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

Aargh sooty you are now repeating the same line! Are you a machine?

Ilovesooty is scaring me. What have the demographics of people refusing to answer got to do with anything or anyone? It seems like the Stasi to me

I apologise if that's the case. I'm just wondering whether the people who refuse to answer are largely white, male, heterosexual, etc and whether they feel that diversity and equality of opportunity has no relevance to them.

I'm repeating it, FlipFlops because it hasn't been answered. If andrew simply says he doesn't want to answer I won't bother asking again. I think it's a relevant question.

As I understand it as an employer it is could practice to collect this information, but individuals can choose not to answer that is their right. From my forms data is then collated in an anonymous form and then their original form is placed in an individuals personnel file and never looked at again.
Interestingly being a white male in my industry makes you a vulnerable group. Only 10% of my work force are white males.

I'm definitely female but would find questions beyond that intrusive, plus I have an aversion to data collection as it is frequently misused and misunderstood, plus I think if a WHM is the best person for a role then he should get it, no?

I suspect you're right kim

Equality impact assessment simply has no relevance to many of those who don't suffer discrimination - even less so if they lack imagination and empathy as well, as some of them do.

I'd be concerned about the lack of confidentiality displayed by your boss who was filling out the form of a new employee.

I think if a WHM is the best person for a role then he should get it, no?

Who has suggested otherwise?

Viviennemary

I agree that no one should be inputting personal data in view of other people.

Your comment about the demographics of non-answerers and your questions to Andrewofgg suggested to me that a non-answerer would have assumptions made, ilovesooty, which might affect their prospects if you were the arbiter.

Companies are looking to see if they are exercising bias, with people hiding others who they relate to is "look" like them. So if you have white men in charge, they can tend to hire other white men to follow on after them. Stuff like that.

Many companies are interested in increasing diversity for business reasons. Nothing wrong with that.

Kim, yes I do.

Discrimination is not subject to a crude numbers test. Getting the right people also depends on the makeup of the available workforce in an area, the requirements of the job, the educational background required for the role, etc. It is not one size fits all.

Oh ffs will try again on laptop later. This autocorrect is way overzealous

The monitoring form has nothing to do with the interview process. We're not talking about looking at the data of individuals to decide whether or not to interview them. That's not what equality impact is.

Discrimination can easily be subject to a crude numbers test. If you benchmark against similar companies and local population and find yourself very different then you can see something is going on and look into it.

A bit boggled people want monitoring stopped tbh.

Every time I renew my parking permit my council want to know what colour/religion/sexual orientation I am.

why? I live in one of the most diverse areas of the UK.

For me this thread has highlighted again the issue that many people just don't understand why these forms are used. There needs to be a big national push on why this information is useful to society as a whole.

I wouldn't want it stopped and yes of course you can benchmark locally, within reason (it's national 'roll-out' that never works).

The thread was about intrusive questions about sexuality, which probably squick out more people than you might imagine. My industry is diverse and gay-friendly but I know a lot of people who aren't out at work (particularly men) and who would not specify it on a form. I think it's awful that an assumption would be made by those analysing the form that they were heterosexual (and thus less 'diverse'). They might just be private people who don't want to fly flags and who believe ( correctly IMO) that sexuality has no bearing on their ability to do their job.