In today’s weekly digest of equality and diversity news – EHRC says employers should be more carer friendly to retain staff, survey shows that employers are not prepared for implementation of shared parental leave, Google has published its first diversity report and British Social Attitudes survey indicates an increase in racial prejudice.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is intervening in a case arguing that employers should make adjustments to support carers. Dr Hainsworth worked for the Ministry of Defence and was stationed in Germany. Her request for a transfer to the UK to enable her disabled daughter’s special educational needs to be met was turned down. Her claim of unlawful disability discrimination was previously rejected by the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeals Tribunal. The Commission will ask the court to consider whether EU legislation obliges an employer to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for staff caring for disabled people and, if so, whether EU directives can be read into the Equality Act 2010.
According to law firm Hogan Lovells, only 15% of employers have made clear plans for the implementation of the shared parental leave which comes into effect from April 2015. Under the new rules parents will be able to share statutory maternity leave and pay for up to 12 months. Once mothers elect to share their leave, parents will have the right to ask for either a single continuous block of shared leave, or request a series of “on-off” leave periods. Ed Bowyer, an employment partner at Hogan Lovells, said, “A key concern from the outset is around how resource can be managed if people take time off in less predictable chunks.”
Google has published its first diversity report which reveals that only 30% of its workforce are women and in the US, black people make up only 2% of its workforce. When narrowed by job type and seniority, Google’s gender split is more extreme, with only 21% of leadership positions held by women and only 17% of technology-specific jobs held by women. This trend appears in the wider technology industry. Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, said in a blog post: “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.”
And finally, as we highlighted in a blog post yesterday, in its British Social Attitudes Survey 2013, when NatCen asked people if they’d describe themselves as “very or a little prejudiced against people of other races”, 30% of them said they would. This is an increase from 26% in 2012 but a decline from 36% in 1987.
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