Disappointed with our new head of DEI

[Ingenieur]

We've just got a new head of DEI at work, and he gave a company-wide presentation regarding his agenda over the next few years.

Among the usual stuff you'd expect, there was no mention of sex as something worthy of discussion (in fact no mention at all of sex). A colleague asked why sex wasn't being addressed at all, only gender, as sex is the principal vector of discrimination, to which the DEI head responded:

Sex is being addressed as we capture this data for everyone as a mandatory HMRC requirement, and are beholden to the Equality Act 2010 under which sex is a protected characteristic. However, sex is a narrow biological category rooted in genitalia and chromosomes. It is less useful as a frame of reference for understanding and discussing human behaviour and experience than gender which, although often (not always) directly influenced by birth assigned sex, refers to the roles, norms, behaviours and relationships associated with masculinity and femininity - which are socially (rather than biologically) constructed. Sharing my response here, but happy to pick the conversation up further offline

I feel like my company, by ignoring sex, is creating a huge blind spot and it's made me a bit sad. They're also applying to become Stonewall diversity champions, which is nice...

Categories are supposed to be narrow. They're supposed to group things or people according to a particular characteristic and exclude all things and people who do not have that characteristic. That is literally the whole point of them.

Yes, it does seem like he's been using ChatGPT!

I thought it was the maternity pay gap, in reality, rather than sex or gender and there's data to back this up? How does that fit with his 'it's not about biology' bollocks.

Just to note that most of the discrimination women face is directly sex-based, not based on wearing dresses or high heels etc. Employers prefer workers who cannot get pregnant, beliefs about women being less suited for leadership positions are based on arguments about innate biological differences and so on. And sexual harassment is almost entirely based on sex-related factors so that the harassers are predominantly male and the harassed predominantly female.

So it's not something about chromosomes and other things too narrow to deserve much attention. And if you look more widely, you will find religions and many cultural traditions directly advocate differential treatment on the basis of sex, to the detriment of women and girls.

Could you set up an anonymous Gmail account to email him from to discuss further?

Well this is timely. (Gender meaning sex here, obviously).

Isn't it depressing to see so many ignorant men people being promoted despite their adherence to flat earthism, misogyny and profound ignorance about sex based oppression?
And I'll bet he's paid handsomely for displaying his inbuilt prejudices against women.

'beholden' was an interesting word to use.

Yes, I did find this to be an odd phrase to use, as though something as prosaic as the law is getting in the way of his good works.

Indeed.

“and are beholden to the Equality Act 2010 under which sex is a protected characteristic. “

A woman might see it as being “protected by” the Equality Act, rather than beholden to it.

You are right, I didn’t word it well. What I was trying to say is that they frequently come from the minorities within a PC that historically have suffered more discrimination e.g. disabled, ethnic minority, LGB etc.

This. Totally different relation to it - it's a shield, not a burden.

It seems to me that what he is saying is that he thinks the Gender" category will pick up sex discrimination issues, while also picking up gender discrimination. So, pregnancy leave would be sex related, but uniform related issues might be gender even for a woman.

'Gender discrimination' is not - legally - a thing. The protected characteristic is 'gender reassignment'.

Dinosaur companies with uniform policies that require women to wear makeup, tights and high heels (or ban them from wearing trousers) are discriminating on sex, not gender.

Well he could hardly have opened the door wider to sex discrimination cases. Head of DEI literally just said he doesn't think sex discrimination is significant.

And that he sees the company as burdened by need to pay attention to things like pay equality. Because he sees protected characteristics based on physical bodies as narrow.

I agree that beholden to the law was an odd usage. It gives the impression that he was gritting his teeth and saying that, unfortunately, they aren't allowed to put transw on an untouchable pedestal, at the expense of women.

Easy for a man to say that sex is less important than some bollocky word salad about nonsense. He’s admited he’s going to disregard a protected characteristic - one that impacts half the population.

This shouldn't be ignored, he's basically admitting he thinks that sex is unimportant, and that he's legally obligated to consider it but he'd rather not. Which shows a complete disregard for everything that women might suffer based on biology, which is nearly everything that we suffer. He is showing that he will be unable to address matters of equality and discrimination for women, which makes women in the company vulnerable.

I would officially complain about him. Imagine if he'd said "we're beholden to protecting race under the Equality Act, but it's a narrow definition based on physical appearance, and it's more useful to treat people as individuals, we're all the same underneath". He'd probably have to resign.

As a person who does not have a gender identity but is a biological female, I'd want to know how he will enact his duty to address equality issues which impact on me. It can't be about gender because I don't have one. of course that doesn't make me any less likely to be paid less or passed over for a job.

Who interviewed him & awarded him the job? Didn't they ask him about this? Or do they not understand it either?

Because men are automatically qualified to do absolutely everything by dint of having a willy.
Like this guy:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4612399-dundee-man-leads-fight-against-period-poverty?page=2&reply=119284732

If he didn’t think this how could he be the head of DEI? He’s saying exactly what I would expect the head of any DEI department to say. Ever person I have ever met in that position or similar (and I have met a few of them) has said exactly the same sort of thing. It’s baked into progressivism.

"Beholden" means owing some kind of debt of gratitude. I think it's likely that he doesn't know this. He could have used "constrained" instead, which would express what he probably meant better, but that would really be giving the game away.

Well, yes, they are.

But it's useful to understand the logic of people thinking like this. It helps a lot to deconstruct their arguments. And, I would had, it helps to avoid supporting ideas that lead to this kind of thinking.

There are plenty of feminist advocates who have described this kind culturally based, of uneven expectation based on sex, as "gender norms". And have said that a huge part of what feminists fight against is these gender norms which do not properly belong to sex as such.

What that suggests, is that if these ideas don't inherently in some sense relate to femaleness, they could be separated from it potentially. In fact some feminist have suggested that the way forward is to see these kinds of things like preferences for femininity or masculinity completely severed from biological sex. So men in dresses will help separate "womaness" from biological sex and therefore it will no longer be sexed based discrimination, if it exists at all.

This guy does seem to acknowledge that there are a few things that might be inherently related to sex, like pregnancy, but he thinks the larger category of gender (as he sees it) would still capture that information, as well as the types of sex stereotypes that don't inherently belong to sex.

There is a kind of fuzzy logic to it, and I think it comes, at least in part, from the way we talk about gender stereotypes as if they are kind of random and erasable, at least potentially.

Some people just aren't very careful about the finer meanings of words. They don't really even pick up on them.

People who think they are cleverer than they are misuse words that they believe make them sound more scholarly.