6. Parental rights

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. Concentrates show you what to expect in a law exam, what examiners are looking for, and how to achieve extra marks. This chapter discusses the law on parental rights. Topics covered include maternity leave, parental leave, time off for dependants, the right to request flexible working, and the new right of parents to bereavement leave. The right to shared parental leave (SPL) is singled out for detailed treatment, partly because it is fairly new, and partly because, some would say, it exemplifies an old-fashioned approach to sex equality when caring for newborns. The option as to whether her partner can share in SPL is for the mother to decide; the mother may receive (by contract) enhanced maternity pay, but there is no enhanced SPL. The effect is to reinforce the mother’s staying at home because if she goes back to work, the family will lose most of the partner’s income because the rate of pay for SPL is low, around £151 a week. The latter point is arguably sex discrimination, and, during the currency of this book, the Employment Appeal Tribunal will decide this issue (at the time of writing employment tribunals are split).

Equality of Terms

This chapter explores Part 5, Chapter 3 of the Equality Act 2010, which deals with equality in contractual terms and conditions of employment and occupational pension scheme rules. It deals with all aspects of equal pay law, i.e. the rules requiring that men and women doing equal work should have equal contractual and pension benefits. The chapter begins by briefly setting these provisions in context, addressing their relationship with discrimination law and EU law. It then looks at the sex equality clause (contract terms) and sex equality rule (pensions). Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the maternity equality clause and maternity equality rule.

Moral conviction increases sharing preference for politically congruent headlines

Evidence suggests that political polarization in the United States may be due, in part, to liberal and conservative partisans living in different factual realities, as a consequence of being exposed to information streams that rarely challenge their background beliefs and cherished narratives. In this project, we approached the issue of biased access to political information at the level of information emission, by focusing on ordinary citizens’ decisions to share political news headlines on simulated social media touching on four controversial issues: gun control, abortion, sex equality and racial equality. Across 8 studies, we found robust evidence that participants have a sharing preference for politically congruent news items over incongruent ones, and that this sharing bias increases with the moral importance of the issue. Those effects were observed on true and false headlines alike. Perceived accuracy and coalitional motivations to share headlines to advance political goals were among the main motivations to share. The transmission preference for congruent content and its interaction with issue importance held in spite of manipulations of the anonymousness of sharing (from an anonymous vs. a personal social media account), and audience’s political congeniality (agree vs. disagree). Intervention messages reminding participants of their susceptibility to the myside bias had little moderating influence. While biased communication on politics may be rational for the individual, it likely contributes to reinforce partisan differences in perceptions of society, and may reinforce affective polarization.

Diminishing constitutional law: The first three decades of women’s exclusion adjudication in Israel

Balancing between sex equality and religious interests has been a challenge for Israel’s constitutional law from the state’s inception. In recent years, however, the expanding repertoire of practices known as women’s exclusion has brought forth this tension with new formulations, intensity, and public sensitivity. This article maps the three decades of Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ or “the Court”) adjudication on women’s exclusion. The modesty requirements and sex-based physical segregation that have become rampant in Israel require re-articulations of the scope and status of the right to equality, as well as other constitutional rights such as dignity and liberty. The thirty-year database compiled for the purpose of this article encompasses all women’s exclusion cases decided by the HCJ. The database was built based on an annotated definition of women’s exclusion cases as a legal field, developed and explained in this article. The database reveals what might be defined as diminishing constitutional adjudication. In the 1990s, the Court labored in elevating sex equality, developing a doctrinal structure that guards it against religion-based demands to legitimize exclusion norms. In contrast, in the past decade, the Court has almost completely refrained from reviewing cases on merit or writing reasoned opinions, adopting ad-hoc problem-solving approaches or taking dispute resolution approaches prompting the parties to find compromise, without delineating the legal framework that should guide the disputes.

25. Discrimination

This chapter examines European Union (EU) law on discrimination, including the definition of ‘discrimination’ and the limited possibilities of justifying it. The chapter provides an overview of EU provisions on gender equality and discusses equal pay for equal work under Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). It also explains the principles of equal treatment in self-employment, social security matters and occupational pension schemes, and also discusses the provisions of Directives 2004/113 (sex equality outside employment), Directive 2000/43 (race equality) and Directive 2000/78 (non-discrimination on grounds of age, disability, religion and sexual orientation).

14. Equal Pay Law

This chapter examines the principle of equal pay for equal work enshrined in the Equality Act 2010 (EA). It first considers the stubbornness of the gender pay gap in the UK and the EU, as well as the justifications for intervention in the labour market via the auspices of equal pay laws. It goes on to discuss the legal machinery in the EA, which confers an entitlement on employees of one sex to the same remuneration as suitable employee comparators of the opposite sex. The focus then turns to the content of the ‘sex equality clause’—a term imposed into every employee’s contract of employment by virtue of section 66 of the EA. This is followed by a discussion of the material factor defence for employers in section 69 of the EA.

5. Equal Pay

This chapter considers those provisions of the Equality Act 2010 that deal with equal pay. These include equality of terms and the sex equality clause (s 66); equal work (s 65), ie like work, work rated as equivalent and work of equal value; the defence of material factor (s 69); sex discrimination in relation to contractual pay (s 71); the maternity equality clause (s 73); discussions about pay (s 77); and gender pay gap reporting (s 78). Also covered are rules on jurisdiction (s 127); burden of proof (s 136); time limits (s 129); remedies (s 132); death of a claimant; and backdating awards.

Fair Procedures for Fair Stable Marriage Outcomes

Given a two-sided market where each agent ranks those on the other side by preference, the stable marriage problem calls for finding a perfect matching such that no pair of agents prefer each other to their matches. Recent studies show that the number of stable solutions can be large in practice. Yet the classical solution to the problem, the Gale-Shapley (GS) algorithm, assigns an optimal match to each agent on one side, and a pessimal one to each on the other side; such a solution may fare well in terms of equity only in highly asymmetric markets. Finding a stable matching that minimizes the sex equality cost, an equity measure expressing the discrepancy of mean happiness among the two sides, is strongly NP-hard. Extant heuristics either (a) oblige some agents to involuntarily abandon their matches, or (b) bias the outcome in favor of some agents, or (c) need high-polynomial or unbounded time.We provide the first procedurally fair algorithms that output equitable stable marriages and are guaranteed to terminate in at most cubic time; the key to this breakthrough is the monitoring of a monotonic state function and the use of a selective criterion for accepting proposals. Our experiments with diverse simulated markets show that: (a) extant heuristics fail to yield high equity; (b) the best solution found by the GS algorithm can be very far from optimal equity; and (c) our procedures stand out in both efficiency and equity, even when compared to a non-procedurally fair approximation scheme.

Prostitution and Sex Equality

Watson aims to present the initial positive case for the Nordic model as a sex equality approach to prostitution. It is argued that social conditions of inequality (based on sex, age, class, race) structure the conditions of entry into prostitution and structure it internally. Watson addresses a series of objections to arguments in favor of restricting markets in sex. Those objections include that any position aiming to curtail prostitution must rest on some form of unjustifiable moralism or paternalism;, that prostitution should be understood as a fully voluntary choice and protected as such; that even if prostitution is exploitative, allowing such exploitation makes persons in prostitution better off than they would be otherwise; and, finally, that persons have rights to markets in sex such that any prohibitive policies violate rights.