“The latest evidence that corporate America is becoming more gay-friendly comes in the form of a new report on workplace practices released this week by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest lesbian and gay political organization,” Marc Gunther reports for Fortune.

“The report, called the Corporate Equality Index, gives 138 major U.S. companies a perfect 100 percent score when it comes to providing equal benefits to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) workers. That’s 10 times as many as received a perfect score when the group did its first survey of workplace practices in 2002,” Gunther reports.

“To get a perfect score, companies must explicitly ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, provide domestic partner benefits and offer diversity training. Beyond that, they must advertise to the gay community and contribute to GLBT community groups,” Gunther reports.

“Companies with perfect scores for 2006 include automakers Ford, General Motorsand Daimler Chrysler, computer makers Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard, tech firms IBM, Intel and Microsoft, financial giants Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch and consumer products companies Coca Cola, PepsiCo and Johnson & Johnson. Several aerospace and defense industry firms – Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon – also notched perfect scores,” Gunther reports.

Full article here.

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