ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

To the sound of clinking champagne flutes I entered the swanky new London headquarters of Microsoft’s Skype. Inside, instead of the normally buzzing office of a company hard at work, I found 200 excited people networking around the room. What might have surprised you is that most of them didn’t work for Microsoft — in fact, there were more who worked for Google — with just two things uniting the crowd; they all work in tech and they are all gay.

Under normal circumstances the employees of Google do not get free roaming rights among the offices of Microsoft. On the face of it both companies agree on very little. There is one thing, though, on which both passionately concur: a corporate commitment to gay rights.

This isn’t just fluffy, airy-fairy PR spin, it goes right to the top. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and its chief executive Steve Balmer, together with Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are among the largest donors to same-sex marriage campaigns in the US. Their central argument has always been that happy employees, gay or straight, make good employees.

Earlier this year a study by the University of California found 46 per cent of the gay US workforce has at least one degree, compared with less than a third of the straight workforce. Similar studies in the UK have found gay men on average earn more than a straight man in the same profession. One senior London corporate executive, who preferred not to be named, told me this is a big driver in their strategy: “It is a cliché but the average professional gay person tends to be clever, probably not yet in a civil partnership and certainly not yet a parent. This means they can dedicate more of their time to their career and ultimately to our bottom line, at least for now.”

Therefore, it is not surprising Microsoft and Google have decided to team up with other rivals including Amazon and Nokia to launch London-based InterTech, a cross-industry social and professional group they market to “gay geeks”, and hence last month’s launch event at Skype. The event itself, though, wasn’t unique: InterTech joins similar inter-company gay groups for those working in the banking, insurance, legal, media and property sectors. There’s even a group, ParliOut, for the gay employees of all of the political parties and Radius, a cross-industry networking group whose events are hosted and funded by large corporate employers.“We are trying to design the devices and services that will be loved by billions of people, which is why making the most of a diverse workforce that reflects our customers is crucial to our success,” says Microsoft’s director of human resources, Theresa McHenry, of the event.

“It’s not actually about being nice to gay people, though we are,” says Richard Beaven, the openly gay director of customer services at Lloyds Banking Insurance. “We fund the insurance industry’s LGBT group, LINK, because it makes good business sense. It means our staff reflect our customers, some of whom happen to be gay, and it also means we are able to hire from the best talent pool out there. Having a completely straight, male, management team doesn’t exactly reek of diversity and it is diversity in the workplace that we’re absolutely determined to achieve.”

Funding diversity in the workplace is not just limited to the white-collar industries. Defence equipment manufacturer BAE Systems, one of the UK’s largest private employers, is to champion diversity aggressively among its workforce over the next year, starting with a co-sponsorship of the inaugural PinkNews awards in October.

“I can’t imagine that these sorts of events would have happened a decade ago,” says Tom Copley, a Labour London Assembly member, who as a former web designer is also a member of InterTech. “It’s great that now so many employers in London, from big names like Microsoft to small businesses, have recognised the important role that gay people play in the workplace. It’s a testament to the diversity and the future economic success of our city.”

Benjamin Cohen is the publisher of PinkNews.co.uk. He tweets @benjamincohen