Claimant v Royal Borough of Greenwich

The claimant gave no evidence which could lead the tribunal to conclude she may have been the victim of discrimination because of her sex. Her witness statement focused principally on race discrimination and made only two passing references to being a woman. Some key incidents involved comparison with female colleagues. The claimant failed to meet her evidential burden.

The tribunal found all alleged instances of less favourable treatment as facts. Key findings included: management not supportive of claimant's Black Lives Matter awareness efforts; her concerns about race discrimination were minimised and called 'silly'; she was given menial roles while white colleagues received work suited to her skills; she was treated tokenistically; racial stereotypes were applied to her (called 'qualified nuisance', 'authoritarian', 'strong personality'); and her Head of Department (Dawn Squires) had previously been found liable for discrimination and harassment relating to Muslims. The tribunal was satisfied the claimant met her burden that the treatment was done because of race. With the response struck out, the respondent could offer no alternative explanation.

The alleged PCPs (not carrying out PRaDS, not setting SMART goals, not making development plans) were applied negatively only to the claimant, not to others. The claimant complained these steps were not done for her but were done for others. This does not establish a PCP applied generally. Further, the claimant provided no evidence that application of these PCPs put the group sharing her protected characteristic at a disadvantage. Claims did not work as indirect discrimination.

The claimant provided no evidence that the alleged PCPs were applied to anyone else or that they put the group sharing her sex at a particular disadvantage. The pleaded claims identified issues done to her negatively, not generally applicable practices. The claims did not work as indirect discrimination.

This claim was listed in the case management orders under section 39 Equality Act 2010 relating to access to opportunities, but the judgment makes no findings on this head of claim. It appears it may have been withdrawn or not pursued.

The tribunal found six protected acts: raising race discrimination with line manager (August 2018), raising race discrimination with HR (September 2018), raising issues with racial equality network (July 2020), raising matters via occupational health reports (November 2020, November 2021), the grievance (December 2020), and the grievance appeal. Four pleaded acts were found not to be protected acts because they were general complaints not sufficiently aligned to the Equality Act. The tribunal found all pleaded detriments occurred as facts, save for one (community engagement role offered to another in April 2018) which pre-dated all protected acts and so could not have been done because of them. All other detriments were found to have been done because of the protected acts, with no alternative explanation available due to the struck-out response.