Eleanor Frances settles civil service tribunal case £116k

[Imnobody4]

Great news,

I am delighted to have reached settlement in my Employment Tribunal case for discrimination and victimisation in connection with Civil Service EDI initiatives.

DCMS and DSIT have agreed to pay £116k, and to make a statement committing to overhaul their HR policies.

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https://x.com/Eleanor_Frances/status/1878164412139184162?t=HnLX7jvAmt915djkVCW89g&s=19

sex-matters.org/posts/updates/civil-service-must-return-to-impartiality-and-protection-for-all/?s=09

Thanks for this article.

Op, fantastic result. Very pleased to read this outcome.

Fantastic news - you are a warrior! Thank you for fighting this and I'm so sorry for all the shit they put you through.
All happiness for the future!

Excellent news! I'm looking forward to the changes trickling through to the private sector.

Amazing news. Well done to Eleanor. Looks likely this will ripple through the CS, too.

Congratulations on a well deserved victory, I'm sorry you had to fight but I am very grateful that you did. 👏🎉

Adding my voice to say Thank You..

Congratulations and well done for sticking to your guns. Again, I'm also upset that you were subject to an officially sanctioned campaign of bullying and harassment and pleased that you have had such an emphatic win.

Are you going to be reinstated?

Brilliant news. Another courageous woman helping to return a toxic civil service to being informed and rational.

DCMS and DSIT have agreed to pay £116k, and to make a statement committing to overhaul their HR policies.

DCMS is Lisa Nandy's department, I think.

Fantastic news, thank you!

Well done, that is fantastic news.

Fabulous news. I’m sorry you had to go through this.

The level of civil service capture is huge. I worked with 2 members of the HoL to get the Home Office to correct its website as it didn’t even mention sex as a protected characteristic, it had gender instead. It took written questions to the Minister to get the site corrected to reflect the EA2010. Recently I got a diversity screening form for another Department for voluntary work that misstated the PSED on this topic so they got it back with handwritten amendments citing the relevant sections of the Act.

This case so important because there needs to be a formal policy that people can point to and say I have rights too.

Thank you very much all for the kind words and to those who have supported the case. I've added an update on my original thread.

For reference, here are links to the write-up in the Telegraph, my update on X/Twitter, and an explainer from Sex Matters.

Thank you Eleanor. This is wonderful news for every single woman and girl in the country!

Amazing! The wins are coming thick and fast. Lots more to do but we can win this. Amazing women like Eleanor are leading the way.

Thank you Eleanor.

I used to be a CS too and found it a very hostile environment for someone with my (perfectly mainstream) views, but lacked the bravery to say or do anything.

Pedantic interlude: In terms of the date of the new policy, my reading is that the Perm Secs' statement said that they expected the new central policy (which will inform departmental policies) by the end of 2024. There is no comma between 'policy' and 'which' in the second sentence: with no comma, it must be the central doc due 'by the end of the year'. I don't think any information is given about when departmental policies will be ready.

This assumes that the statement was actually issued in 2024, which I'm not sure. The SM website says that they have agreed to issue it, which is different. Do we know if it has been issued?

This is fantastic news. The principle of not having to accept another person's beliefs about themselves as being true is so important.

I hope this buys you some time to rebuild your career. Thank you for your sacrifice

Thank you, Eleanor. I was out with a retired civil servant a month or so ago and freedom-of-speech came up. They're out-of-the-loop now, and commented that things are certainly going in the wrong direction, but we won't reach frightening degrees of genuine censorship in our lifetimes. I made a clumsy attempt to explain that we're well past that already, when well-intentioned defences of women's sex-based rights are punished as bigotry at government level. You've done a brave thing that will help us all.

Massive congrats! You've made a huge difference as the accepted norms in the civil service affect pretty much all our lives! I hope there's now a robust system in place to ensure that they mean what they say. It's going to be pretty tricky to root out some of the stuff that's got so entrenched.

'Frances was told that if she objected to showering, changing or using the toilet with a male colleague, she could instead use alternative unisex accessible facilities. The policy also suggested that if staff objected to the presence of a male person in female facilities they could be disciplined for failing to support the gender identity of their colleague.'

Fucksake.

Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said it was “illegal and… revolting in equal measure”.

Jolyon Maugham considers the rights of females to boundaries, safety, privacy and dignity to be revolting.

And he, as has been proven many times by the cases the Good Law Project has lost, doesn't appear to understand the Law and the definition of legal and illegal.

Well done Frances, you were certainly up against it and this is an incredible win for you and us but I am sorry you had to go through that. Good luck and all the best for the future.

This is great news Frances, and thank you for your bravery and determination. This affects so many other women, and is yet another chip in the edifice.

It is, and it could have big implications for a sector that is massively captured.

With this plus Denise Fahmy, hopefully they'll be taking notice.

I hope Defra is taking note. Well done Eleanor!

Thank you Eleanor, as a former CS I know how hard it to take on the establishment, never mind win an important case like this.