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Gender Equality Duty

From 6th April 2007 The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was amended to place a duty on all public authorities to actively promote gender equality. This means that we need to ensure that we:

• promote equality of opportunity between men, women and transgender
• to eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment

There is also a specific requirement within the new legislation to publish a Gender Equality Scheme which sets out the actions that we need to take to achieve gender equality at Hertfordshire County Council.

To put this scheme together a steering group, made up from individuals from all over the organisation has coordinated a mapping exercise as a review of current departmental practice in relation to gender equality.

In order to ensure that the actions from an employment perspective reflect the needs and priorities of our employees we produced a questionnaire to understand more about their experiences of working at Hertfordshire. The questionnaire aimed to identify what improvements would make the biggest difference to male and female employees.

The Council commissioned MORI to carry out a survey of residents in Summer 2006 to assess resident’s attitudes towards the Council and the services it provides. This survey has been analysed by gender and the result used to feed into the scheme action plan.

The Gender Equality Scheme has now been produced and agreed by the Council’s Strategic Management Board and Resources Cabinet Panel. The Document is attached to this page.

The Scheme is available on request in other languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujerati, Hindi, Italian, Punjabi, Urdu, and Turkish, and other formats, including Audio and large print versions.

For more details contact the Performance Improvement department via the general enquiry number 01438 737555 or 01923 471555 from area codes 01923 and 020 8.