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June is LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, a time to recognize and celebrate the history, resilience, and contributions of LGBTQIA+ communities. Pride Month originated to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in New York City, a pivotal moment in the movement for LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility in the United States. Today, Pride Month serves as both a celebration and a reminder of the ongoing work needed to advance equity, inclusion, and belonging for LGBTQIA+ individuals.
As the month comes to a close, we reflect on the important role community colleges play in supporting LGBTQIA+ students by fostering welcoming learning environments, advancing equitable policies and practices, and using data and research to better understand and address students’ experiences and needs. Yet these efforts are only effective if the data is accurate, prompting a critical question: Are our data systems telling the full story of our LGBTQIA+ students?
Visibility matters. But visibility requires data—and right now, gaps in how we collect sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) information mean that too many LGBTQIA+ California community college (CCC) students remain unseen in the very systems designed to support them.
Recognizing the need to make our LGBTQIA+ students more visible, CCCs have added new and modified existing student demographic information to better reflect the diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community. The CCC data elements added and modified were:
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SB36 Student-Transgender and SB37 Student-Sexual-Orientation—both added in 2018, and
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SB04 Student-Gender—modified in 2019 to include nonbinary as an additional gender identity.
The efforts by the CCC system are especially important today. While California community colleges have taken steps to improve SOGI data collection, recent national trends have moved in the opposite direction. A recent report conducted by the Williams Institute found that hundreds of federal data collections have removed sexual orientation and gender identity measures, limiting our ability to understand and address the needs of LGBTQIA+ communities. As federal data sources become less inclusive, strengthening SOGI data collection efforts at the state and local levels becomes even more critical.
Our LGBTQIA+ students deserve to feel seen, supported, and valued every single day—not just during one month. Here are some ways you can get involved:
- Join the SOGI Coalition—email Jaime Sykes to be added to the mailing list. The SOGI Coalition meets on the fourth Monday of each month at 1:00 pm via Zoom.
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Subscribe to the Foundation for California Community Colleges’ LGBTQ+ Initiatives and Student Support monthly newsletter.
We have only scratched the surface of the rich and complex topic of LGBTQIA+ student representation in data! We invite you to share your own experiences, questions, and/or resources by emailing communications@rpgroup.org. Your voice helps us build a more comprehensive and inclusive narrative.
Additional resources:
- Bringing Data Out of the Closet and Toward Equity: SOGI Data Collection and Usage Practices in California Community Colleges
- Foundation for CCC — LGBTQ+ Initiatives & Student Support