05 October 2018

What you missed in equality news during conference season.

Morrisons has become the latest major supermarket chain to face an equal pay for work of equal value claim from majority female shopworkers. This follows similar cases against Asda, Sainsbury and Tesco. The chains pay supermarket staff, who are mostly female, less than their warehouse staff, who are mostly male. The workers will argue that the work conducted by shop workers is of equal value to that conducted by warehouse workers and that they should thus be eligible for equal pay.

A study by the Young Women’s Trust has found that over one in five employers admits to discriminating against pregnant women and mothers. As many as 22% of the human resources managers surveyed disagreed with the statement “whether a woman is pregnant or has young children has no impact on organisational decisions regarding career progression or promotion“.

Former Pensions Minister Ros Altmann has warned that the government’s pensions policy also discriminates against women, telling The Independent that her male colleagues ignored her concerns over the impact on women of raising the state pension age when she voiced them.