Glasgow Employment Law Blog

As a general rule, women are underrepresented in most high paid or high profile professions. While many people believe that this problem will correct itself overtime, for others, positive discrimination is required to catalyze that change.

Positive discrimination involves giving disadvantaged groups who face discrimination in everyday life, such as women, the disabled or ethnic minorities, favourable treatment on the basis of their protected characteristic. An example of this is all-women shortlists for jobs, whereby all the candidates are female and the success of a woman is guaranteed.

The Government has announced that it will soon be a requirement for employers who have lost sex discrimination cases to publish the results of an equal pay audit and make them available for all affected staff, under what will be called the Equality Act 2010 (Equal Pay Audits) Regulations 2014.

Women are ending their maternity leave earlier than they would like to, according to a report from NCT, the UK's largest charity for parents.

The latest figures from Professional Boards Forum BoardWatch show new psychological milestones have been reached in the percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards.

Partnership working is needed to tackle the barriers too many woman still face in being appointed to serve on public boards, said Equalities Minister Shona Robison at the Scottish Government’s summit ‘Women On Board: Quality through Diversity’.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is to undertake a new comprehensive research project into the scale of pregnancy and maternity discrimination in the workplace.

The Scottish Government has announced plans for a ‘Women in Public Life’ summit to take place on 5th November. It will consider issues around the appointment of women onto public boards and what might prevent women from applying for positions on public body organisations and come up with a programme of actions to address these.

Maternal breadwinning is the highest since records began, with over two million working mums now the main family earner, a rise of 80% in the last 15 years, according to a new report by the think tank IPPR.