School Equalities policy: "gender" instead of "sex"

[Hazeldine]

I have been reading the Equalities policy of my daughter's primary school and this is how they represent the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010:

"The Single Equality Act combines the existing three duties into one new Equality Duty that covers all seven of the equality strands: age, disability, gender, gender-identity, race, religion or belief and sexual orientation."

These seven are repeated multiple times; sex (the actual protected characteristic under the EA 2010) is not mentioned at all.

Any recommendations about how to raise this with them? Has anyone done similar?

I also think that whilst users of MN seem incredibly clear that gender and sex are very different things - i have met very few people that dont use the words interchangeabley
^^ This.
You are unlikely to find either a member of staff or a governor who either knows or cares that there is a difference. OP you will probably be the only parent who has read the school policies, let alone disputes the wording. I'm not disagreeing with you (I was that parent 20 years ago though not on the same subject). Just that you should know how unusual it is.

I am a parent governor so will check when our equality one next comes up for review in case we need to change ours.

My DS's school has 'sex (gender)' when listing the characteristics, then only 'gender' throughout.

I've used one of the templates listed above and have emailed them this afternoon. Let's wait and see!

Thanks for the info re 2006 Equality Act. This was about creating an overarching Equality Commission and Act I had assumed that because it meant incorporating the Sex Descrimination Act they would use the correct terminology.

We can only be grateful to whoever spotted this linguistic error and corrected it in the 2010 update to the Act.

Can you imagaine if we were having to rely on a 2010 Act that actually still said Gender instead of Sex.

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Just on an historical note the gradual misuse of the word gender was part of the gradual infiltration of the queer takeover in universities that were part of the back lash against Women's Liberation. They managed to stop women's studies and made it gender studies. Students from the period then went on to have jobs in places of influence and gradually the long term project of erasing women as a biological reality began. (As much to dismantle the radical feminist analysis of feminism that it is men as a sex class that oppress women as a sex class. If there is no sex then how can men be opressors!) So for instance the NUJ promoted that in writing stories you would refer to someone's gender when it should have said sex. If you look at older newspapers you can see this was the normal practice. Another example is to stop using the word prostitute and instead talk about sex workers. And much more. So what we are doing now is trying to turn back the tide of over 30 years of a particular strand of politics eating away at women's rights.

There have been a few threads about queer politics but a recent one was www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4003841-The-enduring-roots-of-queer-theory-the-post-modern-origins-of-the-politics-of-sexual-transgression which has links to articles / videos.

Is it just schools this applies to? I work for a very large public sector body and have just filled out the annual workforce survey where it asked for my gender identity and if I was Trans as well as the usual disabled and religion etc. No mention of sex whatsoever. I'm not sure how to respond or if I should try to point this out to anyone?

I dont the legal position but "good practice" is that you dont ask for personal information that is not relevant.

So for instance why do they need to know? As some companies (not sure about public sector body) are asked to show whether men and women (under the protected characteristic sex) are equally employed they should be collecting it.

So do they care about equal opportunities for women?

You could raise this as someone concerned that they would want to be sure of meeting public sector standards.

This is about Public Sector Duty from the ACAS archive but it does refer to the EA 2010 which is still in place archive.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=5990

@JKRsHandmaiden

Is it just schools this applies to? I work for a very large public sector body and have just filled out the annual workforce survey where it asked for my gender identity and if I was Trans as well as the usual disabled and religion etc. No mention of sex whatsoever. I'm not sure how to respond or if I should try to point this out to anyone?

I’d be interested to know if there was an option for “none” or “other” where you could put none or N/A and I would ask why they aren’t collating information on sex as they’d need to know for various reasons

Thanks. I put prefer not to say for both and kept waiting for the question on sex but it never came.

I was also struck by the language, the question was literally

'Are you Trans?
Yes, no, prefer not to say'

Not even the full word Transgender. Is that what has happened to language now?

@JKRsHandmaiden

Thanks. I put prefer not to say for both and kept waiting for the question on sex but it never came.

I was also struck by the language, the question was literally

'Are you Trans?
Yes, no, prefer not to say'

Not even the full word Transgender. Is that what has happened to language now?

If your parents are American and English, you could be Transatlantic. Perhaps that is what they meant?

Probably that. My DS is very into Transformers. Maybe they're checking whether I identify as Optimus Prime?