Faculty/Staff

All Harvard faculty and staff are welcome to join the Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus. Benefits of membership include access to the online membership database and participation in Harvard's large BGLTQ community. HGSC has thousands of members. You can also sign up for a variety of email lists that will keep you posted on the latest events and activities of the caucus, especially related to campus activism.

Within the Harvard BGLTQ community, several hundred BGLTQ faculty and staff from all the Harvard schools are members of HGSC.

You can become a member by applying online at:
https://hgsc.sigs.harvard.edu/memsub.html

Over the past two decades, there have been a variety of  BGLTQ-related faculty and staff groups. Currently there are three that focus on organizing BGLTQ faculty and staff and helping them feel comfortable in the workplace. These are great places to talk about coming out and any other issues of interest to the LGBT community .

Current BGLTQ Networking/Support Groups

Harvard-Wide LGBT Faculty/Staff Group
The LGBT Faculty and Staff Group seeks to provide a common voice for all LGBT employees of Harvard University. Our principal goal is to improve the conditions of our workplace by advocating for the interests of LGBT people who work at Harvard with respect to benefits, education, policy and programming. By education, we are referring to the education of non-LGBT members of the Harvard community regarding policies that discriminate against LGBT employees and their families, educating LGBT employees about their right to be treated with dignity and respect in the Harvard workplace, and providing educational opportunities for Harvard's LGBT faculty and staff to learn how to manage their lives given current discriminatory policies, e.g. the necessity of ensuring parental rights with two parent adoption, etc. In addition to working with the Harvard administration, the LGBT Faculty and Staff group will serve as a liaison to student and alumni/ae groups (e.g. QSA, HGSC, etc.) Although we are a distinct group with interests specific to our role as Harvard employees, we strive to establish and maintain a working coalition with other LGBT organizations in the Harvard community.

Membership includes all LGBT faculty and staff at Harvard University. A Steering Committee, comprised of 10-14 colleagues representing various parts of the university, will be appointed to serve a one-year term each academic year. The Steering Committee will meet five times a year, will have a rotating membership, and will reconstitute every June. Steering Committee terms are renewable.

Additional information is available on the group's iSite.

Other Women's Discussion Groups
HGSC members can also sign up for the Boston area women's email list as well as the women of the caucus email list by logging in to the HGSC membership directory and checking the corresponding box on Interest Groups page.

Harvard Business School LGBT Faculty/Staff Discussion Group
The HBS faculty/staff group is a very casual lunch group that meets a few times a year. HGSC members can sign up for the HBS Faculty/Staff email list by logging in to the HGSC website and checking the HBS Faculty and Staff Discussion list on the Interest Groups Page

Harvard Trans Taskforce
The Harvard Transgender Task Force consists of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and alumni at Harvard University who are dedicated to improving the lives of transgender (transexual, genderqueer and other gender variant) people and communities across the Harvard campus. Here is an example of the kind of talks that occur on campus. This talk was given at Harvard on 3/17/2008 by transgendered Professor Ben Barres from Stanford on the Dearth of Women and Science from the perspective of a transexual person... an amazing talk!

Other email lists and groups of interest

There are also several other lists that may be of interest to Harvard faculty and staff. These lists below are a few of the dozens of email lists HGSC members can sign up for by checking the box associated with each group on Interest Groups page on the HGSC website.

  • The Boston/Cambridge Chapter email list posts information about local alumni events, including several annual parties open to the entire Harvard community.
  • The LBG Campus events list posts information about upcoming on-campus events and occasional multigender faculty/staff lunches.
  • The Longwood list posts information about events in the medical area.

Harvard faculty and staff might also be interested in signing up for the MIT LGBT issues group email list. There are several other MIT faculty, staff, student, and alumni groups that many Harvard affiliates have been able to join. Find out more on the LGBT @ MIT web site .