Tired of bashing your head against the glass ceiling and beating the same old diversity drum? Well, spare a thought for a bunch of Italian women who were reportedly bounced out of their jobs recently when their employer, a small engineering company, had to make a third of its 30-strong workforce redundant.
The firm, according to The Guardian, decided to hold on to its 12 male employees, and make the 13 redundancies from among its 18 female employees, on the grounds that the women could spend more time with their families, and weren’t the main bread winners anyway.
That sort of thing couldn’t happen here, you think?
The most recent statistics indicate that sex discrimination still accounts for the highest number of discrimination claims lodged with employment tribunals. Admittedly there is an incentive for employees to go down this route as awards for successful discrimination claims are uncapped, unlike those for unfair dismissal. But maybe there’s still plenty of inequality in the workplace just waiting to be challenged.
A story we ran recently about Wal-Mart successfully blocking an equal pay/sex discrimination claim class action from a million female employees, got a record number of hits on our website. Maybe it was our sub-head that attracted visitors: ‘Decision will prevent similar class actions against large firms’. Sighs of relief spreading from here way across the Atlantic?
Probably not. The HR community knows it cannot afford to be complacent. A few months back, chairman of commodities firm Glencore (stock market flotation value £36bn) Simon Murray was reported as justifying his reluctance for boardroom quotas, or even hiring young women, on the grounds that, “I know they’re going to get pregnant and … go off for nine months.”
He thought this made women “not so ambitious in business as men because … they like bringing up their children and all sorts of other things”.
Lord Davies, author of the Women on Boards report, called the comments “unforgiveable” and about 30 years out of date. Murray later said he was “100 per cent committed to equal opportunities in the boardroom and across a company’s structure”. Now where have I heard that one before?
There are going to be more equality cases going through the tribunal system for HR people to defend until those holding the corporate purse strings catch up with the direction that the rest of us are heading in.