On Job Requirements, Equal Opportunities and Positive Discrimination

I once worked in an IT company that had a ‘Data Preparation’ department. Every single member of the team (I seem to recall there were about 15 of them) were women. I asked one of the bosses about this once, regarding the equality issues, and he said that only one man had ever applied for a job in that team. Well it was one or none anyway. These days, I sense that answer would not have been enough. Today, I suspect that he would have had to prove that any job adverts for roles in that team would have been ‘equally accessible’ to men and women, that special efforts had been made to ensure men had felt able to apply for the role. What is the equality world coming to?

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