Asking your sexual orientation at work

[wakeupandsmellthecoffee]

Weird question I know but at work today boss was filling out new member of staffs form .
One of the questions was ie white hetrosexual femail
I know I haven't explained this properly .
It's just that I thought this is so wrong as it's no ones business what your preference is .
She said it was data and it was to make sure that they were employing fairly

Being asked about sexual orientation irritates me because I find it so stupid to categorise oneself in this way. I would put prefer not to say just on principle.

The Equality Act Public Sector Duty 2011 places a statutory duty on all public sector (or public related) organisations to perform an analysis of your activities (e.g. policies, procedures etc) to measure their impact on the different sections of your workforce and customers. It's also a consideration in external auditing and tendering processes. I work in the third sector and the equality impact assessment is taken very seriously. The charity I chair also has to provide this data quarterly to our funders.

In NI you can tick 'Protestant background', 'catholic background' or 'I identify with neither background'. If you don't want to identify your sexuality just refuse (if there isn't a tick box for that). I don't really see a problem with letting your employer know though

In thirty-odd years in the public sector I have never filled in these forms in any meaningful way. Under Race I answer Human, which is more or less correct

More or less?!?!

Mmm, I understand the thinking behind it, but find these questions dubious to say the least. In the US they ask people to state their ethnicity which, IMHO, makes people think about these things even more. I'm Irish but according those forms I am white. I'm pretty pale but more inclined to be pink. My daughter and grandchild have a very interesting mix that does not have a category on these forms. I hate the idea that one has to define oneself in these ways. Likewise sexually, I am not really very interested in what people do in the bedroom and certainly don't think that one's workplace is the place to spell these things out.

Sexual orientation, race etc questions are there for recruitment monitoring purposes. The nformation is filled out by the employee not on the employees behalf and is separated from the application by HR. This information is not retained on the employees file. I would have a serious word with boss and HR because it sounds like someone doesn't have a clue.

You do not fill a form out ( unless you have translated that from German).
You fill a form in. Think about it, it does make sense.

I have sat in on HR department on external audits where a company has been criticised for not measuring diversity as you had to prove you weren't discriminatory. So as I love sooty says, it has to be asked but you don't have to answer and it can only be used for measurement not suitability for job.

Password, I think it's a regional usage besides the point anyway, the post isn't about grammatical issues

YANBU. Its intrusive and unnecessary.
Even some of the race questions are idiotic. I have the option of white Scottish or white European. What would someone with say a German father and mother who was half Chinese, had Scottish put? Because obviously white people are not allowed to be mixed race?!

If the question is asked and everyone refuses to answer then

the audit is clear
the intrusion is minimised
there is no information to be misused.

Win, win, win.

Chlesy there is usually a box at the end of all the listed ethnicities called 'other'. My DH is half English half Chinese so technically neither White British or Chinese. In this box he puts Eurasian

Win, win, win

Just as long as you're not a minority of any kind of course, or as long as you're a company who doesn't care about measuring equality impact, or you don't value equality and diversity in the workplace.

Of course people need to have the option of "would rather not say". But do you really want to go back to the days when unless you were white, male, heterosexual C of E and didn't have a disability you were regarded with suspicion?

So, Chelsy would you care to explain why measuring equality impact is "unnecessary"?

Andrew whilst I agree that there's a case for making the first pass of cv triage with all personal information removed, it's incredibly naive to think that you can't discriminate unless you ask people about their sexuality/trans status. Unless it is a 100% outsourced job and you never come into the office, then you will meet people, personal lives will be discussed, and these things will arise.

I correctly assumed that a young man I interviewed recently was gay despite never asking anything about his private life (for the "why were you even thinking about it it's NOYB" brigade, I was wondering why he seemed so guarded in his answers). Fortunately for him I didn't give a monkeys, but if I had had bigoted views the lack of a tick box wouldn't have helped him. And a colleague was recently talking about an interviewee rejected for being "not a good team fit", which was code for camp (yes I know not all gay men are camp and vice versa, but it's still relevant).

there is no information to be misused

What makes you think it is misused? There is also no information to be used for positive purposes in promoting inclusivity and equality either.

I recently filled out a job application that asked for religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity etc.
Also was asked at a job interview this week if I had any children.
I'm not in UK so it's allowed.....eek.

I was once told ( by my child's teacher) that I made a mistake when completing an ethnicity monitoring form. I hadn't,he just hadn't understood that a white person could be ethnically mixed!
I was amazed, and couldn't see a) what business he had reading the form which was sent to the school office, and b) how he thought it was appropriate for him to challenge me.
I do not answer these questions any more, I am very sceptical about the use /application of the information given, and the chances of that information being kept confidential, whether deliberately or otherwise.

LadyIsabella at the moment I deal with cases of inappropriate language or comment in the workplace or in a context which can bring the company into disrepute. I know these impact on our company because people feel confident in disclosing this information and then voicing any concerns they have.

And anyone who thinks the information is misused needs to raise it formally as a data protection or information governance issue.

Op what on earth? How can an employer fill out a diversity form on behalf of an employee? That is utterly bizarre. Firstly the employer may well not know everything about them, possibly on purpose, secondly these forms are for hr not for line managers!

On the other bits, I work for a company that is actively seeking to improve diversity in its management teams. They are doing this as they know diverse management teams are more successful, and they can see their teams are predominantly made up of white men.

As a woman, I have no problem with this. Seems like common sense to me. The people who probably don't like it are some of the white men. For obvious reasons. I agree with others that they are probably the ones dicking around with the forms. Same as a respect in the workplace course I went on. All the non white people and women bidding along from the word go, most of the white blokes looking a bit baffled. Most of them were bidding by the end and the only person who refused to buy in to the idea was, you guessed it, a white bloke.

Sigh.

The member of staff will have been asked to fill in an equal opportunities form when starting employment. These are always optional - you don't have to fill them in at all - and you don't have to fill in any question you don't want to.

Presumably the staff member in question did fill the form in and therefore HR has that statistical information on file.

Nothing illegal or unethical to see here. Move along.

Nodding not bidding. Autocorrect.

The problem is that the questions are themselves becoming discriminatory. e.g. if you only have boxes for mixed race of certain nationalities or white Scottish, Irish, Welsh, English or European, if someone is of other mixed race, to lump them altogether in "Other" is offensive. And not particularly accurate.

You have to question also the efficacy of such monitoring as opposed to it being a badly done tick box exercise. What would be useful would be monitoring different levels of pay between different genders and different ethnic groups.