Is this legal? Barts Health NHS recruiting for a director of Operations who identifies as female

I read that as wanting a transwoman for the job? But they can't surely as the number of people qualified for that job and a transwoman would be tiny....... Confused.

Is this another of those pointless roles on huge salaries which sucks up so much NHS money? Say what you like about the Daily Mail but at least they are willing to bring stuff like this to public attention. How can the NHS be "underfunded " when they can afford massive salaries like this ?

Hopefully the white guy who gets it will identify as a black woman to make their management more diverse.

This shows why language matters. I have no idea if they want a biological female and have worded it badly. Or if they want a male person who says they’re a woman. 🤷‍♀️

A healthcare organisation using "identifies as female" FFS.

IANAL but I think you can explain if you have a certain group underrepresented at that level (ie females) and that you welcome applications from this group. But that's it.

You can specify some jobs are for men and women only eg rape crisis jobs. Same goes for some services specifically for ethnic minority groups. And you can put the two together and have some jobs only for ethnic minority women eg DV services.

You can't say "identify as" because for the sex exemptions to be legal, you have to be that sex.

Doesn't look like any exemptions are justified for this job at all.

It does look dodgy. Generally you can't discriminate against someone on the basis of a protected characteristic (race, sex, gender reassignment, religion etc). However, there are exemptions, so you can specify that someone is a particular race, sex, religion and so on if you are redressing an existing imbalance or there is a particular need (eg female sonographer to perform mammograms). Later on in the ad it says it welcomes applications from Black people to redress an imbalance, which is fine.

Identifies as female, though? That seems illegal to me. And bizarre too. No explanation is given for it.

I wonder if they're so caught up in new-speak that they mean women - and therefore that, for them, would include trans-women.

IANAL but that looks dodgy to me. However, I think the Mail article gets it wrong. They're not discriminating against men - they are excluding women. They're advertising for a male who identifies as a woman. An actual woman could not get this job. That's my interpretation, anyway.

Following with interest. It doesn’t explain why they want someone who identifies as female - unless they mean an actual living, breathing woman? And if men want to apply does that mean they have to specify on their application form that they’re not actually male but identify as female, and then they might get an interview?

It’s bonkers - would definitely be interested in hearing about the legalities of this.