The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is legislation proposed in the United States Congress that would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or, depending on the version of the bill, gender identity, by employers with at least 15 employees.
ENDA has been introduced in every Congress since 1994 except the 109th. Similar legislation has been introduced without passage since 1974. The bill gained its best chance at passing after the Democratic Party gained the majority after twelve years of Republican majorities in the 2006 midterm elections. In 2007, gender identity protections were added to the legislation for the first time. Some sponsors believed that even with a Democratic majority, ENDA did not have enough votes to pass the House of Representatives with transgender inclusion and dropped it from the bill, which passed the House and then died in the Senate. President George W. Bush threatened to veto the measure. LGBT advocacy organizations and the LGBT community were divided over support of the modified bill.
In 2009, following Democratic gains in the 2008 elections, and after the divisiveness of the 2007 debate, Rep. Barney Frank introduced a transgender-inclusive version of ENDA. He introduced it again in 2011, and Senator Jeff Merkley introduced it in the Senate. On November 7, 2013, Merkley's bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support by a vote of 64–32. President Barack Obama supported the bill's passage, but the House Rules Committee voted against it.
From 2015 on, LGBT rights advocates moved to support the Equality Act, a bill with far more comprehensive protections than ENDA. The Equality Act would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity not only in employment, but also housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding, credit, and jury service.
On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The ruling was only on employment, like ENDA. LGBT rights advocates welcomed the ruling and called on Congress to pass the Equality Act, noting that as of 2020, 29 states do not have the full protections the Equality Act would provide for the LGBT community.
Evidence of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity
In states that have anti-discrimination policies in place, LGBT complaints are equivalent to the number of complaints filed based on sex and fewer than the number of complaints filed based on race. EEOC statistics from 2018, show that 1,811 LGBT complaints were filed.
The Williams Institute estimates the number of LGBT employees as follows: 7 million private sector employees, 1 million state and local employees, and 200,000 employees of the federal government. Thirty percent of state and local LGBT employees live in California and New York. In comparison, less than half of one half of one percent of LGBT state and local employees live in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming combined. As one might expect, many of the documented complaints of discrimination by state and local governments against LGBT employees are in California and New York. Surveys that seek to document discrimination on the basis of perceived sexual orientation and/or gender identity are often conducted with a pool of self identified LGBT people, making it difficult to ascertain the impact of this type of discrimination on non-LGBT individuals.
One source of evidence for hiring discrimination against openly gay men comes from a field experiment that sent two fictitious but realistic resumes to roughly 1,700 entry-level job openings. The two resumes were very similar in terms of the applicant's qualifications, but one resume for each opening mentioned that the applicant had been part of a gay organization in college. The results showed that applicants without the gay signal had an 11.5 percent chance of being called for an interview; openly gay applicants had only a 7.2 percent chance. The callback gap varied widely according to the location of the job. Most of the overall gap detected in the study was driven by the Southern and Midwestern states in the sample – Texas, Florida, and Ohio. The Western and Northeastern states in the sample (California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New York) had only small and statistically insignificant callback gaps.