Three Openly Bisexual Business Leaders — and Why the List Is This Short

Ask for openly gay business leaders and the names come quickly. Ask for openly bisexual ones and the list runs out almost immediately. That is not an oversight in the asking. No openly bi chief executive has ever appeared on any published count of out LGBTQ+ Fortune 500 CEOs, and Fabrice Houdart's census of out LGBTQ+ Fortune 500 board members — 27 people holding 36 seats — identifies none as bisexual.

Below are three people who have said it publicly, in their own words. We have deliberately kept the bar there: everyone here has described their own identity on the record, and nobody has been included on the basis of rumour, a partner, or someone else's description of them.

Dame Inga Beale — Lloyd's of London

Beale became CEO of Lloyd's of London in 2014, the first woman to lead the insurance market in what was then its 328-year history, and held the role until 2018. Before that she was Group CEO of Canopius and Global Chief Underwriting Officer at Zurich Insurance. In 2015 she topped the OUTstanding and Financial Times LGBT executive power list.

Writing under her own byline for the Institute of Directors, she put it plainly:

"I chose to come out as bisexual just prior to starting at Lloyd's of London so I know how it feels to be different."

Dame Inga Beale, Institute of Directors, June 2022

She first disclosed her bisexuality in 2008, during a job interview for Zurich's group management board — a detail worth sitting with, given how many people describe recruitment as the point in a career where they are least out.

Speaking to myGwork in 2018, she described the specific double bind bi women in different-gender relationships tend to encounter: "People say: 'Well, now you're married to a man, doesn't that just make you a heterosexual woman?'" And from the other direction: "Suddenly I've got a man and half your lesbian friends don't socialise with you anymore. You're excluded from that group."

Erin Uritus — Out & Equal

Uritus has been chief executive of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates since 2018, having previously worked in consulting and international development. She is one of the very few people to hold a chief executive role anywhere while being openly bi+ — and she has been explicit about how rare that is.

"I may well be one of the few openly bi+ chief executive officers in America today. I know firsthand the importance of creating spaces of belonging for the bi+ community in the workplace."

Erin Uritus, The Advocate, September 2020

What makes her account useful to anyone running an employee network is her description of an earlier stage in her career, when she was out at work but not accurately: "While colleagues openly identified as gay or lesbian, I felt I couldn't fully belong," she wrote. "I chose instead to come out as a lesbian to my coworkers."

That is bi erasure operating on someone who was already out — choosing a label the workplace had a slot for, rather than the accurate one. She has since written about coming out "as bisexual — and, later, also as pansexual", and has said she uses bisexual, pansexual and queer depending on context.

Stein Erik Hagen — Orkla and Rimi

Hagen, who died in May 2026 aged 69, founded the Norwegian discount supermarket chain Rimi and went on to become chairman and the largest shareholder of the consumer goods group Orkla, and one of Scandinavia's wealthiest people.

He spoke about his sexuality publicly for the first time in October 2015, on the Norwegian-Swedish talk show Skavlan, saying: "Jeg skjønte at jeg var homofil i godt voksen alder" — I realised I was gay well into adulthood. "When I was in my twenties, we didn't know what that was."

The on-air word was "homofil", gay. Later the same day he clarified to the newspaper VG that he is bisexual — "bifil" — and that he had been since roughly his thirties, and that his ex-wives and family had known for years. Norway's national encyclopedia records the sequence exactly that way: he came out publicly as gay in 2015, "later specified as bisexual".

That two-step is worth noticing rather than tidying away. A man at the very top of European business, describing himself on television, reached first for the word the culture had ready — and needed a second attempt, in print, to land on the accurate one. He married Bendik Skinningsrud in November 2025.

Why the list is this short

It would have been easy to pad this piece. There is no shortage of lists online of "famous bisexual people in business", and they fill out by including actors who own production companies, or by attributing an identity to someone who has never claimed it. We would rather publish three verified names than thirty unverified ones, because getting this wrong about a real person is not a small error.

The scarcity has a measurable cause, and it starts a long way below the C-suite. Research from the Williams Institute at UCLA found that 36% of bi employees are out to their supervisor, against 75% of gay and lesbian employees; 19% are out to all their coworkers, against 50%. Notably, bi employees who are out report discrimination at rates similar to gay and lesbian colleagues — so the gap is about disclosure, not about what happens afterwards.

Stonewall found 42% of bi people had hidden or disguised being bi at work for fear of discrimination. The TUC found 39% of bi workers in Great Britain are open with no one at work, against 14% of lesbian and gay workers.

Follow those numbers up through thirty years of a career and the result is arithmetic rather than mystery. If bi people are half as likely to be out to a manager at every stage, the pipeline of visible bi leaders is thinned at every promotion — until a list like this one has three names on it.

What this means if you employ people

The lesson is not that your organisation needs to find a bi executive to put on a poster. It is that the bi people already in your senior ranks are probably not out, and that the reasons are structural rather than personal.

Beale disclosed in a job interview. Uritus first came out at work as a lesbian because that was the identity her workplace recognised. Hagen reached for "gay" on live television and corrected it hours later. In all three cases the constraint was the vocabulary and the expectations available to them at the time — which is something an employer can actually change.

Our Bi Inclusion Guide for Employers sets out what that looks like in practice: saying "bi" in your policies, counting bi people separately in your data, making benefits partner-blind, and giving your network a bi lead. It is free to download.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any openly bisexual Fortune 500 CEOs?

No openly bi CEO has appeared on any published count of out LGBTQ+ Fortune 500 chief executives. Those counts have run between one and four people in recent years, all gay or lesbian.

Who was the first openly bisexual woman to lead a major financial institution?

Dame Inga Beale, who became CEO of Lloyd's of London in 2014 and was the first woman to hold the role in the market's history. She topped the OUTstanding and Financial Times LGBT executive power list in 2015.

Why are there so few openly bi business leaders?

Because bi employees are roughly half as likely as gay and lesbian employees to be out to their managers at every career stage, so the visible pipeline thins at every promotion. It is a disclosure gap rather than a representation gap — bi people are the largest group within the LGBTQ+ community.

myGwork is the global business community for LGBTQ+ professionals, graduates, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Everyone named in this article has publicly described their own identity on the record; figures are attributed and dated in the text.