Stop conflating sex and gender, NHS told by watchdog

[IwantToRetire]

NHS England was accused of conflating the two terms in its staff survey, which asked about “gender discrimination” and whether a person’s gender had an impact on career progression, rather than their sex.

The complaint by the Sex Equality and Equity Network for NHS employees (SEEN in Health) said it had been “inundated with concerns from employees” about the data being collected from the health service’s 1.5 million staff.

Some staff are understood to have boycotted the data collection because of concerns about its accuracy.

The tangling of sex and gender throughout means “analysts will be unable to determine progress made to reduce sexual harassment towards women”, SEEN in Health said.

The UK Government defines sex as “referring to the biological aspects of an individual” while gender is “where an individual may see themselves as a man, a woman, as having no gender, or as having a nonbinary gender”.

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the stats watchdog, has agreed that the NHS must improve the clarity in its survey for 2025, in a letter seen by The Telegraph.

Ed Humpherson, the director general for regulation at the OSR, wrote: “We consider that NHS England should look to provide clearer guidance and definitions to both survey respondents and data users in future surveys.”

In one question, NHS staff were asked: “Does your organisation act fairly with regard to career progression/promotion, regardless of ethnic background, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or age?”
But it failed to list all protected characteristics under the Equality Act, which includes sex or gender reassignment, despite “previous staff surveys indicating high rates of sexual harassment of women”, SEEN in Health said.

The network also said it failed to “ask the respondent if they have experienced sex discrimination, despite the NHS introducing the Sexual Safety in Healthcare charter [last] year”.

“As with the previous question ‘gender’ has no legal basis and the NHS cannot assume that all respondents will understand that gender, in this instance, presumably refers to sex,” it said.

Extract from a longer article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/28/stop-conflating-sex-and-gender-nhs-told-by-watchdog/

Can also be read at https://archive.is/rI4JA

God, people are so bloody tired of this shit.

Hopefully people might start collecting workplace data properly, without the sexism.

Although the article is interesting, positive even, I wonder when we will read that this recommendation has been implemented.

But well done to SEEN in Health.

Well done SEEN in NHS. All excellent points

Good to see. I mean awful that this is needed but good to see the pushback.

This is a small piece of good news. The dropping of plans to improve women's health, on the other hand, are disappointing, if perhaps not surprising.
www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/30/nhs-england-told-to-scrap-improvement-pledges-and-prioritise-cutting-waiting-times

Hmmm. Is it unreasonable to say that that looks like sticking-plasters solutions, again, rather than long-term thinking? But I do get that in the real world, deciding on long-term solutions is difficult.