A woman who claimed she received an ‘effective demotion’ after raising an equal pay concern has won a constructive dismissal claim worth more than £48,000.
The claimant, Ms Persaud, joined e-commerce content company Flixmedia as a project manager in 2016, and was later promoted to a product manager in 2021. The role involved taking responsibility for various products and managing a team.
A letter in April 2021 confirmed her new job title as ‘product manager’ and increased her salary to £45,000. An organogram produced in 2022 also showed the claimant in that role.
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In October 2021, the company recruited a man referred to as ‘LG’ into another product manager role. LG’s role was slightly different and involved managing data products. The salary offered for this role was £70,000, as the company was looking for someone with significant experience and an understanding of data products, market research experience and dealing with clients.
Another person, SZ, was also recruited as a product manager dealing with content products, but was later promoted to lead PM. Her initial salary was similar to LG’s until her promotion.
All the PMs had the same functional responsibilities, but the products they were responsible for were different and had different marketing and management requirements.
In February 2022, Persaud discovered that LG was earning £25,000 more than her, which she felt was unfair. Both felt that while some gap was justifiable, a much smaller difference in salary would be fairer.
Persaud undertook some research into the market rate for her role and approached her manager, RK, to make a case for a pay rise.
In April 2022, SZ began an exercise of benchmarking Persaud’s role against a matrix that the company had drawn up when setting up the product team.
The claimant raised a formal grievance about her pay in June 2022, citing equal pay legislation and referring to LG as her comparator.
The company interviewed the claimant, LG, SZ and RK to establish whether there were any differences between the two roles. It was around this time that RK told the company’s HR manager that it had been a mistake to give the claimant the title of product manager, and said she should have always been junior product manager. It was then concluded that there were significant differences between Persaud’s role and LG’s role.
A grievance outcome letter sent to Persaud said that her role needed to be reassessed “with a view of confirming the title and subsequently adjusting the salary level once that process is completed”. The letter also referenced a salary freeze that the company had implemented, but said that if the matrix exercise indicated that she was working indeed in a PM role, then her salary would need to increase regardless.
Around this time, one of the team’s quarterly roadmap meetings was held. Despite attending the previous roadmap meetings, the claimant was not invited to this meeting. The company claimed that she had not been invited because it was not relevant to her.
However, SZ told the tribunal that RK’s decision not to invite the claimant was influenced by the claimant’s decision to “level” herself with LG.
The tribunal agreed that this amounted to an act of victimisation.
The claimant appealed against the outcome of her grievance, complaining that her role had been underrepresented and that she had not been invited to the roadmap meeting. The company reiterated that it had been a “human error” to give her the PM job title.
The matrix exercise was concluded in September 2022 and found that she was “not yet performing at PM level”.The reasons were, in SZ’s opinion, partly that her role did not require the strategic identification of KPIs for her products or the creation of plans to achieve those. The letter set out a plan for the claimant to demonstrate that she was performing at PM level, with a support plan and a review date in early 2023.
The claimant resigned the following day, stating that her position at the company was “untenable” and her working conditions “intolerable”.
The employment tribunal sitting in London found that Persaud’s work was broadly similar to that of LG’s and there were no differences in the “practical importance” of their work tasks.
However, it said that the equal pay element of her claim must fail because she had relied solely on the submission that the company needed to recruit someone to be the PM of its data products who had experience in that or related fields, which she felt was unwarranted. The judge said it was “not convinced” this was the correct legal approach for her to take for an equal pay claim.
“We are in no position to judge whether [Flixmedia] was objectively entitled to value the experience, etc, it sought when recruiting to the position obtained by LG,” the judgment says.
It added that the company had not proven that the decision not to invite the claimant to the roadmap meeting was not driven by her complaint.
It dismissed a victimisation claim relating to the decision to unilaterally change her job title to junior product manager, as it was “difficult to adjudicate” whether this was because she had raised a complaint. However, it found this was a breach of trust and confidence, which entitled her to resign and claim constructive dismissal.
Claims of direct and indirect sex discrimination, discrimination because of her race, and discrimination because of her religious beliefs were dismissed.
She was awarded £48,500 in compensation, including a compensatory award of £44,645, a basic award of £2,855 and £1,000 for injury to feelings.
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