Profit Time

Man wins sex discrimination victory

A male lawyer had been sacked wrongfully due to bosses worrying they would be sued, if they fired his female counterpart while she was on maternity leave. 45 year old John de Belin was sacked from his associate position in the property division of Eversheds, a Leeds-based law firm, in February last year, after going up against his colleague Angela Reinholz, aged 40 years old.

This was a rare case where a man had claimed sex discrimination, and the Leeds employment tribunal awarded 123,000 pounds to Mr. de. Belin, after they found that he had been unfairly dismissed, and discriminated against on the basis of his gender. Judge Jeremy Shulman, in the tribunal judgment, said that the firm had unfairly inflated the work assessment scores of Ms. Reinholz in the redundancy process. She was given the maximum notional score in one area by the company, because they thought it was the fairest approach to protect her while she was not present to influence the result.

Concerns were raised by Mr. de Belin, but he was told that the process was fair, and since he had scored something lower, he would be losing his job while Ms. Reinholz would be keeping hers. The scoring system was not found to be within the range of reasonable responses by Judge Shulman, which had led to the discrimination against Mr. de Belin.

Judge Shulman had stated that the court did not feel that Section 2(2) of the Sex Discrimination Act was intended to protect a woman on maternity leave in a redundancy scoring exercise, where it was found that she had received an unfairly inflated score, when all the other scores were actual, the notional score had been designed to defeat a tribunal case against Ms. Reinholz, this had the effect of depriving him of his job. It is now known that Evershed will be appealing.

Tags: Discrimination