Job application form

[Feelingoktoday]

Is this legal?

Equal opportunities section. Asks ethnic group then asks for gender and age and then sexual orientation. Should gender be sex?

The supposed gender pay gap will certainly cease being an issue as more men identify as women and apply for the senior jobs.

You're correct that the Equality Act says sex and not gender.

However, I don't think there's any legal obligation for a job application form to collect any of this data, let alone for it to align with the Equality Act. I suppose they could ask you to fill in your hair colour and favourite pizza topping if they felt they had a legitimate business need to do so.

If they want to monitor "gender" instead of sex, or if they are conflating the two terms and don't really know what they mean, that's up to them. Sex discrimination is still illegal, though, and it would therefore be wise for them to collect relevant and clearly-defined data, to help them abide by the law or defend themselves in a tribunal.

By the way, you ain't seen nothing yet... I was browsing jobs online recently, and came across several online application forms which gave a long drop-down of possible genders, I mean literally at least ten, and then another very long drop-down for sexual orientation, including "graysexual". I couldn't press the back arrow quick enough. I sure hope they all have a legitimate business requirement to understand the proportion of graysexuals getting hired, ratio of bisexuals to pansexuals in their senior management team, number of aromantics in Accounts, and so on...

Thank you for replying. I was going to complain as it isn’t a job I’m applying for. But it sounds like I would be wasting my time.

I applied for a job in social services. It was full of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation
I put prefer not to say on them all. Do you have that option?

I applied for a job in a large social research company and on the equality monitoring form (which they stressed they took very seriously) it asked for my 'gender' with just 2 options of either 'male' or 'female'. I felt like writing to them and telling them that, not only had they pissed off anyone with one of the other 100+ genders, they'd also pissed off anyone who was non-binary and had somehow forgotten to ask about my 'sex'. People are tying themselves up in absolute knots and end up satisfying no one. Surely the best compromise is to ask 'what is your sex?' with an option to declare your "gender' if you wish to do so.