New UCLA Anderson School of Management graduate Ike Zhan started life in a small town in China. His primary school class numbered fewer than a dozen children, and he struggled to feel accepted. “I was always a bit different, and I didn’t know why,” he said. “I didn’t realize I was gay until my last year of high school, and it took me even longer to begin accepting that part of myself.”
Zhan’s self-discovery began in college in Changsha, the capital of central China’s Hunan province, but it wasn’t until 2017, when he moved to cosmopolitan Shanghai to work at Johnson & Johnson, that he became more confident in his identity. He says it was “like a new world.”
His self-acceptance led him to become a major catalyst for change in his workplace as Johnson & Johnson’s first openly out employee in China, where he spearheaded successful efforts to bring same-sex partner benefits to more than 13,000 fellow employees. His achievements were no small feat in a country that had only decriminalized homosexuality in 1997 and where only a small portion of LGBTQ+ individuals come out within their communities.
In addition to bringing partner benefits to the company, he campaigned to open a chapter of Open&Out in his office, one of the company’s 12 employee resource groups.
“Coach Wooden’s principles of initiative, intentness and loyalty were guiding me long before I could name them,” said Zhan, who was selected as a 2024 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow once at UCLA, an honor given to a select students who enrich the school’s learning community and who’s values echo Wooden’s pyramid of success.
Zhan’s advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community continued during his full-time MBA program studies; he was co-president of Out@Anderson, a group that provides professional development and career opportunities to the school’s students in the LGBTQ community. Zhan is also a fellow at ROMBA, an organization that hosts the largest gathering of LGBTQ+ business students and alumni in the U.S.
Read more about Zhan’s journey from UCLA Anderson.
