EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY

TASK 1: Discussion on the Equality Act 2010 and its Protected Characteristics

With emerging consideration for human rights in organizations, management and employees actively promote equality within the work culture to provide equal rights and avoid discrimination by executing the Equality Act. According to Bryson (2017), the Equality Act 2010 protects the groups’ rights with equality legislation by considering their protected characteristics, including sexual orientation, age, gender reassignment, race, religion, civil partnership, marriage, disability, and sex. The growing conflicts with extreme globalization and diversity urge management to imply the Equality Act for anti discrimination practices because it eliminates inconsistency in organizational quality and strengthens the system with ethical and justified practices.

Age Equality: With the emphasis on the protected characteristics, different treatment with an individual based on his/her age group is considered unlawful under the act, which is highly protected by related legislation (Kotze, 2019). For example, some jobs are restricted to specific age groups, which violates another individual’s rights.

Race Protection: On the other side, the Equality Act promotes fair treatment with people from any race, nationality, and ethnic groups based on race protection characteristics. In this case, people who faced racial discrimination in society are encouraged to report such cases and immediately resolve them. Furthermore, organizations actively take measures to minimize racial inequality in the workplace after the Black lives matter campaign (Jones Eversley et al., 2017). Therefore, firms consider the Equality act 2010 as the prime milestones to maintain anti discrimination policies in the workplace with justified culture.

Religion Protection: While focusing on the other protected characteristics, religion is one of the significant personal characteristics protected under the Equality Act. According to Alidadi (2017), religion offers an individual with a particular belief system and values that guides an individual to spend their lives with psychological well being and satisfies inner self with different criteria. This way, religion imposes a strong influence on an individual’s life and shapes human behaviour and attitude to manage living standards. However, if the person faces conflicts in the working culture based on his/her religious dominations, particular individuals feel alienated and demotivated to perform better in achieving the assigned targets and objectives. With particular concern, Equality legislation is embracing companies to allow individuals to follow their religion actively and adding value in the business outcomes. Religion further advances humans thoughts concerning scientific beliefs, psychological beliefs, philosophical beliefs, and coordination between similar religious people. Therefore, Equality Act makes sure that minorities are protected to follow their religions independently without any constraints and gain freedom to be valued within the organizational culture and influences. With corresponding characteristics, companies will not violate the rights of people based on their religious orientation but all of them treated equally while hiring, compensating, and training.

Sex Equality: The other most prominent discrimination magnified in the modern cultural practices is the gender discrimination, where men and females are treated differently based on the associated gender roles and expectations due to social and cultural stereotyping. For example, women are not hired on the executive level because they lack authoritative leadership style and more relationship oriented with lower masculine characteristics, which proves wrong during the pandemic crises that women perform good on the leading position to manage the workforce effectively. With similar concerns, Equality act protected the rights of both genders in the workplace to avail equal opportunities in seeking job at any position with similar facilities (Cowan et al., 2021).

Disabled Protection: On the other side, Equality Act 2010 pointed on the disability discrimination and encouraging related institutes to take active steps in offering them equal rights and services to attain the public facilities such as transport and other employee values. Therefore, making adjustments in the staff operations and overcoming the disadvantage for the disable individuals in the diverse cultural setting. With those initiatives, organisations are productive towards setting different values and policies for disabled individuals to maintain their confidence and morale throughout work practice and feel valued among staff. They are further trained with various skills to educate them with the demanding skills such as digital and communication skills to reflect positively on their performance (Fell and Dyban, 2017).

For highlighting the equality concerns for the particular groups, the legislation proposes two acts related to the discrimination protection act in case of having any disability that affects the achievement of goals can be considerable in selecting the candidate, instead no other factors cannot violate the rights of the disabled individual in the workplace. For example, if a person is suffering from dyslexia and issues with making right spellings is not alienated to avail the opportunities in the organisation. The other consideration is on the indirect discrimination for the disabled people. The indirect discrimination is to eliminate the group of people for the particular job or opportunity based on the disabled character tics by highlighting that it would affect the others well being. In such case, management needs to justify the cause and circumstances on which they evade their selection and training for particular benefit. With those focus, Equality Act actively manages the value for the disabled individuals in the workplace.

Task 2

Discrimination at workplace is a serious offence in the UK. Considering the details provided by Carol, it is extremely disappointing to observe se discrimination at a primary school. An educational institution is a place when children are being taught about the basic principles of ethics and morality (Lane, and Ingleby, 2018). Thus, practising discrimination at such a place is itself a crime. The differences between the position of Carol and Matt has to be eliminated to ensure the successful application of anti discriminatory practices.

In order to do that, there are two main strategies suggested for the school; one, to apply the platinum rule and second, update the educational institution about the policies/legal rule regarding discrimination. However, prior to the application of the strategies, it is first needed to train the management from the scratch. The training needs to include the moral guidelines of the “Platinum Rule.”

The primary objective of this rule is to “treat others as they want to be treated”. This will provide an understanding to the employees what it means to be in the shoes of a person facing discrimination. However, many of the people believe in the application of the “Golden Rule” which means to treat other as you want to be treated. But the main issue with this is the changes in the behaviour of people. Behaviour is subjective and hence, it is possible that the other person might not like the same treatment you are getting.

In this concern, the application of “Platinum Rule” is recommended. This allows the management or the employees to treat the employees as they deserve to be treated. Therefore, in the case of Carol, the application of this rule will allow the teaching staff to treat Carol in the same way as Matt.

Employees performing their duties must not discriminate against any colleagues due to their protected status. The Diversity and Equal Opportunity Policy provides decent work for all employees to comply with the law and ensure the respect and dignity of colleagues.

Another strategy is the application of the “Equality Act 2010” in the workplace. The application of this act will enable the school to implement the anti discriminatory practices against 9 characteristics. Among these characteristics, there are two characteristics related to sex and sexual orientation (Sánchez Monedero, Dencik, and Edwards, 2020). Hence, this act will protect the rights of Carol and act in her favour.

The Equality Policy provides employers/managers with guidance on how to deal with employee performance due to disability or sex. It is important for the business owner to know how to handle this matter professionally, in order to take action and comply with the rules of the Equality Act.

The Equality Act covers all employer, including senior and junior management along with temporary employees, regardless of any association with the company. The Equality Act applies to both the handicapped and those who are not handicapped, but employers believe they are disabled.

Task 3

The second case is about the Gender reassignment which is about Kat, who is transgender women, works as a sports nutritionist in a professional rugby team. The team member with whom she work are not aware from her transition. She face transphobic jokes and comments being made which she asked from his manager to address but did not have positive response. The case also highlights that one morning two of her team members were reading newspaper and joking about the transgender celebrity for which the made crude comments about the appearance of that celebrity and sexual activities. In this case consideration, the legislation around equality has been applied in the case which addresses the equality act that will protect Kat from discrimination (Saari, Kantola, and Koskinen Sandberg, 2019). The equality act assures that discrimination and unfair treatment on the basis of personal characteristics, such as age and appearance is against the law in almost all cases. Therefore, her team members who used to make fun of transgender are abiding the laws and shall be charged in against this these deeds and actions. The quality act is considered to be favourable for act because it will protect her from major discrimination which has been performed in against her indirectly.

The below table highlights four factors from which shows how her discrimination might be categorized in the sports club.

As per the equality act it is the responsibility for her manager that he should reduce diversity and consider inclusivity in the sport club from which Kat will feel comfortable working there. The manager should also aware from the unconscious bias which might hurt someone indirectly if he/she has some gender disorder (Bando, 2019). Other than this, if someone like Kat is refusing to discuss on such matter so the individual should stop doing this because it might be linked with the individual who is refusing to discuss this thing ultimately. The manager should also develop the strategic training program even after he get to know about her appearance.

Reference List

Alidadi, K., 2017. Religion, equality and employment in Europe: the case for reasonable accommodation. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Bryson, A., 2017. Pay equity after the Equality Act 2010: does sexual orientation still matter?. Work, employment and society, 31(3), pp.483 500.

Cowan, S., Giles, H.J., Hewer, R., Kaufmann, B., Kenny, M., Morris, S. and Baines, K.N., 2021. Sex and gender equality law and policy: A response to Murray, Hunter Blackburn and Mackenzie. Scottish Affairs, 30(1), pp.74 95.

Fell, E.V. and Dyban, M., 2017. Against Discrimination: Equality Act 2010 (UK). The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences (EpSBS). Vol. 19: Lifelong Wellbeing in the World (WELLSO 2016).—Nicosia, 2017., 192016, pp.188 194.

Jones Eversley, S., Adedoyin, A.C., Robinson, M.A. and Moore, S.E., 2017. Protesting Black inequality: A commentary on the civil rights movement and Black lives matter. Journal of Community Practice, 25(3 4), pp.309 324.

Kotze, M., 2019. Is the difference in minimum legal ages of marriage for girls and boys in South Africa a violation of equality? (Doctoral dissertation, University of Pretoria).

Bando, R., 2019. Evidence based gender equality policy and pay in Latin America and the Caribbean: progress and challenges. Latin American Economic Review, 28(1), pp.1 23.

Lane, J.A. and Ingleby, R., 2018. Indirect discrimination, justification and proportionality: are UK claimants at a disadvantage?. Industrial Law Journal, 47(4), pp.531 552.

Saari, M., Kantola, J. and Koskinen Sandberg, P., 2019. Implementing equal pay policy: Clash between gender equality and corporatism. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society.

Sánchez Monedero, J., Dencik, L. and Edwards, L., 2020, January. What does it mean tosolvethe problem of discrimination in hiring? Social, technical and legal perspectives from the UK on automated hiring systems. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 458 468).