On 20 April 2011 16:11, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
On 20/04/2011 13:06, steve virgin wrote:
PS: I am white and middle aged so am guilty as charged!!!
So far so good. Here is a list....
- Gender
- Ethnicity
- Age
- Religion
- Disability
- Sexual orientation
Before coming up with our own list of areas of concern, the Equalities Act sets out[0] nine "protected characteristics" that are worth considering for scope:
1. age; 2. disability; 3. gender reassignment; 4. marriage and civil partnership; 5. pregnancy and maternity; 6. race; 7. religion or belief; 8. sex; 9. sexual orientation.
Stereotypically, we[1] are unbalanced in all of these to some extent. We are slightly non-representative in 9 and to an extent 3[2], somewhat non-representative in 1, 2, 4 (mostly as a consequence of 1 and 8), 6 and 7, and hideously non-representative in 8 (and thus 5). I think any focus should clearly be on 8 (and 4 and 5, to the limited extent that it's helpful to the community), but also fixing the other non-representative issues too.
There was also the secondary characteristic of socio-economic status that was considered but didn't make the Act which is worth considering for our purposes. On a global scale, the Foundation's push towards the Global South touches on many of these points as well as this tenth dimension.
[0] - http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4 [1] - by "we" I mean Wikimedia in the Anglosphere [2] - over-representation against wider population
J.