Diversity and Inclusion Survey - advice needed

[Disfordarkchocolate]

edisgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Diversity-and-Inclusion-Survey-DAISY-question-guidance-v1.pdf

This guidance has been used to shape a survey being carried out by an organisation I have worked with and would like to work with again.

Can you help articulate why asking about sex and not gender would be better? There is no plan to record information on most of the other protected characteristics so asking them to work in line with the EA is not an option.

I would have been happy for sex and gender to be separate questions but they are keen to work in line with this document (which has been Stonewalled).

Surely your comment about them not looking at other protected characteristics is the way to approach this? Why are they not focusing on those? How does excluding them put them at risk of failing to meet their obligations? Why would they not want data on them? And since gender has no legal definition why are they asking about it as it can achieve nothing and cannot be used to assess whether they are meeting their obligations.

The draft survey is a UK one, but doesn’t use the same guidance as the England and Wales census. Instead the draft survey gender question links to Stonewall and to an American Human Rights Commission.
The England and Wales survey was good enough for other questions, but gender went another way. Why?

I fed back on an anonymous annual work survey that sex and not gender should be referred to. The issue is some of my colleagues are now using pronouns and bending backwards to pander to the ideology that men can feel their way to womanhood, the rest think it's fine as just see gender and read 'sex'. Interestingly the uptake on the survey was v low, and I probably won't bother with it again.

If they aren't collecting the information, what is the purpose of asking?

@WorkingItOutAsIGo

Surely your comment about them not looking at other protected characteristics is the way to approach this? Why are they not focusing on those? How does excluding them put them at risk of failing to meet their obligations? Why would they not want data on them? And since gender has no legal definition why are they asking about it as it can achieve nothing and cannot be used to assess whether they are meeting their obligations.

I did my best to articulate this but I'm not sure if I did it well enough.

I was quite surprised they didn't plan to collect data in line with the EA, it seemed to be asking for issues in the future.

@LobsterNapkin

If they aren't collecting the information, what is the purpose of asking?

They are looking at public involvement which makes it more surprising they don't want to record in line with the EA.

What OneEpisode said - they referred to the ONS guidance on using the ethnicity categories from the 2011 census, but haven't taken the same approach on sex.

Stonewall doesn't claim to speak for women so that only covers the gender identity side of things and not sex. They need to look at both sides, not just gender identity, as sex is a protected characteristic and they are potentially discriminating against women by not collecting this data (depending on the purpose, etc).

I would point out the legal and cost ramifications that arose for the government when they tried to scrap collecting sex-based data in the 2021 census and got sued by Fair Play for Women.

Also, their explanation:

For D&I monitoring we are usually interested in gender, a socially constructed concept, rather than sex, which relates to biological characteristics. However, sometimes questions are asked around sex because the Equality Act 2010 lists sex as the protected characteristic rather than gender.

Well, that's fucking stupid, isn't it? Their D&I monitoring doesn't cover sex? Their wording implies that the EA2010 is incorrect and is some sort of mere "suggestion" as opposed to being the key piece of equality legislation currently in force. Madness.

They are looking at public involvement which makes it more surprising they don't want to record in line with the EA.

Are they subject to the public sector equality duty? If so, they're exposing themselves to liability by not considering sex as a protected characteristic.

Is this any help from the UK statistics authority.

mobile.twitter.com/SexMattersOrg/status/1442780028295696385

Hmm. That guidance is contradictory and incomplete.

1. They gloss over GDPR and data protection rules, but those are important in ensuring that an organisation is collecting data legally. They have to be able to show they have a need for the data they're asking for. This should be front and centre of any survey creation process.

1. Depending on the organisation in question they may be obliged to collect data on the protected characteristics. First of all, there's the Public Sector Equality Duty which applies to all organisation in the public sector. Then they may also have to collect data on the protected characteristics in order to meet funding requirements or enable funding applications. And last but not least, they have an obligation to ensure that they do not discriminate against staff, volunteers or service users/customers/clients. If they don't collect data on the protected characteristics and they find themselves being accused of unlawful discrimination, any court will want to know what the organisation has done to ensure their compliance with the Equality Act 2010. That's legally binding for all organisations. Not collecting data on the relevant protected characteristics will be viewed in a negative light.

1. They point out that results cannot be usefully compared if data collection is not consistent, but collecting data on gender as a social construct (i.e. on a person's preferences for or dislikes of sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes associated with each sex) rather than sex is a deviation from more than a hundred year's worth of data collection.

1. Furthermore, of course, the question needs to be answered what is the purpose of asking about respondents personal preferences for sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes? I cannot imagine where that would ever matter. Sex matters for various provisions, such as who is likely to need contraception or abortion advice or how support for various issues needs to be targeted to ensure good uptake in the most affected groups.

1. The next problem is that collection data on gender as a social construct and defining men and women as genders presupposes two things - that respondents define the words men and women not as sex designator words but as stand-ins for femininity and masculinity preferences which is unlikely, and that respondents are aware of this concept at all. Neither the feminist analysis of gender as a social construct nor the analysis used by proponents of the doctrine of gender identity are mainstream knowledge. And the validity of either concept is not universally accepted. Asking about sex is straightforward. We all know what it means, even those who claim it's not binary or fixed.

1. Combining a question on self-defined gender with a question on self-identification as trans leads to problems with data collection and analysis. Say you have a male respondent who is a member of the trans community. They can answer the combination question in four different ways, (depending on the exact wording of course).

Are you a man/woman
Are you trans

1. Man = male, so man plus yes to the second question
2. Man = male, so man plus no to the second question (doesn't identify as trans, but as a woman or non-binary)
3. Man = masculine gender, so woman plus yes to the second question
4. Man = masculine gender, so woman plus no to the second question (see 2)

If the first question is are you male or female, you may still get ambiguous answers to the second question, but at least the first one gives usable data.