After it was revealed that diversity plans will allow companies to include transgender females in their gender roll call, city firms are caught up in an equalization row.
The achievement of equality targets will require the participation of thousands in Britain’s largest companies to close the gender wage gap.
However, the proposals define a female in the same manner as Stonewall’s LGBTQ campaign group Stonewall and not in the way that UK law usually recognizes gender.
If they go ahead, companies can meet percentage targets by including transgender women as female in their self-reported data — despite them not necessarily facing the same discrimination relating to their sex.
Critics claim that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was able to bring about the change through’stealth’.
New diversity targets will require thousands of Britain’s biggest companies to close the gender pay gap — but define women as Pictured: Sheldon Mills, who helped draft the proposals and is also acts as chairman of trustees at LGBTQ campaign group Stonewall
Barrister Akua Reindorf said companies could land in legal trouble if they follow the advice ‘if they don’t have an idea of who’s a man, and who’s a woman in their workforce’.
And concerns have also been raised about the role of FCA executive director Sheldon Mills, a solicitor from Cardiff, who helped draft the policy.
Mr Mills also acts as chairman of trustees at Stonewall and helped draft the diversity targets in the Listing Rules, which require companies to record the percentage of female staff in senior board positions based on their self-identification rather than legal sex.
A consultation paper recommended that at least one of the senior board posts be held by a woman (including those who identify as women).
It recommends that at most 40% of board members should be women.
But critics say the data — which companies would have to disclose on a ‘comply or explain’ basis — would be skewed.
Ms Reindorf said to The Times, “A trans woman who has transitioned late in her life, for example, in her fifties, who benefits from being treated like a man and paid accordingly throughout her career, can really skew figures.”
It makes data inherently unstable. It is unsound as a principle. The purpose of the sex pay gap was to identify sex-based discrimination in society and fix it.
That’s the idea. It’s to rectify the historical wrong that women were underpaid.
According to the FCA, the new rules will be introduced by the end of this year subject to board approval.