Written evidence from Professor Kate Sang (ERB0090)
Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP
Chair, Business and Trade (Commons) Select Committee
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
Via email: commonsbtc@parliament.uk
10 December 2024
To the Chair and Select Committee Members,
Call for Evidence on “Make Work Pay: Employment Rights Bill” – response from Heriot-Watt University
As the Director of Centre for The Transformation of Work at Heriot-Watt University, I am writing to you to highlight our views on the new Employment Rights Bill, which I hope will be of interest to the Committee as it seeks to inform the later stages of the Bill’s passage through Parliament.
By way of introduction, the Centre for The Transformation of Work (formerly the Centre for Research on Employment, Work and the Professions) leads on a range of research projects examining contemporary work and employment, working with employers, policy makers, trade unions and professional bodies to improve working lives globally. Along with my colleagues Dr Chiara Cocco (Postdoctoral Research Associate) and Professor James Richards (Professor of Employment Relations), I specialise in improving marginalised people’s careers, particularly in women and disabled people’s careers. With this focus in mind, we hope that you will welcome the evidence provided below relating to the Committee’s interest in workers’ protections. You can also view the Appendix for the evidence cited in this response.
I welcome the Bill’s focus on embedding women’s health in law. However, based on extensive, peer-reviewed research, I believe that the Bill would provide insufficient legal protections relating to equality. Namely the plans to require large employers to develop and publish an equality action plan, including ways of supporting employees experiencing the menopause, currently fail to fully address challenges around menstrual health at work. My colleagues and I have identified three shortcomings in the Bill as introduced, detailed below.
Firstly, equality action plans are at present limited to menopause support. As such, the Bill lacks provisions for workplace support for the whole spectrum of menstrual health, which include (peri)menopause, and associated conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This means that there would be no requirement for businesses to support women (or someone assigned female at birth) that experience often debilitating and chronic challenges such as heavy menstrual bleeding, pain, fatigue and severe psychological distress. With diagnosis of gynaecological conditions often taking up to eight years, many women encounter difficulties to secure long-term workplace adjustments. These challenges have major implications for employment in the UK, including an increased use of sick leave to manage pain or heavy bleeding or career changes, with women moving from site or peripatetic roles to less well-paid, office-based roles (studies 1, 2, 5 in the Appendix, which include data collected over a 7-year period).
Relatedly, I am concerned that the Bill also uses potentially misleading terminology. Menopause is the term used when a woman has not had a menstrual period for 12 months. It is the transition, known as perimenopause which begins approximately 10 years before menopause, during which often the most severe symptoms are experienced. This can have far greater employment implications, as some women choose to leave their careers or the labour market altogether during this period of time, largely linked to poor workplace accommodation of perimenopause rather than menopause (also studies 1, 2, 5 in the Appendix). If the Bill does not make provisions for the whole spectrum of menstrual health, we suggest that an implicit reference is made to perimenopause.
Secondly, evidence also shows that sex (along with other protected characteristics) intersects with other forms of marginalisation and that menstrual health can be particularly challenging for disabled and neurodivergent people. Medications used to treat conditions such as ADHC may work differently across the menstrual cycle and neurodivergent people may not respond to hormonal treatments in the same way as neurotypical people. Some trans and non-binary people also experience heightened gender dysphoria when managing their periods at work. For neurodivergent women, perimenopause can ultimately be the tipping point into leaving the labour market (see studies 1, 6 in the Appendix). The Bill, however, does not embed intersectionality, which may inherently produce equality action plans which are not inclusive of a significant part of our population.
Neurodivergent people – women and men, and particularly autistic people – already have the poorest employment outcomes, facing unemployment and underemployment. Many neurodivergent people across a range of sectors face significant challenges, including poorly informed managers, difficulty accessing reasonable adjustments, and the lack of fair work (see studies 1, 3, 6, 7 in the Appendix). As such I believe there should be explicit equality action plans for disabled and neurodivergent workers. While this is beyond the scope of this Bill, the UK Government may also wish to consider strengthening the Equality Act 2010 at a future date to offer sufficient protections for neurodivergent people.
Finally, ongoing research reveals some cynicism among those participating in current (peri)menopause initiatives, describing interventions and training as ‘tick-box exercises’ and noting their lack of impact. As such, I believe that there is a need to introduce mandatory monitoring and reporting on equality action plans in order to understand what works to improve work for those managing their menstrual health. The efficacy of equality action plans cannot be evaluated without such regular reviews.
In order to address these shortcomings, I set out recommendations for the Committee’s consideration below.
I hope that the latest evidence will be of interest to you and that you will be able to consider equality action plans and the current shortcomings in workers’ protections as part of your inquiry. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or wish to receive further evidence.
Professor Kate Sang
Director of the Centre for The Transformation of Work
Heriot-Watt University
&
Dr Chiara Cocco
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Centre for The Transformation of Work
Heriot-Watt University
Professor James Richards
Professor of Employment Relations, Centre for The Transformation of Work
Heriot-Watt University
Appendix: Relevant publications