Corporate social responsibility strategies and accountability in the UK and Germany: Disclosure of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in sustainability reports.

Over the last decades there has been an increasing demand for transparency in the business sector. Companies produce corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports using standards like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standard. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are confronted with discrimination in their professional life. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview on how LGBT issues are integrated into the CSR framework in the UK and Germany. 385 reports from 2017 were analyzed and rated with a scoring system. The key findings are that LGBT issues are not predominant in the CSR reports of either country. However, the disclosure of LGBT policies is significantly higher in the UK than in Germany. British organizations largely do not follow sustainability standards, whereas in Germany most organizations report using CSR standards. Moreover, the disclosure of LGBT issues varies on the basis of the organization size and the industrial sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]