Author and international law scholar Alessandra Asteriti’s search for a new university position inadvertently turned into a prolonged struggle to uncover the influence of LGBTQ+ organisations on the hiring practices at KCL.
With a LLM and a PhD in international law from a Russell Group university, Asteriti is the sort of person universities are usually looking to hire. However, when she wanted to apply for an open position at King’s College London, Asteriti ran into a problem: there was no way of proving to her prospective employer that she was woman.
According to Asteriti, the KCL application’s equality and diversity form “fails to ask for sex”, but only provides the category of “gender”. This prompted her to contact the recruitment team and inform them that recording the sex of each applicant is “essential for [KCL] to comply with [its] equality duties”.
As a self-described “gender dissident”, Asteriti maintains that she does “not have a gender”, only a sex. KCL’s seeming lack of interest in the latter category made her “unsure whether [King’s] will respect my rights as a woman”, she wrote, adding that “I do not want an employer who does not acknowledge my rights”. At the end of her email to the KCL team, Asteriti urged them to “correct your form as a matter of urgency” so as to “follow the law and not what Stonewall says”. Stonewall, an LGBTQ+ rights organisation, offers guidance on inclusive policy-making to institutions across the country.
CAF has previously reported on the corrosive influence of Stonewall on EDI policies at British universities, including on hiring practices. In particular, Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index ranks institutions on a wide range of EDI criteria, which incentivise dubious policies. Indeed, King’s 2021 WEI report, accessed by CAF through an FOI request, explains that all HR systems only record “gender” and solely “through self-service and self-determination”. Apparently, a “staff member’s legal sex is only recorded for pension, payroll and to report to HMRC” and is entirely “separate from the information recorded in [KCL’s] equalities opportunities monitoring”.
This is the issue Alessandra Asteriti encountered on the job application form and subsequently complained about to the KCL team. A recruitment manager responded with a message apologising for not making Asteriti feel “represented” and advised her to choose the option “Prefer Not To Say” if none of the listed genders were appropriate.
Of course, this did not actually address Asteriti’s concern, as she pointed out in another email to the recruitment team. In their response, the team absurdly tried to reassure her of KCL’s commitment to equality by emphasising that “we will do what we can in accordance to [sic] guidance given to us by Stonewall”.
Somehow, the recruitment manager had interpreted Asteriti’s complaints as a call for more involvement from Stonewall, rather than less. Still, Asteriti focused on positive side: the obvious admission that Stonewall was guiding the wording on the equalities form. As she wrote on X regarding this revelation, “I could not believe my luck”.
At this point, Asteriti decided to submit a FOI request, asking to see “any guidance given by Stonewall in relation to the language used in all [KCL’s] recruitment material, but specifically [KCL’s] equality and diversity forms”. This led to a lengthy back and forth, involving various teams across the London institution, each of which showed an impressive capacity to drag their feet as they refused to cough up the requested information.
One attempt at obfuscation included a three-sentence long summary of the Stonewall guidance written by an internal “Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Consultant” rather than a release of actual documents. Then the KCL team contradicted its previous statements by denying that Stonewall had had any influence at all. Indeed, one of the official responses to the FOI request stated that “the development of the [equality and diversity] form pre-dates King’s membership to Stonewall Global Diversity Champions [2018] and as such it is unlikely Stonewall recommendations were a consideration in its development”.
However, Asteriti was not so easily appeased. As she pointed out in her response, “becoming a diversity champion is not the beginning of the collaboration with Stonewall, as there are criteria that need to be met”. As proof, she pointed to internal King’s documents from January, March and December of 2017, all referencing a partnership with Stonewall. Summarising the state of the process, Asteriti concluded her email by saying “[s]omebody is a liar here, and it is not me. Also somebody is an idiot here, and it is not me.”
When KCL finally released a serious of heavily redacted documents related to the creation of its equality and diversity form and its relationship with Stonewall, it became clear that the partnership had begun earlier than initially implied. The FOI response stated that the “earliest partnership with Stonewall was in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in 2015/2016 with formal membership being purchased in 2016”.
A document from IoPPN details how the institute was “in continuing discussion with Stonewall”, including by “working with a personal consultant who looks over policies and helps improve the image of the university”. The response also documented that management of the Stonewall membership was “moved to the Central HR EDI team in 2017”.
However, Stonewall does not appear to be directly responsible for the equality form that originally prompted Asteriti’s query, as there “is no record of any information or exchange that happened in connection with the production of the recruitment form and the guidelines provided by Stonewall.” The response emphasised that “King’s partnership with Stonewall has had no impact on the collection of sex data in recruitment”. Still, it was admitted that “King’s will aim for any future changes to the recruitment form to be in line with recommendations from Stonewall”.
Rather than Stonewall, it appears that the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the Equality Challenge Unit (now Advance HE) were responsible for guidance on the recruitment form. According to the FOI response, “guidance available at the time used the terminology of sex and gender interchangeably. As such, the recruitment form has never included the collection of distinct sex data”.
ECU, the forerunner to Advance HE, is the same organisation that was recently revealed to have created a template for trans-inclusive policies used by dozens of universities across the country. This template includes three of the four commitments in Sussex University’s trans inclusion policy which the OfS deemed to be in violation of its regulations, resulting in a £585,000 fine for Sussex.
Organisations like Advance HE and Stonewall have had a prolonged and corrosive effect on the policies of many British institutions. Fortunately, King’s seems to have realised the error of its ways. The current Equal Opportunities section on the University’s application form asks for “Legal Sex”, rather than “gender”.
We call on all British universities to review their policies and ensure that they follow the regulatory framework. As Alessandra Asteriti wrote in her initial email, universities should “follow the law and not what Stonewall says”.