Wear it Purple Day affirms my workplace’s commitment to my safety and comfort at work

  • LGBTIQ+
  • Brenna Harding
Brenna Harding, a person with long brown hair wearing a purple t-shirt holding a Wear it Purple cupcake

Brenna Harding

Wear it Purple Day 2024 is fast approaching, and having just concluded my first year as a professional diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practitioner my view on the importance of this day in workplaces has deepened. Let me tell you why.  

Wear it Purple is an Australian charity committed to fostering supportive, safe, empowering, and inclusive environments for rainbow young people. We do this through a range of year-round projects, but our biggest celebration of the year is Wear it Purple Day. On the last Friday of August, we encourage people in schools, universities, and organisations to wear purple to send an important message to rainbow young people: ‘You have the right to be proud of who you are’. 

I joined Wear it Purple as a volunteer in 2011 when I was 14 years old. At this point, Wear it Purple was still being run by the two students who founded it, Katherine Hudson and Scott Williams. We were a ragtag group, passionate about making a difference to the scary statistics that LGBTIQ+ youth faced. For example, according to La Trobe University’s LGBTQA+ youth national survey, Writing Themselves in 4: 

  • 60.2% of LGBTQIA+ young people have felt unsafe or uncomfortable at secondary school in the past 12 months 
  • 40.8% have experienced verbal harassment in the past 12 months based on their sexuality or gender identity 
  • 25.6% of LGBTQIA+ young people have attempted suicide at some point int their lifetime 

We handstitched banners, spent $100 on our first round of badges, and stored our single box of supplies in a volunteer’s mum’s garage. I petitioned to have the day recognised at my own school and over many years the festivities grew. By the time I was in year 12, it was an annual purple takeover. But most importantly, I saw girls holding hands in the playground for the first time, and my school counsellor said students now felt comfortable talking about their same-sex relationships in counselling sessions.  

Since then, Wear it Purple has grown significantly. We are now a team of almost 30 tireless volunteers and the day is celebrated in thousands of classrooms and workplaces nationwide. This year we sent 1,000 free school packs across the country, and to date have distributed over $200k worth of arts, culture and community funding to projects for and by LGBTIQ+SB young people. 

Why Wear it Purple Day matters at work

I’ve never doubted what Wear it Purple can do for rainbow young people and the environments they inhabit. But during this last year in my role as Culture and DEI Manager at Macquarie Bank, I’ve begun to appreciate the impact it can have on workplaces too. 

I’ve been learning new industry statistics, like: 

For the first time, I’ve also been experiencing being an openly queer employee in a corporate environment. I now notice myself registering the small signs of LGBTIQ+ allyship in my colleagues; when they have their pronouns displayed on Zoom, wear rainbow lanyards, show up to Pride events, get my partner’s pronouns right, or correct themselves when they don’t. 

A group of people wearing purple shirts among a large crowd of people, many holding Pride flags.

Wear it Purple Day is a day where I learn how committed my workplace and my colleagues are to my safety and comfort at work

Thankfully for me, Macquarie has celebrated Wear it Purple Day for almost as long as I have. Their pride network, Macquarie Pride, is robust and driven, even being recognised at Pride in Diversity’s Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) as this year’s Employee Network of the Year. We have senior leaders who are proudly part of the LGBTIQ+ community, and allies who agitate to keep our inclusion practices on the front foot.  

This year Macquarie Pride are hosting a Proud Parent panel to discuss how employees can create safe and inclusive environments for queer young people. It makes me think about the 20,000 employees Macquarie has worldwide, the 20,000 households and networks of children, nieces, nephews, niblings and siblings who could have an adult in their life who takes time at work to consider how to make the world a better place for them.  

Wear it Purple Day for me will always be about young people. My heart will always melt most when I present at schools and am coyly approached by nervous high schoolers to ask about how to come out or to proudly tell me their new name; when I see members of Wear it Purple’s Youth Action Council share their stories to attentive crowds, or when they tell us the reason why they’ve chosen the latest annual theme. 

But the impact inclusive workplaces and active allies can have goes further than the Friday night networking drinks. Workplace inclusion done well travels home. It travels to the rainbow young people that need it most.  

Brenna Harding (she/her) is a Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Program Manager at Macquarie Bank and has been a board member with Wear it Purple since January 2019 and is currently Board President. Brenna’s LGBTQIA+ advocacy began in childhood when she and her two lesbian mothers appeared on an episode of Playschool, causing public uproar. Beyond her work with Wear it Purple, Brenna is also a Logie-winning professional screen and stage actor, appearing most notably in Puberty Blues, Black Mirror, and a Place to Call Home, and with theatre companies including STC, MTC, Black Swan, Belvoir and Griffin. In 2014 she was awarded the Marie Bashir Peace Prize for her contribution to social justice, and in 2021 she was given the Randwick Council Youth Prize for community service. 

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