We are at the time of year at my job where we can enroll or change our health plans and such. This year they are including a online questionnaire that's supposed to be from the feds. it's supposed to give someone a chance to freely and discretely list any and all disabilities so they know where to send resource's. there is also going to be a part where people can list any sexual and gender identities. it's supposed to be confidential and voluntary. I have spoken with a woman that I work with who is a lesbian. I've only told her that I'm bi. We do have a mutual acquaintance that is transgendered though. She is as skeptical about this questionnaire as I am even though she is out and married to another woman.I am worried that it might come back and bite me at work at a time when I'm trying to move up. I don't really want to end up on a government list like that. On the other hand part of me wants to test it out. Probably wont though. I'm to lazy to sue if it backfires.
Jessica Marie.
Comments
Catch-22
Wrong, it's not work that wants to know, it's the government. Subtle difference but important. Now, if this were a sheet of paper that got fed back through your HR, was all collated together and sent off to the Pen-Pushers, then I could agree with you.
As it is, you say this survey is on-line, which presumably means a direct link to a govt website. If your link has other stuff at the end of it you can try scrubbing that and seeing if if gives you the same form. That way there is only a small chance your employer will ever see any of the info.
Now to the Catch-22. The problem the govt has is that it keeps hearing all this fuss about gay this and trans that in amongst all the other lobbying groups and of course they all want to make it seem they are more important than they are, just to, you know, actually get something done.
In order to find out what numbers of people are affected, they do surveys which in this case almost certainly, knowing the sensitivity of the information, won't contain any obvious ID for anyone who fills out the forms. There might be some kind of reference number but they shouldn't ask for your SS No or anything like that. If you're really paranoid they could possibly work back through the network and find out your IP address but, if you're that paranoid you wouldn't be answering the survey anyway.
So if you do fill out the survey the govt can build up a picture of who needs what and can plan accordingly. If you don't fill out the survey, they don't know you exist and all the shouting you do will be for nothing, since they can point to the survey and say the numbers are too small to bother with.
So it is up to you. Fill out the survey and maybe help some of your fellow sufferers, or leave it and complain nobody listens to you. At some point you have to take that step forward, but you can choose where to step and how far.
I'm not there and I don't have knowledge about the form you describe. Maybe someone else who has done the deed can say if it seems a safe enough thing to do. In principle, we have to take every chance we can get to help ourselves, because we can be sure that nobody else will do it for us. On the other side a badly-worded form, un-necessary information requirements or poor management are good enough reasons to stay well away.
Penny
this all sounds like good advice
If Penny's advice sounds like you wish you had a translator or someone to explain more fully what any of those things are, then it would still be kind of a blind leap for you. In that situation, discretion might be the better part of valor. OTOH, if you get what she is talking about and you're comfortable with how to make sure their form really is a .gov Web site, then I second everything Penny said. Great advice, well said.
For extra caution, do not fill out the form on a computer belonging to the company or while using the network at work. It is pretty common practice at a lot of companies to snoop on all their network traffic, some maybe even use keystroke logging programs installed on computers they own. Their only real purpose is to look for how much company time or how much of the company's data plan is being wasted. But they also want to catch the kind of stuff that people might call Not Safe For Work, because they don't want any fellow employees to get caught up in any kind of harassment situations. That said, if you have IT, HR, or high enough management at your company who just don't get that private and confidential means they should not read their employee's private and confidential mail, etc. then expect those persons to snoop where they don't belong. This happened to one of my coworkers more than 15 years ago when our large company hired a 3rd party that specialized in confidential employee surveys. They made excellent, explicit assurances at the beginning of the survey that it would remain confidential. He was sitting right next to me, and ten minutes after he clicked Submit, he got a phone call from someone in HR who thought his suggestions for improvements in policies were great ideas, were terrific ideas, and wanted to ask some questions. So much for all the assurances of privacy and confidentiality. He was pretty ticked off, as you might suppose. But, that was our company hiring an outside company and definitely not the government. My knowledge about the federal government on this sort of stuff is that they can be trusted. I know more than a few persons, including computer types, who are high ranking, mid ranking, or low ranking federal employees, and many private contractors to the government, including NSA and FBI folks
Unless you are one of those people who believes FEMA and the Federal Reserve want to take everyone's guns away and ship people who object to a "New World Order" off to camps.
Or unless you are one of those people who believes Karl Rove or the Fusion Centers around the country are freely sharing everything that the FBI or NSA or local police collects on citizens with "local business leaders" without respect for anyone's rights or even common sense. (Going off topic, I am a person who knows some of that is true and I don't entirely rule out the rest of it. Fortunately, the Fusion Centers don't appear to be able to take action effectively enough to tear their way out of a wet paper bag, so far. Which is just how I like my proto-Fascist organizations, although being nonexistent would be even better. The exception is they do seem to be pretty good at organizing mass pepper spraying and arrests when liberals peacefully protest something.)
Bottom line is be paranoid but don't overdo it, I guess? Which is exactly what Jessica Marie is doing by asking about this. So...good. :-) If it really is a .gov, then if they can effectively hide the Ark of the Covenant by storing it with a zillion other objects, your data should be safe among the data of zillions of other respondents to that survey. Besides which, a .gov can safely be relied on to keep your info private and confidential 99 times out of a 100. But they would have no excuse to ever ask for your social security number, as Penny says.
I would add that if it is NOT a .gov but a private company contracted by them, I would be considerably more hesitant but just maybe might go through with it anyway.
And if you do tell the government that yes they can count yet another citizen of our country as T in some way, I want to thank you and congratulation on doing a good thing not just on your own behalf but for all of us. :-)
Annemarie
Nope
From my own experience, Nope.
Gwen
i wouldn't
not me it can come back and bite you on the ass. who know it might be a way for them to go head hunting. there might be chance for down sized too.
Depends
In the US, government contractors will get dinged for diversity. Bigger firms supposedly want that and have corporate policy covering gender identity. The employee in this case can voluntarily checkbox in their profile that they are LGBT though I do not see how that benefits the employee imho.