The Hypocrisy of US Corporate Pride and Anti-LGBTQ+ Donations

STA/ISS 313 - Spring 2023 - Project 1

Team Co-Medians: Helen Chen, Amber Potter, Morgan Bernstein, Ellen Zhang

Data

• Datasets are from TidyTuesday and originally drawn from Data for Progress

• Data looks specifically at businesses that contribute to anti-LGBTQ+ political campaigns

• Our data:

  • static_list - info on total donations by company

  • contribution_data_all_states - info on individual donations by companies to politicians

  • corp_by_politician - info on politicians

Question 1: What is the relationship between a company’s status as a pride sponsor, whether they have an HRC pledge or not, and their contributions to anti-LGBTQ+ political campaigns?

[*] The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) business pledge is a commitment for companies to show their clear opposition to harmful legislation aimed at restricting the access of LGBTQ+ identifying people in society and the workplace, and 296 companies have already signed the pledge

Question 2: How have donations to politicians who support anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns changed over time?

Conclusion

• Our dataset only included information on politicians from six states; our research would’ve been stronger had there been more nationwide information to compare political parties of politicians

• Would be interesting to look into federal politicians

• Explore the magnitude of difference in contributions to pro- vs. anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns of these hypocritical companies

• Explore associations of other inclusivity measures in the workplace aside from HRC pledge

Sources

• https://19thnews.org/2022/06/companies-anti-lgbtq-bills-lawmakers/

• https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-gov-abbott-continuing-his-crusade-to-harm-transgender-and-non-binary-texans

• https://time.com/6150964/greg-abbott-trans-kids-child-abuse/

• https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/2021-officially-becomes-worst-year-in-recent-history-for-lgbtq-state-legislative-attacks-as-unprecedented-number-of-states-enact-record-shattering-number-of-anti-lgbtq-measures-into-law

• https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/gov-greg-gbbott-gets-worst-press-on-lgbtq-issues-17184157.php

• https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/less-10-2022s-anti-lgbtq-state-bills-became-law-report-finds-rcna67619

• https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/#D3D3D3:AA4A44:1:hex

• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opinion/lgbt-rights-pride-corporations.html

Sources cont.

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49084904/r-markdown-bullet-list-with-multiple-levels

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Japan

• https://coolbutuseless.github.io/package/ggpattern/

• https://statisticsglobe.com/ggpattern-r-package

• https://coolbutuseless.github.io/package/ggpattern/articles/pattern-stripe.html#the-fill-aesthetic-as-a-mapped-aesthetic-1

• https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/watercolor-rainbow-background-design_30010873.htm#page=2&query=rainbow%20background&position=4&from_view=keyword&track=ais

• https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/

Images

Image credit: Image by Freepik