Let’s talk about Corporate Pride

Last year I wrote a thing about how Pride is getting less fun, because corporations. I proved this using 7 years of Pride parade data from a large city in the northeast U.S. I just updated my dataset with the 2018 data, and things have gotten even worse…

I was shocked in 2017 that a third of the parade was made up of business entries! In 2018 this has increased to 40.3% of the parade! Pretty big change from 8 years ago when only a quarter of the parade was branded rainbow gear and sweaty office employees. In pure counts, we are up from 44 companies in 2011 to 140 in 2018! This represents a 218% increase in the number of companies at Pride, in just 8 years!

Like I reported before, the split between large national corporations and local/regional companies remained fairly evenly split.

Also, for context on what types of companies are coming – we are looking at mostly the service industry and healthcare. I do realize that healthcare entries can be beneficial to LGBTQ+ folks (knowing where we can receive quality and inclusive care), but I still consider them companies as I believe they are just as profit driven. The service industry includes your cable and cell phone companies, realtors, consultancies, airlines, etc.

And I get it, there is good and bad in this. We are clearly financially worth these companies time now that the LGBTQ community has become more “socially acceptable”. It is apparently now profitable for companies to advertise how “socially progressive” they are. I get it is a sign of our progress (or some of our communities progress). But, at the same time there are real discussions happening in our community about assimilation, loss of culture, inclusion, etc. It is important to consider what we want these celebrations to become, and who we want them to be for. Personally I feel 40% of the parade is getting a bit excessive…

More information about the data and analysis in last years Pride series:

• Pride is less fun
• Company call outs
• How much of Pride is for me?

Also data and code can be found on the Gayta Science github!