].

But it’s not just during Pride week that we celebrate and promote equality and diversity. We’ve partnered with various organizations and earlier this year employees contributed their stories to the It Gets Better project.

In addition to our external efforts, we’re also working from within. Recently, we extended domestic partner benefits in regions such as China and Hong Kong. Last year, Google adopted a policy promoting benefits equality through a gross-up on imputed taxes for health insurance. We provided the equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act for same-sex domestic partners and updated the definition of infertility. Happily, over the last year we’ve been approached by many organizations looking to do the same.

Gayglers around the globe created this video to increase awareness about the LGBT community at Google, and we're happy to share it with you today.

Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Strategic Partner Development Team

*LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender but, without letting the acronym get too unwieldy, is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersex, amongst others.