A university influenced by “pernicious and destructive” unconscious bias when it failed to reappoint an Indian academic has been ordered to pay at least £450,000 in damages.
Dr Kajal Sharma was discriminated against by bosses at Portsmouth University when she failed in her application to carry on in her role in the Business and Law faculty, a tribunal found.
The university refused to reappoint her to a job she had been doing for five years and recruited an inexperienced white candidate instead, the panel was told.
Over a three-year period, the 41-year-old was one of only two senior lecturers at the institution to not be reappointed to their job. She was the only ethnic minority candidate to apply for reappointment during that period, while 11 out of 12 white colleagues had all been retained.
Employment Judge Catherine Rayner, awarding the compensation, said: “The fact that the discrimination was not intentional or deliberate in this case does not reduce the level of hurt experienced by [Dr Sharma].
“Unconscious bias is pernicious and destructive, and [she] was entitled to assume that senior members of academic institutions would behave with scrupulous fairness and have an awareness of the possibility of their own potential biases.”
Dr Sharma was awarded at least £450,000 in compensation with the possibility of a further £300,000 depending on pension calculations after the tribunal concluded that the selection process was “tainted by race discrimination”.
