Employment Equality - Catholics - 2019

In 2015, research showed that Scotland's public bodies had an average employment rate of 10.56% of the workforce identifying as Catholic. The government's demographic data resource showed that Scotland's adult population at that time had just over 15% of people identifying as Catholic. The research concluded - This failure of public bodies in Scotland to act decisively on institutional discrimination and sectarianism against Catholics means that for a lot of young Catholic people alive today, they will live out their lives and die before demonstrable and evidenced equality of employment opportunity is available to them.

Follow up research in 2020 found that the sector's average employment rate for Catholic people had fallen to 10.19%. The national demographic for Scotland's population as at 2018 showed that 14.3% of the adult population was identifying as Catholic.

While the sector-wide average of 10.19% of the workforce identifying as Catholic is a positive outcome, there are some underlying concerns that some organisations are simply refusing to gather and publish detailed data on the religion/belief of their employees. It is also noteworthy that three organisations employing 25,806 people [over 77% of the sector total] report percentages of employees identifying as Catholic well into double figures, inevitably distorting the sector-wide average.

The research in 2020 concluded - While there is much to welcome, in crude numbers, in what this research reveals, there remain concerns that 7 employers in this group of 19 public sector employers do not gather and publish data on how many employees identify as Catholic or Protestant. Other major concerns include the lack of analysis of the data available and published to reach judgments on whether workforce profiles need to change to eliminate evidence of discrimination. This lack serves to underline and emphasise what was a concern before the Equality Act 2010 – that employers had come to view that gathering and publishing of employee data as an end in itself. Nothing in what has been published by this group of public sector organisations provides any evidence that those concerns will wither away without a robust and rigorous approach to enforcement of the Equality Act 2010.