Stonewall requests - drop term 'mother' to boost equality

The LGBT+ charity Stonewall has advised organisations to replace the term mother with "parent who has given birth" to help boost their ranking on an equality leader board.

 

Stonewall has issued advice to employers wishing to be included on its Workplace Equality Index, stating that they must remove all gendered language, and allow those who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms.

 

The Ministry of Justice, which is placed fifth in the leadership board, admitted that its HR policies have been updated in recent years to include non-gendered language and that in some internal documents terms such as mother and father had been removed. Other public institutions that appear in the top 100 on Stonewall's Workplace Equality Index include the Home Office, MI6, the Army, the Department for International Trade, the Government Legal Department and the House of Commons.

 

There is growing pressure for Whitehall departments to cut ties with Stonewall, with the Minister for Women and Equalities, Liz Truss, telling officials they should not be paying £2,500 or more a year to be a Stonewall diversity champion.

 

A string of public bodies - including the equalities watchdog - have already quit the charity's champions programme, which provides diversity training. Now a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, seen by The Daily Telegraph, have led to warnings from lawyers that Stonewall is "misrepresenting" equality laws in the advice it issues to public bodies such as councils, government departments, police forces, and NHS trusts, as well as a raft of private companies, and campaigners have called for a public inquiry into how the "lobby group" had secured such an influential position at the heart of government. Documents released from several public bodies under FOI reveal the lengths to which employers must go to top the Workplace Equality Index. Feedback to organisations on how they can improve their application shows that several were advised by Stonewall they should "remove" the term mother and father from all their policies.

 

Stonewall said it is "confident in our advice on the Equality Act which is based on the Equality and Human Rights Commission's Equality Act Code of Practice."  Other advice from the charity included telling Edinburgh University that it would "recommend using a gender-neutral term, such as "parent who has given birth", while Merseyside Police was advised that the "pregnant employee" was a "more inclusive term". The Welsh government, which is ninth on the list, deleted the term mother from its maternity policy in 2019, but the term father appears once.

 

E&K Solicitors

Rusholme