Matthew Furlong - Cheshire police

[MrsMaudwatts]

Anyone seen this? Couldn't see a thread.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/white-heterosexual-male-police-recruit-matthew-furlong-discrimination-employment-tribunal-a8794521.html%3famp

The Independent story is from February and incorrectly uses 'gender' as the protected characteristic instead of sex. However this story was back in the news a couple of days ago as the man finally got a job with Cheshire Police, after the Employment Tribunal had ruled that the 'positive action' taken by the police to recruit minorities had discriminated against him as he was a white, male heterosexual: www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-manchester-48460555

Arse! I found a DM link so was looking for a different one and linked the wrong one.

I can't decide what I think. It still snacks of white male privilege to me....

A force spokesman said a revised recruitment process now only applies positive action where there is a tie-breaker situation and two candidates are of equal merit

In that situation it should be decided on the toss of a coin.

I can't decide what I think. It still snacks of white male privilege to me....

It isn't. Unless there is a specific equalities act exemption justifying candidates of a specific sex or ethnic origin not employing someone just because they are a straight, white man is discrimination.

Not the original discrimination, but the relative ease with which it was resolved. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with other examples, but minorities are discriminated against all the time. It rare to hear of those situations being resolved successfully, and so quickly.

Discretion is obviously not right, but white privilege seems to exist even here.

Discrimination

Lass - it is legal when choosing between two equally well qualified candidates to select one from an underrepresented group (link).

The issue here is that the employer was setting an artificially low "pass mark" so that many candidates appeared to be equally well qualified. This is legitimate up to a point, eg. if a job requires GCSE-level maths, then it's reasonable to consider someone with a GCSE as being just as qualified as someone with an A-level if the extra knowledge isn't relevant to the role.

MrsM - one reason this was speedily resolved is that the employer had an officially documented policy which turned out to be unlawful.

To be fair the ‘discrimination’ in police recruitment is never in favour of white males. It’s not the first time this has happened and It was only a matter of time before this happen again.

Lass- it is legal when choosing between two equally well qualified candidates to select one from an underrepresented group (link)

I still don't think it is fair