A banker has won her case against Barclays after a tribunal ruled her boss was sexist for referring to women as ‘birds’.
Anca Lacatus won nearly £50k in compensation after winning a sex discrimination case against the high street bank.
She had sought a payout of £1.3million for cases relating to both sexism and disability discrimination, but was awarded £49,729, including £1,526 in relation to the birds claim – £1,000 plus interest.
A tribunal ruled that her former boss, James Kinghorn, had ‘inadvertently caused offence’ by using the term in a ‘misplaced use of irony’, the Telegraph reported.
Ms Lacatus said she had reprimanded Mr Kinghorn word ‘bird’ in a reference to a female colleague in 2018.
But he continued to use to made her feel uncomfortable while urging her not to report him to the company’s HR department.
Despite defending his conduct as ‘light-hearted’ while acknowledging it was unacceptable, Mr Kinghorn was found by a judge to have behaved in a ‘sexist’ and was ‘foolish’ to use the term even as a joke.
Ruling on the case, Judge John Crosfill said that Mr Kinghorn’s language was ‘plainly sexist’, while accepting that the manager had ‘ultimately got the message’ and that he had not intended to offend Ms Lacatus.
Judge Crosfill also found that the employee was put at a ‘substantial disadvantage compared to others without a disability’, after the company refused to change her hours as a result of her suffering from anxiety and endometriosis – a disease affecting the uterus.
For her £46,000-a-year salary, Ms Lacatus was expected to work between 40 and 48 hours a week in shifts often finishing later than 7pm.
The analyst completed a master’s degree in finance before joining the bank.
