As recently as 1990, not a single publicly traded company in the United States offered domestic partner benefits to its gay employees. As of March 2007, 37 percent of the Fortune 1000 offered these benefits, including seventy-eight of the top-100 firms. Figure 5.1 shows that a similarly dramatic pattern can be seen in the number of large firms that include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies. Over the last twenty years, corporate America responded without government prodding to the demands of its gay employees and their allies in a stunning fashion. Most popular and some academic analyses of this trend typically point to market forces – including tight labor markets and a growing “gay market” – as the engines of policy change within and across workplaces. Scholars have paid less attention to political forces exogenous to firms and how these forces have changed private policies. As such, this chapter argues that although factors internal to firms and cross-firm mimetic processes help to explain policy change on issues that are as highly salient and divisive as gay rights, politics – specifically shifts in mass opinion – has had a substantial impact.

At the federal level and in most US states, nondiscrimination policies covering gays remain voluntary, and this was the case in all but a few states prior to the early 2000s. Further, at the federal level and in all fifty states, firm policies that provide domestic partner benefits are optional; however, in some jurisdictions, firms that provide benefits to married couples are required to provide equal benefits to domestic partners.