In recent years, it has become increasingly common for employers to encourage staff to add their preferred pronouns to their email signatures, often as part of inclusion and diversity initiatives. An employment tribunal has recently considered whether the dismissal of a gender critical employee, due to the provocative pronouns he chose to add to his email signature, amounted to direct discrimination on the grounds of philosophical belief.
O, a local authority IT projects officer, holds gender critical beliefs. In summary, O believes that sex is binary and immutable, that gender is a social construct, that a policy of self-identification presents safeguarding risks, and that announcing chosen pronouns ‘is a political gesture designed to intimidate anyone who does not embrace the contested ideology of gender identity’.
In April 2022, the chief executive of the local authority emailed staff inviting them to consider voluntarily adding pronouns to their email signature. Guidance was attached to this email which included examples of the sort of pronouns that employees might choose. The employment tribunal later held that ‘the tone and meaning of the guidance was that employees were free to identify by whatever pronoun they felt applied to them’.
O immediately raised concerns with his line managers about his feeling unable to either opt-out entirely or use his commonly used male pronouns in his email signature, because he felt either option would implicitly provide support the employer’s pronoun initiative. O eventually chose to adopt critical compliance with the policy – he added ‘XYchromosomeGuy /AdultHumanMale’ to his email footer as his preferred pronouns. The employer instructed O to remove these pronouns from his email footer but he continued to include them. Following a disciplinary process, O was dismissed.
The employment tribunal held:
- O’s gender critical beliefs amounted to a protected philosophical belief; but
- O had not been dismissed ‘because’ he held that protected belief and there was not a sufficiently close nexus between his use of the provocative pronouns on his email signature and his gender critical beliefs. O had used his chosen pronouns as ‘an act of protest’; they were deliberately ‘designed to provoke’ and were O’s way of ‘mocking the idea of gender self-identification’. The employer’s decision to act as it did and dismiss him was therefore because of O’s ‘inappropriate manifestation’ of his protected belief and did not amount to direct discrimination.
The employer did not escape the tribunal’s criticism though, it held that the employer’s implementation of the pronoun policy ‘was poorly thought through and badly executed’. In particular, the guidance it had issued was vague and this had allowed O leeway to adopt the provocative position he did.
Orwin -v- East Riding of Yorkshire Council [2024] ET/6000146/2022
Important note: ET level decisions are merely of persuasive value, and are not binding upon future ETs, but can provide a useful indicator of how certain issues are currently being dealt with within the ET.
For further details on our employment law services, please contact us or a member of our employment law team.
For further information, please contact:
Emma Ahmed, Hill Dickinson
emma.ahmed@hilldickinson.com
