A Different Approach to Diversity Monitoring is Needed

The Daily Mail carried an interesting article yesterday , February 9th, headed Fury as firms asked: Are your staff LGBTs?

I don't often agree with the Daily Mail, but on this occasion I do think that the London Development Agency is wrong to be asking businesses applying for a slice of their £400 million pot of government funding questions like "Is your organisation mostly owned or led by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) people?" and "What is the percentage of LGBT staff in your workforce?".

These are all part of a diversity monitoring form which government departments are obsessed with trying to get completed regarding all six diversity strands (race, faith, age, gender, disability and sexual orientation). The problem is that when it come to sexual orientation and gender identity, that is personal and more often than not confidential information.

In fact disclosing this information regarding trans people could easily lead to acompany being in breach of section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act. Past gender information must be sealed and only accessed by authorised people. If a trans person's identity is disclosed, it can lead to a fine of up to £5000 but, more importantly, cause untold personal distress. If a company discloses on its monitoring form that there are one or two trans employees, the chances of them being identified, or people being suspected of being trans being harassed are high.

Instead of this kind of monitoring there is a much more important monitoring process public sector organisation should be addressing.

Any organisation delivering service to or on behalf of any public sector body is required to comply with a General Equality Duty. This means they are obligated to take positive action to prevent discrimination and harassment on the grounds of race, disability and gender including gender reassignment. These equality duties are not being enforced by public sector government procurement departments.

You can find more information about the Gender Equality Duty here - detail of the race and disability duties are on the same site.

By asking any organisation applying for as bid what procedures they have in place to ensure that discrimination is identified and prevented, agencies would be achieving a much better objective. Rather than simply monitoring equality, they would be monitoring anti discrimination action and also preventing any company that does not take action to prevent discrimination from accessing government contracts.

Challenging Prejudice - Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise

I have not had much chance to blog over the past month and there was a very good reason - I have been very actively involved in a life changing training programme for two weeks and in putting together business plans to deliver diversity training based on that training.

The training in question is based on the Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise conducted by Jane Elliott who has been in Hull for the past two weeks to deliver seminars and support Gillian Neish who organises the trainer training here in the UK. The programme was brought to Hull by the City Council as part of the 2007 Wilberforce Commemoration - William Wilberforce, a Hull MP, was responsible for the abolition of Slave Trade act in 1807 so we have a huge citywide campaign on this year.

Jane Elliott started her exercise as a class project in 1968 after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. as a way to help her 3rd grade students understand what it feels like to be discriminated against. Despite that long history of this training, I had never come into contact with it and was stunned by the impact of going though the exercise even though I have now had six years experiencing discrimination as a trans woman - I shall now be using this material to help other people to challenge prejudice and create a fairer society.

I will be blogging more about this training and the work I will be doing with it in the future, but in case you have never come across the exercise, in 1970 a documentary was produced of Jane doing the exercise with her 3rd Grade students - 14 years later a class reunion was filmed which included highlights from the original documentary and showing that this exercise had had a permanent impact on the students which was also the subject of a book called A Class Divided UK - A Class Divided US

A Class Divided - Part 1



A Class Divided - Part 2



A Class Divided - Part 3



A Class Divided - Part 4




A Class Divided - Part 5



Rikki Arundel
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