Stonewall: Ditch ‘mum’ for ‘parent who has given birth’

Stonewall has been criticised over advice given to employers seeking recognition under one of its schemes.

Employers wishing to be included in the Workplace Equality Index are advised to swap the term mother for “parent who has given birth”, The Daily Telegraph has revealed.

Organisations that comply with the lobby group’s advice are able to improve their position in its annual ranking of top 100 LGBT ‘inclusive’ workplaces.

Public inquiry

The 2022 application form for the Workplace Equality Index, seen by the newspaper, advises organisations to completely “remove gender markers and titles”.

Guidelines also tell employers to adopt pro-transgender policies. It states they “must make clear that all trans employees can use the facilities (e.g. toilets, changing rooms) they feel most comfortable using”.

As many public bodies feature in the Index rankings, campaigner Maya Forstater has called “for the Committee on Standards in Public Life to undertake a public inquiry as to how an organisation that is basically a lobby group got into such an influential position in so many institutions”.

Forstater herself recently won an Employment Appeal Tribunal after she lost her job for sending tweets defending the reality of biological sex.

Abandoned

The list of organisations abandoning Stonewall’s equally controversial ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme continues to grow, amid concerns over its extreme pro-trans stance.

Ofsted, Channel 4, University College London, and law firm Moon Beever are among the latest public and private bodies to reveal they have left the group’s divisive pro-trans programme.

Employment and discrimination barrister Naomi Cunningham said law firms should consider the “reputational consequences of outsourcing their judgment on equality, diversity and inclusion to a lobby group that’s been caught attempting back-door law reform by misrepresenting the law”.

Oxford professor Michael Biggs has written to his vice-chancellor warning her that the University “should not submit to an unelected organisation which campaigns for a particular political agenda, which provides misleading information of the law”.