Sacked worker sues Environment Agency over ‘feminist agenda’

[oviraptor21]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/487240d8-22f7-11ed-83fa-560ae4fda953?shareToken=3debce21ff73514632c967ae2d85b36e

"Legge, who worked at the quango for 16 years, maintains that feminism is a belief system to which he does not adhere.
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"He has brought a discrimination claim against the agency, in which he alleges that his bosses were biased against him because of his philosophical belief. He has also claimed sex discrimination and unfair dismissal."

Will be interesting to see which way this one goes.

This kind of argument is dangerous, because it is two edged. You could equally argue in many cases that more homogeneity is some area creates a better workforce for a particular job.

FWIW I think you could certainly argue that it is no business of his employer what he thinks about feminism or utilitarianism or any other thing. It just matters if he can do his job and work with the people he is supposed to work with.

But speaking generally, more and more employers seem to think it is ok to try and influence or even police the views, be they philosophical, social, religious, or political, of their employees.

Views are one thing. But if a workplace has a policy in place, and that policy is in line with the law, an employer has every right to ask the employee to follow it. He has no right to decide on who to employ based on his own beliefs. He should do what his manager tells him to do.

IF what his manager told him to do was unlawful - that's a different matter.

Aside from all that, if the manager didn't do a very good job in properly performance managing him out since he refused to follow company policy, then he may well win. Reading between the lines, it looks to me like he raised a grievance about his treatment, and in order to investigate they dug up I formation about his activities on the network. They discovered he had been doing other work on company rime using company equipment - a clear sacking offense.

The sticky part will be - if the investigation into his use of the company network was prompted by his grievance, did the employer find and use that evidence appropriately (I.e. was it in the genuine attempt to investigate his grievance against his boss, which then showed up email records etc of him doing his other job - or were they poking through all his records to try to find whatever they could in order to get rid of him in bad faith).

Either way... they have a right to sack him based on what they found, since policy will state they can look into his use of the network at any time. So his case may rest on whether a fair process was followed during the grievance, or whether it was a pile-on that was mismanaged internally because of this woman's personal problem with the guy and his 'belief' that he doesn't need to follow company policy because it discriminated against men.

Not convinced. The implications to employment policy and law would be profound.

Yes and no? I have noticed that diversity of thought is rarely explicitly encouraged during recruitment. For example, having an org staffed with people with similar outlook and socioeconomic background but different skin tones looks diverse and is not bad in itself, but doesn't necessarily translate into it being a good place to work or where good ideas / policies are made etc.

Interesting case. In my experience of a govt agency with gender targets, some of the practices sailed close to overt sex discrimination e.g. stopping a recruitment round and readvertising as more women were wanted, even when there were suitable male candidates.

We faced huge top-down pressure to meet diversity targets.

He may be an unpleasant person, but may have a case.

Full decision of preliminary hearing here:
www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions/mr-k-legge-v-environment-agency-3314044-slash-2021

Listed for full hearing 24th-28th October.

I assume the feminism bit claim goes nowhere, but there is a valid sex discrimination claim? There’s a not totally unlike case with bhp at the moment amp.smh.com.au/business/companies/sign-of-the-changing-times-bhp-in-court-for-employing-women-over-men-20210616-p581k1.html

I'm careful about this one. It's the civil service. Civil service recruitment procedures are competency driven, and, imv, favour candidates that can manipulate language, rather than candidates who actually have the most experience, knowledge and skills.

I've known of people being promoted with only few years of experience in a field, to then manage a team with people with ten or more years experience, and the whole situation was disastrous. I've also known of someone who was on an official poor performance review, who managed to get promoted to lead a team.

The civil service has a problem in that if you can speak the language of competencies, you can pretty much spin your CV to fit, regardless of your actual abilities, skills or experience. It can lead to very poor candidates being chosen for key roles.

This individual may perceive the EA recruitment process to favour females because of this language aspect.

Interesting case. In my experience of a govt agency with gender targets, some of the practices sailed close to overt sex discrimination e.g. stopping a recruitment round and readvertising as more women were wanted, even when there were suitable male candidates.

I've seen similar in the private sector and tbh it creates a nasty atmosphere. Women who get jobs are assumed to be diversity hires only, teams have massive delays in filling roles because of HR insisting on a certain percentage of female candidates so have to go externally which creates resentment and above all it doesn't address the actual issue of creating a decent pipeline of women getting promoted from junior roles.

But we had a similar discrimination case brought by a disgruntled ex employee and that was dismissed even though he tried every appeal route.

I got my job as a diversity hire. I’m the only black woman in my field in my area and there’s only like 5 in the entire country. My workplace had to do a diversity hire because when they reviewed their hiring practices it turned out that the all-white hiring committees were never shortlisting non-white candidates even though they were qualified and often over-qualified and the white candidates were often not as strong. And you know what? Once I got the job and they went through my cv and saw me in the interview process they were all like “how were you even on the job market? Your resume is so amazing,” etc etc but it took the targeted hire for them to see that and be forced to look beyond their own bubble.

Just another perspective. A friend of mine in academia went to an interview, presented her work, and the all-white committee told her they didn’t know a single person she cited so she must be making them up (she was citing black women researchers.) She didn’t get the job, a year later her book came out and blew up the field and she got hired at a top school much higher ranked than the one that turned her down. So it’s not as simple as saying “targeted hires aren’t fair and we should just go on merit” when the whole point is our merit is so often overlooked, denied, and outright sabotaged.

Absolutely @Misstache I’m a fan of diversity hires
for this reason. They can be done badly of course, but done well they get better people who bring different thinking into an organisation who without that initiative might not have been hired.

This will be interesting. I have worked for the EA for around 20 years. I'm female and in a role that is very male dominated across the industry and across the organisation. I've been through the recruitment process many times as an interviewer and an interviewee.

In my experience, the EA is extremely conscious of diversity representation in all roles across the organisation, of which gender balance and male/female pay gap is one. We have well over 50 support networks for defined diversity characteristics (women's network, Autism support, very active LGBTQ+, Black History Month) and wider (childless by choice; carer's network; living with chronic pain).

As a public body, the EA is very keen for its workforce to reflect the public. Redressing the gender balance has been high on the agenda for the whole time I have been in service; but so has other redressing the recruitment and retention of other groups. To this end there have been a number of positive recruitment initiatives.

All job applications are blind sifted, and all interviewers have to do unconscious bias training - this is also available for all employees at any level. I

One last observation, which I'm slightly surprised The Times slipped up on - we are not civil servants and haven't really been described as a QUANGO for 10+ years, as we are not really that autonomous from Defra anymore - but not part of them enough to be civil servants.

Posted too soon....@HPandTheNeverEndingBedtime has described the competency based recruitment system well. It doesn't suit many people and leads to much frustration!!Despite this, and positive recruitment, I've never come across a situation where a woman has been recruited over a better scoring man.

I'm intrigued by the notion of feminism as a belief system. I wonder if Mr Legge considers conscious representation and support of other groups a belief system?

Wherever the judicial review goes, I am certain that the EA has not deliberately undertaken unlawful recruitment.

What I do know is that the agency takes an extremely dim view of moonlighting in EA time/using EA equipment. It is actually quite hard to get sacked from the organisation, and there are layers of disciplinary procedures to work through before being sacked. The sackings and disciplinaries I know have mostly been around moonlighting ( genuine second jobs and side hustles in your own time, with your own equipment are ok).Private gain from public investment is absolutely not on. I feel that there is probably more to this story than The Times is reporting.

Just some nocturnal ramblings whilst I'm awake in a very noisy hotel! I'm geniunejy curious to see where this goes.

On first reading, but I’m going to hold fire until I see the details.

I am very interested in the details of who was the best man for the job, and on what basis. I can well imagine in an enforcement role, that what one man sees as “authoritative” is perceived by others as patronising, obnoxious and missreading the direction of travel.

… any chance of a Cooper vs Hochhäuser rematch on this.

Thanks @Misstache, great post.

I must work in one of the most female and white professions in the country - I fit right into that. The insulting language of 'diversity hire' is American and makes me concerned that the UK is importing US jargon without ever addressing its own racism or real discrimination. This man may have a case I guess but doing a second job from the office isn't a feminist issue...

He sounds like a complete arsehole.

To clarify my previous post - in our company we have a relatively even split of men and women in bands 1-3, probably slightly more women and many of those South Asian. By band 4 it is about 85% male, partially because it becomes a full time role and many of our Band 3 women have childcare responsibilities.

At Band 5 the HR policy kicks in requiring 2 female interviewees per post. There aren't enough internal women at Band 4 so this becomes an external recruitment. If an external female candidate is then successful she is seen as a "diversity hire" and is usually demographically different to our workforce (white, usually private school, usually Southerner)

These women have been successful at their jobs but in our company there is a stark contrast at Band 5 between the men who mostly come up through the ranks (and predominantly come from working class backgrounds) and the women who come in at Band 5 and are all very polished and corporate. The equivalent external hiring of men doesn't really happen until about Band 7.

A Band 4 man looking at those women are not going to think they're taking away opportunties from Band 4 women, but from him personally. It creates resentment, and crucially it doesn't address the problem of getting band 3 women promoted because HR are finding easier ways to tick their "gender" box that doesn't require them changing the job to appeal to women.

Hahaha! And you think all those men over the years that were appointed and promoted in preference to women were all better at the job. Okaaayy.

It’s really, really hard to get sacked from the Environment Agency. It will be interesting to see what comes out in the case.

the all-white committee told her they didn’t know a single person she cited so she must be making them up

Thank god she didn’t get the job. They didn’t even bother to check their facts before insulting her. Imagine working with such lazy, incompetent people. She dodged a bullet there!

That’s what we all said! Thank god she didn’t have to rely on them for tenure.

Some men in particular I’ve noticed get very jealous of forward thinking accomplished brilliant women and can’t stand when women know things they don’t and will do anything to sabotage and undermine so they can pretend it wasn’t worth knowing in the first place.

That doesn't seem to follow from the post? She's clearly said they didn't have many female internal applicants. That's a really common dynamic in many organizations.

The trade off her company has made in terms of having more women is internal hiring, and fewer working class people moving up. Which maybe is worth it though in any organization I've ever worked in hiring outside when internal people could do the job tends to be bad for morale.

No, but it's better to aim for long-term improvements rather than quick fixes or arbitrary quotas. That's not always easy, I realise, and companies are tempted to be lazy and go for the easiest option so they can look good without putting in much effort.

As an example, MoltenLasagne describes the situation in their organisation and it demonstrates how there can be so many variables that interplay with one another - differences in socioeconomic backgrounds and the potential clashes this can bring, women's caring responsibilities that limit how much they can take on at work, internally qualified men feeling resentful of externally hired women, lack of effort in providing opportunities for internally qualified women to rise up the ranks, or even an unwillingness on the part of the company to reassess the job roles etc etc.

Did the October hearing take place or has it been postponed?