Substantive Equality

Barnard, Catherine; Hepple, Bob

doi:10.1017/s0008197300000246

Cited by 56 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…However, the shortcomings of such an approach have been recognised by several legal scholars, including the difficulty of identifying when likes are indeed alike [45,46]. Thus, the meaning and purpose of equality has been the subject of extensive debate [38,46,47] which has shifted from a formal understanding of equality to a more substantive one, that "rejects an abstract view of justice and instead insists that justice is only meaningful in its interaction with society" [48] (p. 235). It is not within the scope of this article to examine all different constructs of substantive equality.…”

Section: Five Reasons Why Positive Action In Recruitment and Promotiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing Gender Diversity in Senior Roles in HE: Who Is Afraid of Positive Action?

Manfredi

2017

Administrative Sciences

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This article argues that Higher Education Institutions should adopt positive action in recruitment and promotion to tackle women's under-representation in senior leadership roles. In a tie-break situation where two candidates are "as qualified as each other", section 159 of the UK Equality Act 2010 allows employers to give preference to a candidate from an under-represented group. The use of this measure, however, is often contested on the grounds that it is a form of reverse discrimination, it is tokenistic and that it can undermine meritocracy. This article seeks to challenge these objections and suggests that, far from undermining meritocracy, the use of positive action in recruitment and promotion could prove a useful tool to tackle gender bias, unpack stereotypes and re-appraise how merit is defined and assessed.

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Section: Five Reasons Why Positive Action In Recruitment and Promotiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing Gender Diversity in Senior Roles in HE: Who Is Afraid of Positive Action?

Manfredi

2017

Administrative Sciences

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“…One distinction is between formal (or procedural) equality and substantive equality (Rosenfeld, 1986;Barnard and Hepple, 2000;Hepple, 2010). The Equality Duty is an example of adopting a 'substantive equality' approach, because it requires an active approach to promoting equality, as opposed to a more passive 'formal equality' stance (Hepple, 2010).…”

Section: Substantive Equalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Diluting Substantive Equality: Why the UK Government doesn’t Know if its Welfare Reforms Promote Equality

Roberts¹,

Stafford²,

Hill³

2017

Inequalities in the UK

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The UK Coalition government introduced a raft of welfare reforms between 2010-2015. As part of its response to the financial crisis reforms were designed to cut public expenditure on social security and enhance work incentives. Policy makers are required by legislation to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different people. This Public Sector Equality Duty is an evidence-based duty which requires public authorities to assess the likely effects of policy on vulnerable groups. This chapter explores the extent to which the Department for Work and Pensions adequately assessed the equality impacts of key welfare reforms when policy was being formulated. The chapter focuses on the assessment of the impact of reductions to welfare benefits on individuals with protected characteristics -age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, and sexual orientation -including individual and cumulative impacts. It also considers mitigating actions to offset negative impacts and how the collection of evidence on equality impacts was used when formulating policy. The chapter shows that the impacts of the reforms were only systematically assessed by age and gender, and, where data were available, by disability and ethnicity with no attempt to gauge cumulative impacts. There is also evidence of Equality Impact Assessments finding a disproportionate impact on individuals with protected characteristics where no mitigating action was taken.

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“…Whilst indirect discrimination is concerned with group disadvantage, its framing within the anti-discrimination paradigm means, somewhat paradoxically, that it is litigated on an individual level (see Barnard and Hepple, 2000). This individualistic basis of anti-discrimination law forms one of the law's most sustained criticisms and impacts on its ability to comprehensively address structural inequality (Lacey, 1998).…”

Section: The Provenance Of Indirect Discrimination Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perpetuating Traveller children’s educational disadvantage in Ireland

Smith

2014

International Journal of Discrimination and the Law

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The impact of 'subtle' admission policies utilized by many secondary schools in Ireland on children from minority groups has been recently flagged as problematic by the Irish Department of Education. A new regulatory framework has been promised to address this issue but has yet to emerge. In the meantime, such policies, which include preferential parental legacy rules, certainly trigger the reconfigured principle of indirect discrimination in the access to and enjoyment of goods and services under the Equal Status Acts 2000-2012, which transpose a number of EU Equality Directives. This article considers the approaches taken to the demonstration of how suspect policies give rise to 'particular disadvantage' for protected groups in light of the shift away from the mandatory use of statistical evidence in the context of a discussion of a recent High Court case, Stokes v. Christian Brothers High School. This decision concerned the impact of a parental legacy rule on a child from Ireland's Traveller community, a community that has a long and virulent history of educational (and other forms of) disadvantage. In response to the limited understanding of indirect discrimination taken in the High Court (which pivoted on the Oxford English Dictionary), which significantly undermines the principle's ability to tackle structural inequalities, I go on to demonstrate how use of both the 'social facts' approach and a statistical approximation of the impact of the policy on Downloaded from the complainant's group reveals 'particular disadvantage' in the use of legacy rules on Traveller children, children of migrants and children raised in non-traditional families.

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Substantive Equality

Cited by 56 publications

References 0 publications

Increasing Gender Diversity in Senior Roles in HE: Who Is Afraid of Positive Action?

Increasing Gender Diversity in Senior Roles in HE: Who Is Afraid of Positive Action?

Diluting Substantive Equality: Why the UK Government doesn’t Know if its Welfare Reforms Promote Equality

Perpetuating Traveller children’s educational disadvantage in Ireland

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