In UK employment discrimination law

Employment discrimination law in the United Kingdom

United Kingdom employment equality law is a body of law which legislates against prejudice-based actions in the workplace. As an integral part of UK labour law it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because they have one of the "protected characteristics", which are, age, disability,...

, a Genuine Occupational Qualification (or GOQ) exists when the nature of a particular job causes the sex or gender of an applicant to become a reasonable cause for choosing one applicant over another. GOQs are a special case exception to the Employment (Sex Discrimination) Act 2000, defined in Section 9 of this act.

There are eight possible types of reason for claiming a GOQ in advertising a particular job:

• Physiology or authenticity (for example, in choosing actors to play a role),
• Privacy and decency of people the employee would be dealing with (for example, staff in a care home),
• Private household's integrity (for example, professional carers for an individual, but not normally nannies),
• Single-sex accommodation, when it is unreasonable to expect the employer to provide additional accommodation,
• Single-sex establishments, for example special prisons and refuges,
• Personal welfare and counselling, when sex is directly relevant to the welfare or counselling provided,
• Jobs in foreign countries with specifically relevant laws or customs,
• When a pair of jobs are advertised specifically for a married couple.

In each of these, reasons must be specific and absolute, not based on stereotypes or generalised assumptions.

External links

• ‘Genuine Occupational Qualifications’, A Good Practice Guide for Employers, Department of Trade and Industry, retrieved January 2008.