Help me with message to HR

[Yoursmineandours]

The company I work for is about to launch a DEI activity designed to capture data that will enable them to gain quantitative insights into the company’s DEI landscape. I have no issue with any of this, nor do I have any concerns about how the data will be collected, handled, stored etc.

However, they seemingly intend to ask questions regarding Gender, and regarding Gender Identity, but not Sex. The survey has not yet launched so I have an opportunity to challenge, but I am struggling with articulating one particular point. Can you help finish this sentence?

………….

Excluding “sex” as an option, but allowing for “gender” as well as “gender identity and expression” risks excluding those people who don’t …. Believe in gender? Care for gender stereotypes?

…………

Any wordage gratefully received.

If gender critical people put n/a or none for gender identity, they are going to get bad data

Not really sure "data" is the word I would use.

And what would you propose as a solution ? Require people to answer under threat of prison ?

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/women/sr/statements/20240404-Statement-sr-vawg-cedaw-convention.pdf. worth reading to see if there is anything there that you can use - perhaps it would be possible to ask that a definition of woman / man and male / female be included at the start of the questionnaire and at least one question should permit the respondent to include their sex - if they wish to.

Yes, the tone of emails can be misconstrued. I much prefer a call where we could discuss your concerns and I could allay them than receiving an email that probably tells me stuff I already know and assumes I'm being PC for the sake of being PC.

Why?

@Propertylover thanks.

OP my company have just indicated that they excluded me from pay gap information because I had stated that I don't have a gender identity (because I don't subscribe to gender ideology) - the HR policy replaced Sex with Gender, and the diversity data collection is only for Gender so I don't have the option to note Sex = female. As others have already pointed out on this thread, the company can do this as the Gov guidance states "if an employee does not self-identify as either gender, you can exclude them from your calculations."
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gender-pay-gap-reporting-guidance-for-employers/preparing-your-data

Obvs I'm pissed off at being excluded purely because I refuse to identify into something I don't identify into.

Does make a mockery over the integrety of the stats - presumably all companies who do have a pay gap can just exclude a large proportion of their workforce if they all choose to conveniently self-ID out of it.

I'm unclear as to how this fits with Diversity and Inclusion - surely excluding people on the basis of their beliefs (no gender identity) is discrimination?

Anyway, perhaps you could raise it as part of your query, enquiring as to how they intend to account in official data and statistics for those whose belief system does not align with the boxes they put forward, without discriminating against those people for holding "company non-approved" beliefs.

@ATowerOfGiraffes Just a thought do they use EDI data or payroll data?

In my experience payroll data includes a sex (gender) data field which is completed as part of recruitment onboarding from birth cert/passport. It is very rare to change this e.g. an employee having an GRC. Normally it is 99%+ completion rate.

EDI data is usually a separate section in the HR module of the system rather than payroll. EDI data is usually patchy and the completion rate is variable.

When extracting data for Gender Pay Gap it’s primarily payroll data and you would use the sex(gender) payroll data field rather than EDI.

If you want to check you could either ask the person who extracts the raw data or do a limited SAR request for any data held in both payroll and EDI data fields.

HTH

Thanks @Propertylover . I'm waiting for them to get back to me at the moment - they originally said it was EDI data and that I was deffo excluded but they could make a note that I wanted to be included moving forwards 🙄But they are kindly double checking their data sources for me.

@ATowerOfGiraffes you could also try two other arguments. The guidance uses male and female only as it’s a binary measure. It’s very likely the payroll data is M or F, and the DEI info is the rainbow.

Secondly send them the link I have posted above and ask them why they are not using best practice data collection methodology.

@ATowerOfGiraffes I hope it’s ok to ask, but I’m curious how you came to find out this from your employer?

@Skyellaskerry , they just recently published their pay gap report so I emailed to ask how they'd processed me, given my response was None to gender ID, and they said they had used the self-completed data collection (we have an internal system that we can access to confirm our diversity info) and that mine was therefore excluded, although subsequently said they would double-check, as I'd pointed out it seemed wrong to exclude me just because I didn't subscribe to gender ideology. I'm awaiting the next response from them.

@Propertylover I've tried in the past, asking if they would collect Sex as well as Gender if they wished to do so, citing equality act etc. They shut me down, saying they believed their use of gender was perfectly fine.

@ATowerOfGiraffes I know it’s difficult.

The guidance is new and is from the Office for statistics regulation. So it carries a lot of weight.

I would take the line of - have you seen this new guidance from OSR it explains how to ensure data collection is of a high quality so you can analyse and draw high quality conclusions.

Thanks @Propertylover
If only the Government guidance on pay gap data was as clear.

I do feel like their statement of "if an employee does not self-identify as either gender, you can exclude them from your calculations." just confirms that it's totally fine to base pay gap on gender and people can be excluded. Which, for a system which is supposed to allow for robust and clear national comparisons between companies, seems crazy to me. I mean, in what other data comparison can you allow participants to self-select categories, and for any data points to happily be excluded?!

@ATowerOfGiraffes I agree about the current guidance which is very much not what was originally intended when the regulations were introduced.

The original intention was as written I.e. all female employees vs all male employees.

I notice the use of “….either gender”, and wonder if this another case of using gender instead of sex, ie what about all the other genders that people ID with, for which the wording would not be “either”

Admittedly I haven’t read the full text but those words stood out to me.