Wedding Bells, a marriage certificate, but few P60s - is this equality ?

Scottish government has been devoting much precious legislative process and time to redressing the inequalities inherent in lesbian, gay and bi-sexual [LGB] people being able to get married in Scotland.  The wider discourse on same-sex marriage has uncovered evidence that prejudice, bigotry and homophobia in Scotland are rarely far below the scratched surface of many people's comfort zones.  To their credit, government has not allowed the opposition to same-sex marriage to deflect them from the goal of remedying an institutional inequality.

With same-sex marriage the contemporary backdrop to LGB equality in Scotland, one would have imagined a positive knock-on effect in other areas of LGB discrimination, such as in improving the employment levels of LGB people within Scotland's public sector.  Curiously and regrettably, given government's control over the public sector, the benefits remain limited to the prospects of wedding bells and have yet to witness marked improvements in the employment prospects of LGB people securing P60's within the public sector.

Recent research has looked at how the NHS in Scotland is performing in meeting the specific equality duty which requires them to profile their workforce by protected characteristic, analyse what this tells them, and then act on this so that they can better deliver employment equality - for all protected characteristics, including LGB people.  

We know that 19 of Scotland's 22 NHS Boards published profiling reports.  The other 3 either blissfully ignorant or simply ignoring the law.  No doubt the EHRC will be on their case.  It would be helpful if the Cabinet Secretary for Health was also to prod 3 chief executives with a sharp performance-related-pay stick.

From the reports which were published, we know that the NHS in Scotland employs 158,326 workers.  We also know that 1,502 of them identify themselves as LGB - just 0.95% of the workforce.  That is quite a way short of the UK government's estimate for the LGB population.  

On the basis of these figures, there appears to be something like 7,998+ LGB people missing from the payroll of Scotland's NHS.  

When performance on LGB equality reveals that a town the size of Oban would be needed to accommodate  all the LGB people missing from the payroll of the NHS in Scotland, it is possible to conclude that institutional discrimination in the NHS on the grounds of being LGB contributes significantly to the scale of those estimated to be missing.