Anyone applying for any sort of job, particularly in the public sector, is asked to fill in boxes stating their race, religion and often sexual orientation. Why is this? To what end is this information collected? Is it to positively discriminate in favour of certain minorities? If you are a Caucasian English Hetrosexual like myself its easy to feel as if such information is being used to weed us out of obtaining certain jobs. Why is this info collected if not to monitor who gets certain jobs? If we are an equal society why are we being divided and catagorized and sorted by such questionaires?

Good question - I've never known anyone to ask it before.

it's probably about aiming for diversity.

I think that makes you an ethnic minority........

Tony - take no notice of Vespa (he is lacking oxygen today)

Ethnic monitoring is done to examine difficulties in access
and discrimination experienced by some black and minority ethnic individuals and communities.

Could this be an unexpected consequence of increasing CO2 levels?

It seems to me that much of this type of apparently pointless data gathering is about blame-avoidance. Local authorities seem particularly keen on this sort of thing. Presumably the idea is that so long as they can show that they are monitoring the ethnic/gender/age/sexual orientation mix of their workforce and that the percentage from each group is approximately equal to the percentage who apply for employment, they cannot be accused of discrimination.

I think, perhaps, if there is an extremely small number of ethnic minorities (I really dislike that term) within a work environment it could show that there is a problem. I emphasise could because obviously that isn't always the case.