IT accessibility-gap for disabled widens, says British Computer Society

Britain's eight million+ disabled sector is being left behind by the quickening pace of technological development. According to the British Computer Society, mobile phones, i-pods, microwave cookers and websites are singled out as seriously failing the disabled user, especially the visually impaired.

Chris Mairs, a spokesperson for the British Computer Society's disability specialist group said that the UK's ageing population will mean a significant proportion of people will eventually be classified as disabled, particularly with some degree of visual impairment.

The sector represents an annual spend of £50 billion, a figure growing annually by over ten percent and a failure to cater for this market represents a major oversight by British business.

"Whilst modern technology has bought great benefits to many visually disabled people, giving them control over their lives and access to things they might otherwise be denied, advances also threaten to alienate them by making some equipment too complex to be of use," said Chris Mairs.

"Voice technology has really opened up the world to the visually impaired. We have talking newspapers, easy access to online music with speech synthesized catalogues, email reading and writing and a speech interface with GPS. On the other hand, other inventions which are heavy on technology have disenfranchised the disabled. For example, microwave cookers, mobile phones, iPods and most web sites are all particularly difficult to use if you have a visual impairment."

Free disability discrimination assessment offered to SMEs

A free service launched for small- and medium-sized businesses to asses whether they are meeting their legal obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).

The online service, Access Assessment, has been created in partnership with the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation (RADAR) to help companies conform with the DDA, which requires that they make their products and services accessible to customers with disabilities; or that they at least have plans in place to do so, with proposed timelines and budgets.

Companies who use the assessment can use the results to identify areas of their business which need to be amended in order to comply, along with potential costs and timelines. The Action Plan also includes advice on making changes which improve access to good and services but which cost nothing to implement.

1 in 5 women underpaid

Almost one in five of the country’s biggest employers are breaking the law by paying women significantly lower wages than their male colleagues, according to the Equal Opportunities Commission.

A study by the commission of 870 employers, all of whom have carried out equal pay reviews, found that 16% of them are unlawfully paying females less than men to do the same or equivalent jobs.

The EOC’s report into the research states that the true proportion is likely to be much higher, as these organisations were among the more enlightened that have voluntarily carried out pay reviews.

As well as showing that 16% of women were paid less as a result fo their gender, the survey also revealed that women are routinely missing out on senior jobs, starting on lower salaries and taking longer to get promoted, largely because they are more likely to take career breaks to have children.

These new figures come as the government prepares to announce the full findings of its Women and Work Commission, which was charged by the prime minister with making recommendations on narrowing the gender pay gap. Tony Blair is expected to launch the report next month, however it remains to be seen whether the experts, who have taken 18 months to develop a plan to tackle unfair pay for women, will recommend compulsory pay reviews, as requested by many campaigners.

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Conservatives to make politics more representative

A meeting of the Conservative party’s Ethnic Diversity Council took place yesterday to discuss promoting equality and diversity within the party.

The council's chairman, Mohamed Iltaf Sheikh said party leader David Cameron was pushing for a greater number of women and ethnic minority candidates for the next election.

"Not only did we as a Party field the biggest number of ethnic minority candidates at the last General Election but we are now determined to get the biggest number elected next time."

He added: "I am very pleased that the party chairman [Francis Maude] has promised future meetings with, and support for, this rising number of Conservative candidates from black and ethnic minority communities."

The Ethnic Diversity Council was launched at the Conservative party conference in Blackpool in October.

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National diversity recruitment event

A national recruitment event focusing on diversity is taking place on 8-9 March 2006 at the Novotel, Hammersmith, London. Oragnised by the Centre for Economic & Social Inclusion, in partnership with Talent Recruitment, the event the Centre for Economic & Social Inclusion, in partnership with Talent Recruitment.

Speakers from over 25 organisations at the forefront of the diversity agenda will highlight examples of commercial best practice and what drives their diversity agenda. They will be joined by a series of experts from Government, policy, research and legal sectors who will host interactive workshops focusing on the many considerations currently facing organisations.

The second day of the event offers a choice of ‘Diversity in Action’ study visits, which will give delegates the opportunity to see how diversity in recruitment is being tackled. The choice of action-packed days out will bring to life the challenges, projects and opportunities that exist in the dynamic labour market of London today.

Speakers from companies already signed up to take part include Barkers, B&Q, BskyB, BT, Transport for London, Ford, Herbert Smith LLP, ITV, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Independent, UBS and Yorkshire Water. Also present at the event will be organisations in the field of diversity including the Commission for Racial Equality, Jobcentre Plus, Stonewall and the University of London.

More information on booking tickets, exhibiting or sponsorship opportunities
Contact Inclusion’s Events Team on 020 7582 72

McJobs that all the family can share

McDonald's is pioneering a scheme that allows employees to share their job with family members.
The Family Contract allows husbands, wives, grandparents and children over 16 to job-share and swap shifts without notifying management.

Under the contract, which is the first of its kind in Britain, each worker clocks on and is paid separately through his or her own bank account. It is being tried in six cities around Britain. Co-habiting partners and same-sex partners can apply and, if it proves successful, McDonald's said it would expand it to include friends and extended family such as cousins.

David Fairhurst, the head of McDonald's UK human resources operation, said: "A lot of our staff wanted more flexibility.

"Many are youngsters at college who have very different term hours and holiday hours. Many older staff have children, with all the demands that entails; many look after relatives. So we decided to offer them the flexibility in a family context."

McDonald's, which has 67,000 staff in 1,250 British restaurants, said flexible working reduced the number of sick days. It said the scheme was supported by the Department of Trade and Industry.
The first family to sign up for a Family Contract were Rita Cross, 42, and her two daughters Laura, 18, and Natalie, 16, in Cardiff.

Laura said the main advantage of the arrangement was its flexibility. "We get up in the morning and decide which of us really wants to go to work," she said.

Mrs Cross said it helped the whole family. "We get a better work and life balance," she said. "I'd love my husband to join up too, so that we can all plan our work and family life as one unit."

This story was taken from the Daily Telegraph

Disability equality code of practice leaves no room for excuses

Public sector employers have "no excuses" for ignoring the new code of practice on promoting disability equality, the government has warned.

The Duty to Promote Disability Equality requires public sector employers to produce a disability equality scheme to outline their policies, practices and procedures on disabled people.
Anne MacGuire, minister for disabled people, said public authorities now had the opportunity to plan ahead before the duty comes into force in December 2006.

"There is no excuse for not understanding what you have to do," MacGuire told delegates at a Disability Rights Commission (DRC) reception this week to mark the publication of the code.

DRC chairman Bert Massie urged public sector employers to be proactive in instigating the policy.

"Public authorities must involve disabled people and take disability policies beyond the brief," he said. "Take the code home with you, read it, memorise it and then make sure every public authority knows it."

This story was taken from Personnel Today

Atlas of multicultural Britain

This week's Guardian G2 supplement presents a study of the multicultural make up of the UK and the impact of different communities in different parts of the UK in an interactive 'atlas of multi-cultural Britain.'

£1.75m cash boost to launch business centre for women

The London Business School has announced plans to launch a business centre for women following a £1.75m sponsorship commitment over five years from investment bank, Lehman Brothers.

The Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business will aim to provide solutions for the challenges that businesses face in attracting and retaining talented women. The centre will supportwomen at every level, from the time they apply to business school through to their careers as teammembers, entrepreneurs, managers and senior executives.

As the centre develops, it may explore the ways in which business school curricula can be enhanced to ensure that women have the competitive training and global experience necessary to reach the highest executive levels. Although thought leadership and research will be the centre’s primary focus, it will also act as a catalyst to encourage wider international debate by inviting leading industry practitioners and academics from across the globe to participate in the centre’s work.

Dean Laura Tyson of London Business School said: “The Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business will bring together academic theory and real life practice in the crucial area of gender diversity and the recognition of women’s importance in the workplace. As attracting, retaining and promoting talented women becomes an increasingly pressing challenge for business, it is important to ensure that there is a dynamic interface between intellectual thought and industry practice.”
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Sexual orientation to be included in government surveys

Questions about sexual orientation will be included in mainstream government surveys for the first time this year, reported the Financial Times today (p4). The change comes in response to recent developments in legislation including employment equality and the introduction of civil ceremonies. The Department of Trade and Industry and Department of Health have been the first to update their surveys and it is expected to be added to the British crime survey to identify hate crime.

UK pink pound now worth £70bn

Research by Out Now Consulting has revealed that Britain's 3 million gay and lesbian population last year earned over £70 billion. This income - along with fewer children in gay households - leads to higher disposable gay incomes that are now attracting the marketing attention of some of the UK's biggest companies.

The research showed that, on average, are very well-employed, well-paid and are out spending their incomes on a range of lifestyle product categories.

"This is not necessarily news to us, as we have been working with companies to help them understand how to reach gay customers for over 15 years now," says Ian Johnson, managing director of Out Now Consulting.

"What is new, however, in the UK market, is that because of this research, and for the first time, the value of gay consumers' expenditure on so many product categories can now be accurately measured."

Importantly, these new figures include both gay men and lesbians. Other gay research in Britain has focused almost exclusively on men, and has not accurately captured simultaneous data from the lesbian segment of the gay market. This new research does this for the first time."

The research reveals that last year gays and lesbians in the UK spent more than £800m buying CDs, and even more (£843m) on DVDs. Similar amounts were spent buying books and magazines. Leisure travel features very highly in gay and lesbian spending patterns with total expenditure of more than £3bn being spent on tourism during 2005. Mobile phone bills accounted for more than £1bn of gay market spending whilst clothing accounted for a further £1.9bn.

Out Now 2005 Diva and Gay Times Readers Surveys

Compassion or compliance?

An article in Personnel Today questions how far companies are implementing diversity policies because of legislation and the need to be seen to be doing something about diversity.

Estimates from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) show that nearly 70% of UK organisations now have diversity policies in place and a key part of this is diversity training.

The article asks what the true motive behind the commercial world's increasing interest in diversity training is.

"Deep devotion to the cause or simply the need to comply?"

Karen Waltham, diversity expert at career management consultancy Fairplace Diversity, says instituting a programme because legislation requires it is doing it for the wrong reasons.

"Training should be seen as an attempt to change thoughts and culture," she says. "A half-day course cannot achieve this."

According to the article, the most common complaint about diversity training is that organisations do it just to comply with anti-discrimination legislation and to ensure that they are covered in the event of an employment tribunal case. Some critics even claim that it can breed prejudice where there was none, by drawing attention to people's differences.

Others believe that many organisations simply want to be seen to be doing something about diversity.

Read the full article at Personnel Today

Police tops lesbian and gay employer rankings

Staffordshire Police has been named the country’s top employer for lesbian and gay people in 2006, according to Stonewall’s 2006 Workplace Equality Index, showcasing the 100 most gay-friendly employers in the UK.

IBM made second place and the Department for Work and Pensions and Manchester City Council tied for third place.

Stephen Frost, Stonewall’s director of workplace programmes, said: “We know that the 1.7 million gay staff in the UK workforce are increasingly keen to choose gay-friendly employers. Staffordshire is one of a number of police services across the country making increasing efforts to appeal to lesbian and gay recruits. There isn’t necessarily a stereotypically ‘gay-friendly’ employer any more.”

“The business case for addressing these issues becomes stronger every year,” says Ben Summerskill, Stonewall Chief Executive. “Employers who overlook how they appeal to gay staff don’t only miss out on a significant pool of potential recruits but, in many cases, they miss out on a significant customer base too.”

Accenture and Sheffield City Council secured joint fifth place in the 2006 Top 100. BT and the Department of Trade and Industry are joint seventh. Investment banks Credit Suisse and J P Morgan are joint ninth. Twelve other police forces feature in the 2006 Top 100. The Royal Navy, which joined Stonewall’s Diversity Champions good practice programme in spring 2005, is now one of the Top 100 employers at 75th.

The Index ranks employers according to a range of 20 criteria. These include effective engagement with lesbian and gay staff and service users through vehicles such as network groups. One criteria is the presence of an openly-gay member on an organisation’s board or senior management team.

Visit the Stonewall website for more information

Problems persist in the workplace for gays and lesbians

Up to half of the UK's lesbians and gay men do not feel able to reveal their sexuality to all those they work with, according to research from Out Now Consulting, Diva and Gay Times Readers Surveys. The research also found that as many as one in ten gay men, and one in eight lesbians were harassed at work in 2005 because of their sexuality.

According to the research, only 52% of gay men and 51% of lesbians say they can be completely honest about their sexuality with their work colleagues. Official Whitehall figures released last month say that 6% of the UK adult population, or around 3 million people, are lesbian or gay.

"Being accepted by the government is a big step forward in terms of Civil Partnerships, but being able to be yourself at work is something all workers in the UK really ought to be able to do," says Ian Johnson, managing director of Out Now Consulting, a specialist gay marketing consultancy.

"These figures show that this is not currently the case for a large number of UK lesbians and gay men," says Johnson. "In the medium to long term that affects workplace productivity, loyalty and ultimately can result in otherwise well-qualified lesbian and gay staff leaving a job because they can no longer keep up a pretence of being heterosexual. UK workplaces need to improve on these figures both as a matter of social justice and also as a matter of business profits and workplace productivity."

The report by Out Now Consulting, was undertaken following independent research with more than 1,000 readers of Diva and Gay Times magazines between March and October 2005. Sample size is 1118 respondents.

(This article first appeared in Gay Times magazine.)

Out Now Consulting

Gay Times Magazine

Diva Magazine

Wal-Mart execs face penalties for not achieving diversity targets

U.S retailer Wal-Mart (owner of the U.K Asda chain) has told regulators that it will start penalising managers that fail to meet diversity targets. According to the filing, the company has "set diversity goals to motivate officers to achieve [its] diversity initiatives, while adhering to the company's commitment to select the most qualified individual for each position."

Incentive payments for executives who participate in the plan but fail to achieve the targets could be reduced by up to 15%, the company indicated.

Wal-Mart is currently facing an $11 billion gender-discrimination lawsuit that was certified for class-action status by a federal district court in 2004. That certification is now under appeal. At various times, the company has settled claims relating to the hiring (or not hiring) of people with disabilities, pregnant women and illegal workers.

Last week, the company apologised after its website randomly linked a Planet of the Apes DVD to films about prominent African-Americans. Wal-Mart shut down the automated system and said it was "heartsick that this happened."

CRE chief backs recruiter with unlawful no whites policy

The head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is under fire and stands accused of breaking the Race Relations Act in advising a recruitment firm that takes on only non-white recruits.
According to Personnel Today, Trevor Phillips is on the advisory board of Rare Recruitment, a company that places graduates, but only if they are "visibly from a non-white background".

The board also includes other high profile race relations campaigners such as Sandra Kerr, national director of Race for Opportunity, and Anne Watts, a member of the steering group for the proposed Commission for Equality and Human Rights.

Following the investigation by Personnel Today, the company pulled its website on Friday and now claims its services are open to everyone, although specialising in ethnic minority candidates.

The Race Relations Act (1976) clearly states that it is illegal to discriminate against someone due to the colour of their skin. This includes attempts to make up a shortfall in a particular ethnic group in the workplace through positive discrimination. Section 14 of the Act says it is unlawful for an employment agency to discriminate against a person "by refusing or deliberately omitting to provide any of its services".

Raphael Mokades, managing director of Rare Recruitment, insisted that the company was only practising positive action, which is legal under the Act. But Naomi Feinstein, partner at Lovells law firm, said that positive action only applied to the training of staff and refusing white applicants was "definitely positive discrimination".

"Positive action is quite tightly defined - it relates to the provision of training where there is no one of [a certain] racial group employed doing certain work and there only will be if employers offer that training," she said.

A CRE spokeswoman said: "The commission is always mindful of the need for projects such as this to be in accordance with the law, and that is exactly why an advisory board with a range of expertise is necessary in order to ensure such work is taken forward appropriately."

Read full story on Personnel Today

Another 200 years for women to gain true equality

The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) has releases figures that suggest that it could take up
to 200 years for women to gain true equality in politics and many decades to attain the same
levels of men in other areas of civil life.

The EOC's annual survey of women's representation in positions of power suggests equality between
men and women will take:

• 20 years in the top management of the civil service
• 40 years at the director level of FTSE 100 companies
• 40 years in the senior judiciary
• Up to 200 years – another 40 elections – in Parliament

Currently, women account for only 11 percent of directors at FTSE 100 companies, 20 percent of MPs (with only two ethnic minority women) and 16 percent of local authority council leaders. The survey also shows that women make up just 9 percent of the senior judiciary, 10 percent of senior police officers, and 13 percent of editors of national newspapers.

However, women are reaching critical mass in some areas, including as heads of professional bodies
(33 per cent) and national arts organisations (33 per cent), but in most fields there has been
little change since the EOC first published the survey two years ago.

Jenny Watson, chair of the EOC, said: "Thirty years on from the Sex Discrimination Act, it is time
for us to face some stark facts. Women will not make it to the top in significant numbers unless
action is taken to remove the barriers that stand in their way, and Britain will continue to miss
out on women's skills and talents for another generation."

More information from the Equal Opportunities Commission

New tool launched to identify and tackle business practice issues

Investors in People has urged employers to identify and tackle issues that could undermine their organisation over the year ahead.

Investors in People has launched a web-based test to enable employers of any size or sector to examine current policies or practices and identify opportunities for improvement. The tool aims to help employers review their current position and therefore allow them to identify changes that would support progress over the year ahead.

Ruth Spellman, chief executive of Investors in People, said: “Many managers begin the New Year with fresh ideas and enthusiasm, but it's important to identify specific areas for improvement within the context of their business plan before launching any action. Without this attention, new plans will not be properly targeted and delivered and, as a result, may not deliver any real benefit to the business.

The web-based tool guides employers through multiple choice questions exploring life within the workplace and gives them a green/amber/red rating based on how their workplace measures up to good practice contained in Profile, the Investors in People development tool. Profile builds on the Investors in People Standard to provide a path for further improvement, so employers can continue challenging themselves and keep developing in line with evolving business needs/opportunities.

More information on the tool and registration (free)