Stonewall has abandoned legislation advising workplace equality organisations to remove the word "mother" by their lines of conduct.
The lobby announced that will no longer reward with higher ranking scores employers who would adopt gender-neutral alternatives and start using 'mother'..
Nancy Kelleythe chief executive of Stonewall, denied in an interview that such a course of action existed. "We are not interested in removing or deleting the word "mum". he said. Kelley, who has two adopted children with his wife, added: "I am a mum. I'm married to another mum. It's a deeply emotional term. And I would be really upset if my children didn't call me Mum."
(....)
"Our guide for the Workplace Equality Index should suggesting a range of different options to make the guide inclusive of all the different ways in which our families are formed" said the Stonewall official. "It is not necessary to remove terms such as 'mother'. to achieve this result.
The lobby is now under intense pressure after hundreds of documents have shown that its systems encouraged the organisations to rewrite their policies in exchange for points on the workplace equality index, index that claims to rank the most LGBT-friendly employers in the country.
(....)
La Dundee University has confirmed yesterday of replacing "mother" and "father" with gender-neutral alternatives after Stonewaal's negative feedback to his application for the index.
To explain the fact that the university scored only five out of 15 points in its guidelines, Stonewall wrote: "We recommend removing the terms mother and father from your guidelines.. . . we recommend using the gender neutrality in the guidelines'.
Stonewall explained that the feedback given to the university was outdated. "This is an old document," said one representative. "They are no longer the guidelines we provide." The university confirmed it had changed its terms after receiving advice from Stonewall.
An investigation by The Times of this year revealed that Stonewall suggested to the Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust to "using terms such as 'pregnant employee' or 'birth parent' instead of mother".
Rhondda Cynon Taf County Councilin South Wales, told the index evaluators that they had changed all its Guidelines on maternity leave, adoption and surrogacy to "avoid gender pronouns".
The Scottish Government, at advice from Stonewall, has deleted the word 'mother by its lines of conduct.
Lucy Bannerman - The Times 20-11-2021
original article here
Translation Laura De Barbieri
