Happy to provide numbers of Jewish, Hindu, Muslim or Church of England people, but not Catholic - Scotland's universities

Aside from being places where the bulk of tomorrow's middle-class public sector management apparatchiks are created, Scotland's universities are also major employers.  In 2019 and based on reports they themselves have published, Scotland's universities employ almost 50,000 people.

Like all other employers across Scotland's public sector, universities are struggling to evidence that discrimination has been eliminated and that equality of employment opportunity is being allowed to flourish unhindered by the weeds of prejudice and bigotry.  Recent research into data published by all universities on the religion or belief identity of their workforce revealed that 'Scotland's Shame', so eloquently described by James MacMillan in 1999, continues to cringe even in Scotland's ivory towers, helped not a little by the fact that almost half of Scotland's universities refuse to turn on the light and let the world see the data on Catholic and Protestant people employed by them. 

This reluctance stands in contrast to the willingness of all the other universities to gather and publish data sets providing a rich granularity on the religion and belief identify of their workforce, whether it be Jewish people representing 0.1% of the Napier University workforce, the 4 Hindu people in the Stirling University workforce, the 2 Church of England people employed at Queen Margaret University, and the 59 Muslim people on the workforce at Aberdeen University.  Just don't ask about Catholics and Protestants.

In fairness to universities, Scottish government is also guilty of refusing to shine a light on the Catholic and Protestant cohorts within their workforce.  Their most recent employment equality report from 2019 rolls up the uncomfortable reality of sectarianism by aggregating the troubling data sets into an anonymised, unembarrassing and uninformative catch-all of 'Christian', amounting to 25.7% of government's workforce.  Curiously, the benchmark government chooses to check performance reveals that Scotland has 44% of the population identifying as Christian.  Government doesn't comment on this disparity or inequality.

Strathclyde University is one of a number of universities unable to evidence employment equality for people identifying as Catholic. Page 25 of the Strathclyde University workforce profiling report reveals : 

At Strathclyde, information from staff on gender reassignment, religion and belief, sexual orientation, marital and civil partnership status was sought in September 2013 for the first time. The disclosure rates for gender reassignment (improved by 4%), and parental (improved by 2%) have increased since 2017. All other rates have slightly decreased since 2017. We will monitor this and consider initiatives to improve the disclosure rate for reporting purposes. 

What Strathclyde University fails to address is that it is unable – and has been unable for some time – to identify and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of a person identifying as Catholic. 

Almost half of Scotland’s universities have failed to gather and publish data sets which evidence [or fail to evidence] employment equality for people identifying as Catholic.  All of Scotland’s universities have failed to provide a benchmark against which to judge current performance on delivering religious equality in employment and not one of them has offered up any clear sense of what their destination [the elimination of religious discrimination] will look like if and when it is reached.

The silence of so many of Scotland’s universities on the Catholic and Protestant profiles of their workforce simply acts as a shout which draws attention to another fertile layer of the cultural landscape in Scotland which enables the continued growth of intolerance and which continues to provide discreet sustenance to the sectarianism long recognised as ‘Scotland’s shame’, as discussed and illustrated more recently in 2018.