8. CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY SUB-CULTURES: WORK SITES, WORK PRACTICES, GEOGRAPHY AND EMPLOYERS Participants described particular occupational categories and workplace contexts as having an influence on LGBTQ+ diversity and inclusion. For example, work sites were described as challenging places for diversity in general: ...boots on ground places um are generally not - not very pleasant for people who are of any diversity. You know there's - there's just your typical tradies walking around in their boots and they sometimes don't even realise that what they're saying is offensive to somebody. Female, 50s She added that office-based workplaces were likely to be more open and LGBTQ+ inclusive: ...when [our company] last asked specific questions about what people wanted to identify with, we found that there were less [LGBTQ+] people than we expected. We thought people should be pretty comfortable with [reporting] that. But I guess that led us to think well okay so maybe just cause we're at head office, [laugh] maybe it's the project offices even and the satellite offices and maybe it's those places where there's people in more remote locations and maybe it is different in other parts of the world. Like in Asia they're probably not going to be telling everyone either, so we did have to take [that] into account. Generally, office people are more comfortable. I find in the office it's a lot easier ... so most of our head office is quite easy to roll out these [LGBTQ+ inclusion] initiatives, because it's corporate. I think it's more difficult on regional jobs. I worked on a regional job and you get some quite conservative people working on those projects. You know they live out there or they've come overseas and they've struggled to find a job [in the city] and they end up getting a job in a regional area. So, they can sometimes be quite conservative. Gay, male, 20s A number of participants in the research described having positive experiences at work while being open about their sexual or gender identity. For example, one participant referred to
29
