Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (retained from EU Regulation 2016/679 EU) (UK GDPR), employers can gather and analyse information about employees for equality monitoring purposes, provided they have a legal basis for the processing and, where applicable, the rules relating to processing special categories of personal data are met.
While many employers have, for some time, been conducting general equal opportunities monitoring, the issue of diversity in the UK is now firmly in the spotlight and becoming increasingly important because of the implementation of the gender pay gap reporting regime and the government’s plans to extend this to ethnicity pay gap reporting.
Equal opportunities monitoring and ethnicity pay gap reporting both involve the processing of ‘special categories of personal data, such as information about individuals’ race, ethnic origin, health, and sexual orientation. Gender pay gap reporting does not involve the processing of special category personal data, but salary information is nevertheless sensitive data.