Very useful reference!
18 Sept 2024
© Ruth Birchall and Jo Phoenix 2024
This report forms the first in a series of Occasional Papers in the Employment and Justice Series, School of Law, University of Reading.
https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/118472/8/Dont%20Get%20Caught%20Out%20final%20%28002%29.pdf
Executive Summary
This report analyses recent secular gender critical belief discrimination employment tribunal judgments. The key messages of this report are:
There have been many successful outcomes in the Employment Tribunal. Whereas the average percentage for successful belief discrimination claims is around 3%, the percentage for successful ‘secular’ (i.e. non-religious) gender critical is nearly 80%. This is unprecedented.
Taken together the judgments provide evidence that employers are failing to equally protect gender affirmative and gender critical beliefs. They are also failing to understand that a dominant gender affirmative workplace culture can foster an environment where people with gender critical beliefs are unlawfully harassed or discriminated against. This is in direct contrast to the obligation placed on employers to create workplace cultures that tolerate a diversity of beliefs. They demonstrate that in many workplaces across different sectors hostility towards expression of gender critical beliefs has been normalised. This is a workplace culture in which accusations of transphobia and derogatory name calling are tolerated by management and there is a widespread practice of managers taking complaints of transphobia at face value, not investigating them to establish if they are substantive or vexatious. Managers and leaders may express fear or concerns in dealing with a vocal contingent complaining about the expression of gender critical beliefs.
The judgments provide further evidence of how a widespread gender affirmative workplace culture in which gender affirmative staff make their biases and prejudices against gender critical beliefs and belief holders widely known, in which senior leaders express their prejudices against gender critical belief holders and in which employers and service providers fail to stop or address overt and extreme examples of prejudice and intolerance towards gender critical beliefs and belief holders.
These judgments make for damning reading about the failure of employers to protect gender critical staff.