The British Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced that universities should remove the names of students on registration forms to avoid unconscious discrimination against minorities from 2017. He also called on employers to follow this trend. After all, several national and international studies show that discrimination based on ethnicity, consciously or not, is a given.
Other government agencies, such as the BBC, ministries and local governments, and large employers such as Deloitte, KPMG, HSBC and Virgin Money will hide the names of candidates on CVs.
Deloitte has indicated tha tit is prepared to go one step further, where in the schools and universities which an applicant has been to will also be hidden. This is to ensure that more are recruited on the basis of potential, rather than on ethnicity or gender. Law firm Clifford Change has also done this, removing the university's name on CVs of applicants last year. This should prevent scenarios where only students from top tier universities such as Oxford and Cambridge are given the opportunity to work at the law firm.
The call from Cameron to recruit based on 'name blindness,' "does not stand alone. It fits into the plans to eliminate all employment discrimination. So must the pay gap between men and women disappear."
To this end, the following measures were announced:
Large employers are forced to publish the bonuses recieved by male and female employees in order to make a visible difference in pay between men and women. The idea behind this is that if companies see that they treat men and women unequally, this will ensure a change in behaviour. Adjusting the law to encourage government agencies with more than 250 employees to publish the pay gap between men and women. This is to enforce that large, listed companies will include more women in the Boards of Directors.
The UK government hopes that this package of measures against discrimination in the labour market will have been largely eliminated towards the end of Cameron's term.