Ms S Atlas v Travelers Insurance Company Limited — 2023

Ms S Atlas alleged that Travelers Insurance Company Limited discriminated against her when she was not shortlisted for a Desktop Services 2nd Line Support role she applied for on 17 November 2021. The tribunal found that the recruitment process involved 16 applications, that the Claimant was one of 12 candidates declined at the sift stage, and that the shortlisted candidates were Mr Order, Mr Chughtai, Ms Evans and Mr Pinto. It accepted that Mr Order was advanced because of an internal recommendation, and that the shortlisting was a swift and impressionistic sift rather than a detailed scoring exercise.

On direct race discrimination, the tribunal did not accept that Mr Hartigan deduced the Claimant's Pakistani background from her name and rejected her for that reason. It found that the Claimant's name had no more and no less impact than Mr Chughtai's, that Mr Hartigan did not make anything of the name Shazia Atlas, and that the decision was instead based on a view that three applicants had stronger CVs and Mr Order had a strong internal recommendation. The tribunal also accepted evidence that Mr Hartigan had previously recruited Mr Ibrahim, a man of Pakistani heritage, into his team, which it treated as supportive of its conclusion that race was not the reason for the non-shortlisting.

On direct age discrimination, the tribunal found no evidence that age was taken into account in the recruitment decision. Although it accepted that age might be inferable from some application histories, it concluded that nothing in the evidence showed Mr Hartigan had done so here. It also accepted his evidence that he had recruited people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, including ST in his mid-50s, Mr Walker in his 50s and AW in his 40s. For indirect discrimination, the tribunal rejected the alleged PCP that the Respondent would not employ British Pakistanis or employees aged 45-60 in second line support, because the evidence did not support the existence of such a practice and the Respondent had in fact employed Mr Ibrahim in a similar role. All four claims were dismissed.