Tribunal awards transgender ferry worker £65,000 compensation

A transgender P&O Ferries crew member has been awarded £65,000 in compensation after a tribunal ruled that she has been driven out of her job by taunts from co-workers.

Drusilla Marland said she was accused of flirting with her male colleagues and frequently undermined after joining the maintenance team at the Pride of Bilbao ferry in October 2002. Marland had started her gender reassignment programme six months before joining the company.

She said she was referred to by her former colleagues as “he, she, it, whatever” and told to use a male changing room.

The Southampton employment tribunal found that P&O had failed to protect Marland from “an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility caused by the fact that she was undergoing gender reassignment”.

The senior management team had also failed to provide employees with adequate guidelines on dealing with transsexual workers and destroyed Marland’s trust and confidence in her employers.

P&O admitted sexual discrimination but denied unfair dismissal, as Marland had been offered alternative work at the company.

First published in Personnel Today

Public sector professions fall foul of anti-discrimination laws says DRC

Current guidelines used to determine whether people can train and practise as teachers, nurses and social workers are likely to fall foul of anti-discrimination laws, an independent legal review reveals today.

The review forms part of the Disability Rights Commission’s (DRC’s) investigation into the legal framework governing entry and progress in nursing, teaching and social work. The review also found significant variations in the criteria used for entry in the three professions in Scotland, England and Wales.

In the first assessment of its kind to examine the criteria used to determine entry to the professions against the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), the review found that there was no recognition of the DDA in some sectors’ statutory documents. This is despite the fact that the regulations governing training and entry were compiled after 1995 – the year the DDA was passed by Parliament.

The review also found that ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ are defined in a confusing variety of ways across countries and sectors. In some cases, such as the teaching profession in Scotland, the focus is on competence and conduct and not on attempting to define and assess health.

Bert Massie, Chairman of the DRC, said: “Our investigation has uncovered over 70 separate regulations and pieces of guidance across these three sectors, yet the overwhelming majority of them take no account of the DDA.

"This means that despite the minefield of regulations governing teaching, nursing and social work, disabled people are in severe danger of experiencing discrimination, both at the point of entry when they undertake training and also later on, once they start working.”

'Train to Gain' scheme attracts attention of 15,000 employers in just five months

More than 15,000 employers are now using 'Train to Gain', the new service offering advice on training for businesses, according to the Learning & Skills Council (LSC).

Demand for the service, which is run by the LSC, has soared, with an eight-fold increase in the number of employers that have started training since it was rolled-out across England in August.

Train to Gain provides employers with access to free skills brokers who offer independent advice and match skills needs with appropriate training providers.

The Leitch Report, published last week, acknowledged that the UK's skills shortages continue to have a crippling effect on the economy. More than a third of adults do not have a basic school qualification, while five million adults do not have any qualifications at all.

The LSC estimates that illiteracy and innumeracy cost the nation £10bn in lost revenue each year.

David Way, national director of skills at the LSC, said: "Train to Gain is playing an instrumental role in tackling this crisis head-on by providing employers with expert advice on how and where to train staff to increase productivity.

"Employers told us this is what they need to succeed and Train to Gain is now helping more than 50,000 employees to get qualifications."

With £1bn committed to Train to Gain until 2010 in this year's Budget, the service is forecast to benefit 33,000 employers in 2006-2007, rising to 53,000 employers in 2007-2008 and in successive years to 2010.

Number of women moving into management roles increases by a third

The number of women moving into managerial and professional roles has increased significantly over the last decade, according to research.

The amount of women in managerial jobs has grown by almost one-third (30%) in the past 10 years, compared to 15% in professional roles, the report by The Work Foundation think-tank showed.

There was also a significant increase in 'associate professional' roles (such as nurses and computer technicians) for both men and women. The number of women in associate professional jobs has more than doubled, growing by 57%, in the last decade, compared with 17% for men.

Managerial roles for men were found to have grown by 13% and the number of professional jobs increased by 8%, the report showed.

Ian Brinkley, director of the knowledge economy programme at The Work Foundation and co-author of the report, said the report challenged a number of popular theories.

"In the 1990s, it was widely claimed that work and society were becoming more divided, while breaking into the elite would be nigh on impossible. That story no longer looks right," he said.

"Instead, what seems to be happening is that, if anything, the world of work is upwardly mobile. Among women in particular, there seems to have been a fairly smooth transition into higher skilled, higher paying work."

Top five high-paying jobs for women:

• Marketing and sales managers
• Hospital and health service managers
• Personnel managers
• Primary and nursery teachers
• Management consultants, actuaries, economists and statisticians

Top five high-paying jobs for men:

• Marketing and sales managers
• IT managers
• Construction managers
• Medical practitioners
• Software professionals

Top five low-paying occupations for women:

• Sales assistants
• Care assistants
• Educational assistants
• Kitchen and catering assistants
• General office assistants

Top five low-paying jobs for men:

• Sales and retail assistants
• Goods handling and storage occupations
• Kitchen and catering assistants
• Cleaners and domestics
• Labourers, builders and woodworking trades

First published in Personnel Today

Trevor Phillips' push for positive discrimination dismissed as unworkable by business

Diversity tsar Trevor Phillips' bid for positive discrimination to be legalised has been dismissed by businesses.

Phillips, head of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, last week insisted "special measures" were needed to ensure diversity in certain professions.

It seems likely that Phillips will call for a change in the law to allow positive discrimination when he reports to government in the New Year as chairman of the Equalities Review.

But Susan Anderson, director of HR policy at the CBI, told Personnel Today that business did not want the powers.

"In our view, positive discrimination means not recruiting on the basis of ability," she said. "It may be needed in exceptional circumstances, such as in the police and the security services, but we would not want to see it extended into mainstream business."

More than eight in 10 respondents to Personnel Today's barometer question said positive discrimination should not be legalised.

But Phillips said last week: "There are problems we have yet to find the tools to crack - where we may need to go beyond the reach of the current law.

"We have to consider whether, when there is a clear public need, we must allow our institutions - even if temporarily - to take special measures with the aim of integrating their workforces faster than would otherwise be the case."