A lawyer has won a sex discrimination case after she was made redundant when her female bosses decided she had been 'less focused' since going part time after having triplets. Intellectual property specialist Gemma Long was let go from British Gas after her managers - who were also lawyers - put pressure on her to work on her days off.
Mrs Long had been working part-time ever since giving birth to her three children and was criticised for her 'focus', despite covering two people's roles while only doing three days a week. She will now receive compensation after it was ruled the redundancy process was discriminatory as her 'personal circumstances as a mother of young children was unconsciously being held against her'.
The tribunal, held in Reading, Berks, heard Mrs Long was an experienced solicitor who started working for the energy giant as their intellectual property counsel in January 2012. In May 2016, she went on maternity leave and gave birth to triplets. The tribunal heard one of her sons had 'significant additional needs'.
When she returned from maternity leave in September 2017, Mrs Long worked as one of two intellectual property lawyers, with the workload divided between her and a full time colleague. Mrs Long was paid £46,800 a year for a three day working week.
The tribunal heard the full time lawyer resigned in June 2018 and Mrs Long 'started to feel pressure to work on her non-working days' from her line managers, solicitors Sarah Hartnell and Vicky Wells. This was shown in emails Vicky Wells wrote to Ms Hartnell which said 'Are you going to speak to Gemma this week about not dropping everything when she leaves on Weds? Let me know how it goes...' and 'I’ve also told her that the work doesn’t stop at 4pm on a Wednesday'.
Ms Hartnell told the tribunal she had 'serious concerns' about Mrs Long's performance during 2018, but her 2018 annual performance review was a mix of positive and negative comments. Mrs Long said the review document 'did not give the impression that she was performing below expectations'.
Despite this, in March 2019 she was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan, the same month the firm hired an experienced full time male intellectual property lawyer on £80,000 a year. The tribunal heard Mrs Long was informed that she was at risk of redundancy on in June 2019.
In the scoring matrix the firm used to decide who would be made redundant, Ms Hartnell scored Mrs Long '1 out of 7 for Focus', which meant 'rarely demonstrates this capability and/or sometimes demonstrates the opposite'. In her evidence to the tribunal, Ms Hartnell accepted that Mrs Long's focus on trademarks was good and that this made up the lion’s share of her work.
Mrs Long was made redundant in July 2019. Employment Judge Andrew Gumbiti-Zimuto said the mark for focus of 1 was 'irrational'. Mrs Long said the selection criteria was ‘stacked against me as a working mother’.
She believed she was 'consciously or unconsciously discriminated against' on the grounds of sex and part time status because it was 'assumed she was not performing as well as a full-time male colleague' and was 'less focused because she was a woman with triplets working three days a week'. Judge Gumbiti-Zimuto upheld Mrs Long's claims of equal pay, sex discrimination, less favourable treatment on the grounds of part-time working and unfair dismissal.
He said: "These matters in our view also allow us to infer that [Mrs Long's] personal circumstances as a mother of young children was unconsciously being held against her. We conclude that [Mrs Long] was treated less favourably than [the other male lawyer], a full-time male worker, in the process that resulted in her dismissal.
"The Tribunal concludes that [she] was treated less favourably than [British Gas] treats a comparable full-time worker. [Her] complaints about dismissal succeed on the grounds of direct sex discrimination and less favourable treatment because of part-time working."
