(4 Votes)

Employers should be forced to invite job applicants to apply anonymously - to ensure they don't "subliminally" discriminate against women or ethnic minorities, according to an MP.

Lynne Featherstone (Lib Dem Hornsey and Wood Green) won a pledge that the Government will consider new laws obliging all firms to request anonymous CVs.

Under the proposals, firms would need to ensure the manager selecting candidates to be invited for interviews "does not know the gender, race, sexual orientation, age or marital status" of the candidate, or whether they were disabled.

Instead, applicants could simply include their National Insurance number on their CV, in order to identify them.

Any employer that failed to comply could face legal action for discrimination - even if there was no evidence they had actually discriminated against anyone.

Ms Featherstone set out her proposal as the House of Commons discussed the Government's Equality Bill, which contains a range of measures including a ban on age discrimination.

Vera Baird, the Solicitor General, said the Government would consider the idea.

Ms Featherstone said she was prompted to call for reform after two interns in her office said they were struggling to find a job.

She said: "The idea began when I had two interns with the surnames Hussein and Patel. They told me that they had applied for hundreds of jobs and had not been accepted for interview for any.

"It is not too hard to conclude that that had something to do with their surnames and recognition of their ethnicity."

She added: "People could be subliminally excluded by a human resources department or an individual who is reading a CV, without there being any intention to discriminate.

"In a name, one can recognise ethnicity, gender and age. We would not wish any of those things to be barriers at that first stage.

"Once people get through to interview all will be revealed, but at that stage personality can mitigate any subliminal bias.

"When children take exams, we do a similar thing to eliminate any bias from the examiner or marker - give children a candidate number for their GCSE, AS-level and A-level papers.

"There is no reason why written application forms could not use something like the national insurance number so that unconscious discards did not happen to the same degree."

Vera Baird, the Solicitor General, said "If the Honourable Lady is thinking about names, she has a point, which we should look at when we have the research."

She added: "What we ought to do is experiment, which is what we are seeking to do in that the Department for Work and Pensions has carried out a CV research exercise.

"Two carefully matched applications or CVs with names recognised as having different ethnicities have been submitted in response to the same advertised vacancies to see whether employers make different decisions depending on the names in the CVs.

"That research will be reported in the summer . . . the initial indications are that there is significant discrimination, so more work needs to be done to find an appropriate solution."

Ms Baird said: "I think we will return to this issue."

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