EMPLOYEES who often change their gender identification should be shielded from harassment, according to new Home Office guidelines.
The term “gender identity” is defined as an individual’s “internal, deeply held sense of their gender” that “may regularly vary” in the department’s official ‘Gender Reassignment and Gender Identity’ guidelines.
Activists use the term to refer to persons who want to identify as a gender other than their biological (cisgender) sex.
This might include those who want to identify as female, male, or alternative “identities” including a gender and bi-gender.
According to the Home Office, its diversity initiatives go “beyond compliance” with the Equality Act 2010 by incorporating “gender identity and expression”.
Because of their age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and motherhood, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, persons are protected from discrimination under the Equality Act.
With “over 150 initiatives across the department” targeted at boosting diversity and inclusion, the Home Office’s Roadmap to Inclusion was launched in September 2021 and revised early in 2023.
The plan, which spans from 2021 to 2025, outlines a goal to increase diversity in the Home Office.
The Roadmap also details various “actions” to achieve its targets ahead of its 2025 conclusion.
FIVE UK-US collaboration projects have received funding totalling £485,000 to advance policy improvements for the LGBTQ+ in the STEM community, announced by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Science and Innovation Network (SIN) .
The LGBTQ+ Inclusion in STEM Grant has awarded funds to the following universities. They will be entrusted with doing research on LGBTQ+ people’s attrition and retention in STEM:
* The University of Lincoln and the California Academy of Sciences
* Queen’s University Belfast and Purdue University
* The University of Oxford, Montana State University and the University of San Diego
* The University of Manchester, the University of Strathclyde and Tufts University
* Oxford Brookes University, Quinnipiac University and the University of Missouri.
RSC’s own research in the ‘Exploring the workplace for LGBTQ+ physical scientists’ report shows that there are still areas where significant progress must be made in STEM workplaces while various cultural barriers add to the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ scientists.
RSC partnered with Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) and the US-based SIN last year to tackle these issues and foster a more welcoming workplace.
This scheme will involve UK-US government agencies, NGOs, university administrations, researchers, and funders for the first time.
The intercontinental and interdisciplinary grants cover a wide array of fields across STEM and the social sciences.
These awards, which are valid through December 2024, will aid in resolving the problems by fostering outcome-focused research that can affect governmental or academic policy.
*STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
JOB diversity initiatives have ceased in the district around Walt Disney World in Florida, after state Governor Ron DeSantis signalled his disapproval of any such moves.
The Governing district around Walt Disney in Central Florida tourist oversight district now more or less forbids companies from advertising jobs as part of any diversity initiative.
Republican and conservatives in Florida have routinely stated their opposition to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives believing them to be often politically motivated and promoting a woke agenda which they strongly oppose.
“Any DEI job duties” will also be removed, the Tourist oversight district declared in a statement.
Five DeSantis appointees oversee the oversight district, which was established earlier this year as a result of a dispute between DeSantis and Disney.
It took the position of a county district governed by the Walt Disney Company, which was abolished when Disney protested DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
The Central Florida tourist oversight district blasted its predecessor for implementing “minority/women business enterprise and disadvantaged business enterprise programmes” in a news statement.
Such attempts are “illegal and simply un-American,” according to Glenton Gilzean, the district’s new administrator who is Afro-American and a former leader of the Central Florida Urban League.
“Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal,” Gilzean said in a statement.
“As the former head of the Central Florida Urban League, a civil rights organisation, I can say definitively that our community thrives only when we work together despite our differences.”
DeSantis, who is presently running a presidential campaign, took over the Reedy Creek improvement district in February, which houses the Walt Disney World Resort and it was renamed the Central Florida tourist oversight district.
Disney used to have control over the district in the Orlando region, giving it the authority to pick what it built there, but after drawing DeSantis’ ire, the Republican legislature stripped it of that authority.
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