A mother has won more than £90,000 for sex discrimination after a prospective employer withdrew its job offer after asking how old her children were.
Ms Lee applied for a real estate marketing manager position at the south west London office of R&F Properties, a Chinese real estate company.
She was offered the job in September 2022 after attending two interviews. She raised the need for flexible working, at which point the company’s senior HR manager Ms Jin said the company would be happy to provide once she passed her probation.
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On 20 October 2022, just 12 days before she was due to start working for the firm and after she had resigned from her previous employer, she was invited to a Microsoft Teams meeting with Ms Zhu, the company’s head of overseas development.
At the beginning of the meeting, Lee said she needed to leave the meeting on time to attend to her children.
The meeting mainly concerned her work experience, the size of the projects she had previously worked on and who her clients had been. However, towards the end of the meeting Zhu asked Lee how old her children were. The claimant replied that one was four years old and one was approaching one year of age.
Lee told the tribunal that the question came out of the blue and had no relevance to the issues discussed in the meeting. However, the respondent argued that the question was asked to get to know the claimant, to build rapport, and that Zhu would have asked a man the same question.
The tribunal said that throughout the hearing it was under the impression that the company was denying Zhu had asked the question. A record of an internal chat from February 2023 showed that Zhu’s PA denied Zhu had asked about the children, but evidence from another chat in November 2023 suggested the children’s ages were brought up by the claimant.
The tribunal preferred the evidence given by Lee. Zhu did not attend the employment tribunal hearing.
Lee left the meeting feeling deflated, confused and frightened. She was stressed and worried that the job would be taken away because of the things Zhu had said.
The company argued that around the same time, deputy general manager Mr Zhai was informed by the company’s headquarters in China that there needed to be a recruitment freeze which led to Lee’s employment contract being withdrawn. However, the tribunal found it more likely that Zhu, as a vice president of the company, instructed that Lee’s contract be withdrawn following their conversation in which she found out the age of Lee’s children.
Lee was told on 26 October 2022 that her job offer was withdrawn.
The respondent told the tribunal that Lee would have been made redundant if she had remained in employment with the company, but the tribunal dismissed this as a letter showing redundancies were being considered was dated September 2022 which was the same month that two new positions were being recruited into the sales team. Further sales roles were recruited in February 2023.
We consider that the claimant’s childcare responsibilities were important to Mrs Zhu’s assessment of the claimant’s suitability for the role.” – Employment Judge Caroline Musgrave-Cohen
Employment Judge Caroline Musgrave-Cohen found that the claimant’s sex was the reason the signed contract of employment was withdrawn.
She said in judgment: “We find that the person who decided to withdraw the contract of employment was Mrs Zhu. She is vice president of the respondent company and in line with our experience of company structures, we find that she would have had authority to make decisions about headcount and recruitment. We do not think that she would be subservient to HR HQ or that she would expect to be told about their decisions from the UK based Mr Zhai. We consider it more likely than not that she would have control over such decisions herself.”
The judge noted that the company had not cast any doubt over Lee’s experience or abilities, and Zhu only became aware of Lee’s childcare commitments when they were raised during the meeting.
“Mrs Zhu later asked the claimant about the age of her children out of the blue in a meeting clearly designed for Mrs Zhu to assess the claimant’s suitability for the post. As set out previously, we do not consider she would have asked a man this question. We consider that the claimant’s childcare responsibilities were important to Mrs Zhu’s assessment of the claimant’s suitability for the role,” the judge said.
The tribunal found that Lee had been directly discriminated against because of her sex when Zhu asked the question about her children and when the job offer was withdrawn.
R&F Properties has been ordered to pay Lee £91,597.82 in compensation, including awards for injury to feelings and financial losses including lost earnings, pension and nursery fees.
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