Did you know that in Britain in 2020 it’s illegal for employers to discriminate against married people, but if you’re single you’re fair game?
This *may* have made sense when married people were potentially considered to be less flexible given responsibilities at home and therefore faced unfair treatment in the workplace. But what of now when there are 2.9 million single parents, 90% are female and almost 70% are in paid work outside the home? Isn’t it likely that if a married person may be viewed negatively by an employer, so too would a single parent – if not more so?
We don’t need to second guess it though. Stories abound of unfair treatment of single parents at the hands of employers. And it doesn’t stop there. Single parents face unequal treatment in child benefit and tax free childcare calculations, they are overcharged for holidays and more recently in lockdown they’ve been barred from some shops. This campaign aims to change this, please sign and share the petition to show your support.
Single parents are a forgotten vulnerable who have been overlooked throughout this pandemic just as they are in normal times. Being overlooked isn’t something which is restrained to government alone, but from society and the media more broadly. When the easing of lockdown started and people were allowed to meet with one other person outside, single parents were expressly told, but not you. Once the government started to listen to us and introduced support bubbles for single parents, the BBC reported on it the next day without incorporating calls from any single parents and listeners lamented their exclusion, claiming they were like single parents.
The Equality Act 2010 provides a legal framework to protect individual rights and ensure people are treated equally. It lists nine groups – known as protected characteristics – which are afforded this legal protection. These protected characteristics are: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. The Act covers discrimination for these groups which occurs – in the workplace, in any educational institution, when using any public services, as a consumer, when buying or renting property, and as a member or guest of a private club or association. However, due to our absence within these protected characteristics, single parents will forever fall through the cracks.
Single parents must be enshrined as a protected group in the Equality Act 2010 to ensure these unequal impacts don’t keep repeating and repeating again – lockdown or no lockdown. Only once single parents are a recognised group in law, will we be actively considered by the government and all British institutions as policies are developed, and not merely remembered as an afterthought. Crucially too, by recognising single parents as a group with specific needs, maybe society as a whole will begin to understand our reality a little better.
This could be done in three key ways to ensure the greatest protection for single parents and ensure that the protected characteristics list is brought up to date to reflect modern Britain.
1. Add single parents as a tenth protected characteristic
2. Expand the current “married and civil partnership” characteristic to “marital and civil partnership status”
3. Expand the “pregnancy and maternity” characteristic to include “pregnancy, maternity and parental responsibility”
If you want to support the campaign for single parents to be a protected group in law, please email me on ellamentalmama@gmail.com
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For more examples of discrimination towards single parents please see the following:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmajohnson/2015/07/26/why-does-the-7-6t-global-travel-industry-ignore-single-parents/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-47057787
3rd February 2021 at 7:58 pm
I work on a construction site and l am being pushed into working 10 hr shifts and getting home at 7pm. Work won’t take it in account l am a single parent and have a duty to care for my son. But he is 16 and still in education and l have him full time
3rd February 2021 at 9:10 pm
That sounds super tough. It shouldn’t be so hard for parents to balance work and parenting, especially single parents. I don’t know if they can help but there’s a charity called working families that have a free helpline to give advice for employment issues. It might be worth giving them a call to find out how you could get your employer to agree to this. Here’s the details. Monday to Friday – 11am-2pm
0300 012 0312. Good luck