The British government should consider forcing companies to disclose how many discrimination and harassment complaints they receive, and how many settlement agreements—with confidentiality clauses—they agree to, lawmakers said in a report in June.
The government didn’t accept that. But a little-known court database comes close to that kind of public disclosure. It shows how many times companies have been sued for discrimination at an employment tribunal. And it shows the cases that were dropped before a judgment, which is usually because of a settlement deal.
It’s far from a comprehensive record. It only counts cases where a judge has made a decision, missing lawsuits that are at an earlier stage. And many settlements happen long before cases reach court.
Bloomberg has analyzed the court database’s sex discrimination cases. There are 3,585, of which 2,195 vanished into the ether. The data doesn’t indicate conclusively that each shaded case is a settlement, but it does reveal that they were “dismissed on withdrawal.” That’s typically code for a deal, according to the Ministry of Justice. Plaintiffs can, of course, drop their cases for other reasons.
The database tells nothing about the merits of the cases, but it shows how many there are and which employers are involved. Names of complainants and individual respondents have been removed. The database below is fully searchable.
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You can download the data here.
When a case is filed with a U.K. employment tribunal and then settled, which usually involves a non-disclosure agreement, the court has to formally throw it out so that the parties can’t litigate it any more. It does so by publishing a judgment “simply stating that the claim has been dismissed on withdrawal,” according to the Ministry of Justice.
It’s possible for plaintiffs to drop a case—and for it to be “dismissed on withdrawal”—without a settlement. But according to the MoJ, “dismissed on withdrawal is usually when the respondent has made a settlement offer which the claimant has accepted.”
The published judgments, which name the parties, have been available online since February 2017. Before then, they could be found in an archive in Bury St Edmunds, about 80 miles outside London.
Bloomberg has searched the content of those judgments from an employment-tribunal website to find those that include the dismissal wording. Judges’ phrasing can vary, but the most common examples include:
Where judgments’ wording doesn’t make it clear whether a case met the criteria for being a likely settlement, Bloomberg didn’t count it as one. Often, workers sue for several types of grievance in the same case—say, sex and age discrimination plus unfair dismissal. Bloomberg only counts as likely settlements those where the whole case was dropped, rather than those where the sex discrimination element alone was pulled.
The tribunal publishes claimants’ names too, but to protect individuals Bloomberg hasn’t reprinted those. The tribunal database covers all kinds of discrimination claims, but Bloomberg’s analysis focuses only on sex discrimination.
Some public sector cases may have been settled without NDAs because, according to a report published by lawmakers this year, the civil service has introduced guidelines to encourage settlements without confidentiality clauses.
The cases counted here are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to workers’ grievances about sex discrimination. Complaints only show up on this database if workers have gotten as far as filing papers with the employment tribunal. Many cases are settled before that stage.
The data that Bloomberg has used only include England and Wales, which share the same judicial system. It only counts cases where there’s been a decision, and not those filed with the court that are still at an earlier stage. Bloomberg searched decisions published from 2017 to Aug. 14, 2019.
Separately, in another database, the Ministry of Justice tracks the outcomes of cases on an aggregate level and without naming the parties. That shows that more than 7,000 sex-discrimination suits have been “dismissed on withdrawal” since 2013. The sex discrimination data includes complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender reassignment and marriage or civil partnership.