More than a third of UK employees have felt discriminated against in the workplace, according to a new study.
Age is the most common reason, with more than one in ten employees believing that they have suffered age discrimination, while 8% feel they’ve been discriminated against due to their gender – this figure rises to 11% amongst women.
The research of 1,300 working adults shows that discrimination is more prevalent in some sectors than others. People working in IT and telecoms most likely to have felt discriminated against (53%), along with those in financial services (52%) and arts and culture (50%). The figures fall in other sectors with less than a quarter of those in the travel and transport industry feeling discriminated against, for example and 27% in manufacturing.
Age discrimination
According to the findings, half (50%) of those under 35 say they have felt discriminated against, compared to just a quarter (26%) of those over the age of 45. The contrast is visible across both age (15% vs 14%), gender (11% vs 5%) and other types of discrimination.
“Workplace discrimination has hit the headlines in the last 12 months, with the #MeToo movement and BBC pay row shining a spotlight on the inequality that still exists within many professions,” commented Jeff Phipps, Managing Director at ADP UK, which carried out the research. “Our findings show that the problem is by no means limited to the entertainment and media industries, suggesting that more needs to be done across all sectors to ensure these types of prejudices are rooted out of the system.”
The research sample consisted of 9,908 working adults in eight territories across Europe, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.