June is Pride Month. For some, it’s a celebration. For others, it’s still a protest. At Human Made, we wanted it to be both, and we wanted to engage with it in a way that went deeper than a logo change.
We’re a fully remote company with humans in more than a dozen countries. That geography shapes how we see Pride: not as a single-culture event, but as something with different meanings, histories, and stakes depending on where you live. Curiosity about each other’s contexts, and a genuine commitment to inclusion, sits at the core of how we work. Pride Month is one of the moments in the year when we make that commitment visible.
Here’s the picture we sat with, going into June 2026:
- Same-sex marriage is now legal in 38 countries. Thailand became the first in Southeast Asia in 2025.
- Same-sex relations are still criminalised in around 65 countries, roughly a third of the world.
- 12 of those still have the death penalty on the books.
- Earlier this year, Senegal doubled its maximum sentence for same-sex relations from five years to ten, and criminalised the “promotion” of LGBTQ+ identities.
At the same time, corporate sponsors have been quietly retreating from Pride events in the US and UK, leaving smaller community organisers exposed. In many parts of the world, Pride remains what it started as: a demand for visibility and equality. That was the backdrop for what we did this June.
Pride and Seek
Across the month, we ran Pride and Seek, which involved regular Pride posts in our company Slack, covering everything from the Muxe communities of Oaxaca to the takatāpui of Aotearoa. The posts aimed to educate on what Pride means across the globe, to celebrate what it means to our humans, and to share recommendations of LGBTQIA+ artists, creators, and businesses.
There was a riddle running through it: three connecting words hidden across the month, with a donation to a LGBTQIA+ charity of their choice, going to the squad that engaged the most. We wanted something that rewarded genuine attention rather than passive scrolling, and that gave our globally distributed team a wider view of what Pride means in 2026.
We also asked our humans to share pride flags from where in the world they are based, here’s some that they sent in:
Pride book club
Our company book club chose a queer-themed read for June. It’s a small thing, but reading widely is one of the most direct ways to encounter perspectives different from your own, and it gave us something to discuss together that would touch on relevant themes related to gender, sexuality and pride. We opted for She Who Remains, a tale of gender identity, queer love under theocratic law and the cost of survival within an impossible system.
Cultural spotlights
Throughout the year, we run cultural spotlights in our internal channels: short pieces from team members about traditions, identities, and communities that matter to them. June’s spotlights focused on Brighton, the LGBTQIA+ capital of the UK.
Because we’re distributed across so many time zones and cultures, cultural spotlights are one of the ways we keep active what could easily become abstract. It’s the difference between saying we value diverse perspectives and actually building the habit of listening to them.
Why we keep doing this
Being a good employer for LGBTQIA+ colleagues isn’t a June exercise. It runs through our hiring, our policies, our handbook, our benefits, and most importantly, how people are treated when they show up to work. It runs through the way we build our teams, the way we design our processes, and the small daily decisions about who feels welcome to speak, contribute, and be themselves. June is when we make that work visible.
Happy Pride from everyone at Human Made.
Why not keep the celebrations going with our Music League Pride playlist? Curated by humans, these are the tracks that get us singing out loud and proud.
More of a podcast lover? Check out the Pride edition of our Being Human podcast – colleagues from around Human Made share their views on why Pride is still so important today and the small actions that we can take to be better allies.