Acas guide on sex discrimination in the workplace
05 May 2016
Workplace experts, Acas, have published a new guide to help employers and managers identify, tackle and prevent sex discrimination in the workplace.
From 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016, the Acas helpline dealt with 7,175 calls related to sex discrimination in the workplace. 91% of these calls were from employees and 8.3% of these calls were from employers. Of the employee calls, 78.7% were from women and 21.2% were from men.
The new guidance will help employers and managers get to grips with the laws around equality and to be aware of any behaviour that could be considered as sex discrimination.
The new Acas guide Sex discrimination: key points for the workplace covers the basics of sex discrimination as defined within the Equality Act.
Sex discrimination can apply to men or women. Itcanhappen between members of the opposite sex butit is also just as unlawful for a man to discriminate against another man as it is for a woman to discriminate against another woman due to their sex.
The guidance includes best practice advice around how to deal with the six common workplace areas where sex discrimination can occur:
- Recruitment
- Pay, terms and conditions of employment
- Promotion opportunities
- Training opportunities
- Dismissals
- Redundancies.