McGuireWoods London office managing partner Daniel Peyton wrote a June 4, 2021, article for People Management magazine about recent UK developments involving sex discrimination, including victimization and gender pay gap reporting.
Peyton highlighted that a minimum level of detail will be required for complaints about alleged discrimination to give rise to claims of victimization. As an example, he cited a recent case where an employee’s comment in a written grievance that her employer’s actions “may amount to discrimination” was insufficient to justify her victimization claim under the Equality Act. He noted that “the less precise an allegation, the more difficult it may be to demonstrate” employers’ alleged detrimental conduct was caused by the allegation.
Despite the suspension of penalties for not reporting on the gender pay gap during the coronavirus pandemic, employers who furloughed staff in 2020 still must report on the mean, median and quartile hourly pay gap calculations.
“It remains to be seen to what extent the impact of the furlough scheme skews the gender pay gap data to be reported this year,” Peyton wrote. “Time will tell whether we learn much about the extent, if any, to which gender equality issues have more generally been affected by the pandemic.”