Amsterdam Pride

This year’s Amsterdam Pride festivities started yesterday, and will carry on until Sunday. The highlight for many people, myself included, will be the annual boat parade. The weather forecast is good, so I’ll travel to Amsterdam tomorrow to take lots of photos of it.

 

Unfortunately, this year Shell won’t have a boat in the parade. As a Shell pensioner, I feel rather sad about this, particularly following all the effort the Shell GLBT group (Pink Pearl) made to get their first ground-breaking boat into the parade in 2005. That led to other multinationals sponsoring their own boats in 2006 alongside the Shell boat.

 

I understand from a Pink Pearl member that the reason that Shell is not participating this year in the parade is because the Shell Nederland Country Chairman gave Pink Pearl the steer to focus their limited resources (both manpower to organise these events, and yearly budget) on solving an internal Shell GLBT issue – which is Mobility across borders. At the moment gay employees are not free to move from one expatriate assignment to another with their partners (because it is illegal to be gay in many countries where Shell operates- sometimes leading to the death penalty if found with another same sex partner). The result of this is that gay people do not have equal chances to succeed in their careers if they are limited as to which countries they can work in with their partners, or they have to make choices to work in a country without their partners which does not make for a stable home life. At the moment, Pink Pearl is working on raising the awareness of this issue in Shell, especially within the Human Resources community and leadership teams.

 

So, alas, no boat this year, but Pink Pearl members will definitely be present to cheer on the parade. Me too.