Work consultation on gender for Diversity Strategy

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I have a work thing later today on gender. I'm being deliberately vague here in my language just in case. I'm going to have to be careful what I say. Any tips or suggestions? This is to inform development of HR strategy.

You could start by (innocently) asking how many genders there are; that ought to break the ice.

Play a bit dumb. Ask what 'gender' is — could they define what they mean because you've found when speaking to friends and family about this subject that most people are confused and some think sex is gender and obviously it isn't because sex is science and marked by chromosomes and gender is, well, what?

Ask how they define man and woman. Ask how many transwomen still have penises, because you heard that 80%-90% do and surely that can't be true, how can they claim to be women when they have penises?
Raise the issue of sports, because I don't think anyone truly believes that the sports issue is okay.

Use phrases such as 'What I don't really understand is...' 'Have lesbians been consulted about this because they're a minority too, aren't they, and we need to be aware of their thoughts and needs?'

The more you ask awkward questions and make the trainer talk about things and flounder, the better.

Adopt faux naivety. Play dumb and get them to explain in one of one syllable. Occasionally throw in "what's the legal position? Are we making ourselves vulnerable to future lawsuits?"

Sorry, I hadn't quite read to the end of your post: I see this isn't training.

I still think the best way to go is to ask innocent questions, as if you've been giving this some thought and ended up more confused than you were when you started. And do remind them of the other classes — disabled and lesbians and BAME people — whose needs must be balanced. If you have BAME employees who can't for religious reasons share loos/ showers/ cloakrooms with men then raise that.

This is really tricky. It's coming to my place soon and I work in an office with HR, so not sure how to approach this either.

I've found that one HR advisor hadn't a clue about gender and self identity before a staff member requested a change in their personal pronouns in an email signature (she googled 'cis' while I was there and inevitably got the TRA definition). She spoke about about "being kind" in relation to pronouns and about staff members respecting this. What struck me is how uninformed and naive HR seemed regarding this - not just one member of the team.

HR also misquote the EA2010 in all documents and put gender instead of sex. I need to tackle this, but will out myself in the process.

Hoping to get some tips.

Johnny asked lots of 'innocent' questions in the infamous Mermaids Jelly Baby training to teachers.
It really flumoxed Jan the trainer.

Asking basic questions does seem to expose the farce and danger of the ideology.

Thanks for these. I'm going to go for faux naive, but I'll have to make sure I don't blow my cover. I can get a bit vociferous. Probably easier to bite my tongue on a dial in meeting.

I hope they care as much about racial diversity

Act dumb as everyone else says and ask what the law states re to ensure diversity - What are the characteristics that you need to be diverse for etc emphasise your need/ desire to ensure conformity to the law. Being ‘kind’ is not required by law.

9 characteristics - including sex and gender reassignment.

For note - Single sex exemptions enable the exclusion of any male - inc with a GRC from female single sex spaces.

Good luck!

Don't do what I did recently in a Zoom call.

In a knee jerk, fast fix response to BLM, work (rightly) decided we needed a diversity strategy but began to just suggest names of employees (with no experience) who could support and started a really haphazard and clumsy attempt at creating a group, without even consulting the nominated members.

I suggested we needed a nuanced, well planned strategy and that it might be best to get the professionals in.

Cue wider debate on 'inclusivity' in which trans and gender was then mentioned a few times (I bit my tongue throughout) and an agreement that it might be best to get a professional organisation in.

I'm now waiting to be Stonewalled thanks to my suggestion.

In the faux naive questions, ask them how far they are going with the diversity. Partial diversity is not diversity.
It's LGBT+ these days. Discuss what's included in the '+' and are the company happy to be associated with that?

Use the protected characteristics of the equality act and suggest that nothing done for one group should unwittingly undermine or remove rights of any other groups.

Just keep referring to the Equalities Act, which specifies sex, not gender, and gender reassignment, not gender identity or 'identification."

And yes, the treatment of disability in most workplaces is shocking. Raise that!

I have a work thing later today on gender.
If you can, the classic thing to do is nobble persuade people before the meeting. Any chance of this?

"I can't tell you how pleased I am that we're looking at diversity. The support for our disabled staff is woeful and I don't think our inclusion for BAME and religious groups is too hot either. Great we will ensure everyone's needs will be considered"

No idea who else will join the session. There is work going on for race and disability as well. This employer will genuinely work hard to be inclusive, to be fair. I'm just concerned they might be misguided.

I’ve just googled Workplace Diversity Training. Results show most training providers cover the Equalities Act but also misrepresent it by listing the protected characteristic as gender not sex.

If the protected characteristics are misrepresented you must raise it in a measured way. Hopefully this could lead on to a conversation about why single sex (not gender) spaces have exemptions.

My biggest successes have been in pointing out that a sex discrimination claim could potentially arise. Also agree with raising the impact on BAME, disabled and sex protections.

A mixture of faux naivety and questioning facts may help.

Gender diversity?
If your company has any dress codes which enforce differences for men and women they could start by binning them. What gender stereotypes are in force which limit or discriminate against people who are not gender conforming?

There's quite a lot of process/HR stuff that can be done on gender as well. Do you do name-blind job applications? Does someone assess the language in job adverts for gendered language? What's your gender (sex) pay gap like? Is it somewhere women-only shortlists would be a good idea (sidestep 'what is a woman' for now)? Have you had unconscious bias training? What could your workplace do to counteract stereotype threat and imposter syndrome?

These are all valid questions to ask if your workplace is serious about gender diversity and might be useful to steer the conversation away from mixed-sex toilets and pronouns in email signatures. They also have the advantage of requiring serious thought and actual work to implement, which can get people to see that 'addressing a lack of gender diversity' isn't the quick win they might have hoped.