Robin H. Johnson wrote: > On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 10:56:36AM +0000, Steve Long wrote: >> Ryan Hill wrote: >> > I agree, though year of birth might be interesting. Income and >> > children are a bit too private. >> > >> ++ in general although I do think parenthood (if responsible) is as >> relevant as age. A 28 year old with a 5 year old kid has a lot to show a >> 35 year old doctoral student with no kids, even if it's not all >> technical. # of kids isn't relevant. > I put # of kids in there as a lark, perhaps it might be better as 'do > you have children', with an eye to seeing how it affects their package > choices - see games and education packages for kids, plus the previous > USE=offensive debate on the desktop backgrounds with scantily-clad > woman. > Heh yeah, we often get people using inappropriate language in #gentoo-chat and have to explain that, well some of us have children who can see the screen. I highly recommend gcompris for anyone with younger kids btw. >> Maybe it's not something you want to ask the users, but it would be more >> interesting wrt devs, as would statistics on standard Equal Ops >> monitoring (a legal requirement on employers in the UK, even if the >> person declines to answer, which is ofc their right.) > Go some good links on that? They might have good question wording we can > borrow? > Can I firstly apologise as I appear to have misunderstood (I am not a lawyer, I'm a coder.) The requirement is on public authorities and, I think, publically funded organisations. I worked at a Students' Union (as full-time staff) in the early 90s, and it was impressed upon me (when I sat on an interview panel) that we had a legal obligation to actively *promote* Equal Opportunities.
The main organisation in the UK for this now is the new Equality and Human Rights Commission at http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/ Bradford University's Equality Unit have an excellent site at http://www.brad.ac.uk/equality/ with policies and summary of relevant legislation at http://www.brad.ac.uk/admin/equalopp/policies/ The Higher Education Funding Council for England's Equality and diversity unit has a good site at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/lgm/divers/ Employers have a duty under the legislation discussed above not to discriminate. All of this comes under the umbrella term "Equal Opportunities", best-practise for which comes from the public-sector. It is harder for larger organisations to defend a discrimination case if they do not monitor aiui: "The purpose of monitoring is to enable you to examine how your policy and action plan are working. If your policy is fully effective and has been in operation for some time your workforce should be broadly representative of the population of the geographical area from which it is drawn or demonstrably moving in that direction. Monitoring enables you to assess this." http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=828 which is a good link to see what employers are advised to do. Certainly the term "An Equal Opportunities Employer" has been in use for years, and implies that there are policies and monitoring in place, as well as a commitment to the promotion of EOPS. HTH. -- gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
