What gets measured, gets managed.
The Equality Act 2010 sets out nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. Equality monitoring is the process of collecting, storing and analysing data about the protected characteristics of job applicants and workers.
Employers can use monitoring to:
The types of inequalities that monitoring may reveal might include, for example, that applicants from a particular ethnic group are not selected for promotion.
Equality monitoring can also help employers to:
Effective monitoring is an important tool for measuring performance and progress towards equality and diversity goals, and building an inclusive working environment. Monitoring is not an end in itself and once data is collected it needs to be analysed and used to inform appropriate action.