Make your profile count

Make your profile count

At Essex, we are proud of our diverse community and are committed to building an environment where every member of the University feels valued and can achieve their full potential.

We rely on data to inform our equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, as data helps us to identify any existing inequities within staff and student populations and implement targeted strategies to address them. Strategies could include actions to address equality pay gaps, make reasonable adjustments and other positive action to address any imbalance, of opportunity or disadvantages that individuals may be facing due to their protected characteristics.

Disclosing disability and neurodiversity

Our collective understanding of disability and neurodiversity has evolved significantly over time, and not everyone who has a disability as defined under the Equality Act (2010) will identify as being disabled. However, for data collection purposes, the Higher Agency Statistics Agency collects data on all of the following categories under the umbrella ‘disability’:

• Learning difference such as dyslexia, dyspraxia or AD(H)D
• Social/communication conditions such as a speech and language impairment or an autistic spectrum condition
• Long-term illness or health condition such as cancer, HIV, diabetes, chronic heart disease, or epilepsy
• Mental health condition, challenge or disorder, such as depression, schizophrenia or anxiety
• Physical impairment (a condition that substantially limits one or more basic physical activities such as walking, climbing stairs, lifting or carrying)
• D/deaf or have a hearing impairment
• Blind or have a visual impairment uncorrected by glasses
• Development condition that you have had since childhood which affects motor, cognitive, social and emotional skills, and speech and language
• An impairment, health condition or learning difference not listed above

If any of the above apply to you, we would encourage you to disclose through HR Organiser. As part of our “Your Profile Counts” campaign we are continuing to seek ways to increase staff declaration rates and, while we have made some progress in this area through our targeted strategies, more progress is still needed to help us make a notable difference. We want to ensure that all our staff and students feel valued, respected, and supported at Essex.

How can you help?

By disclosing information on protected characteristics, you can play an integral role in shaping, embedding and sustaining a more inclusive and equitable university community.

Your data is safe

We would like to assure you that this information can only be accessed by a limited number of people and always held in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Data is shared on a limited basis for ongoing work such as reporting and equality charters such as the Race Equality Charter and Athena Swan etc. We take the highest care to ensure that anonymity is maintained. Disclosing information related to protected characteristics is a personal decision, which is why we have provided the option of ‘prefer not to say’ for any question that you would not like to disclose information on, however we do encourage you to share to help advance Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the university.

How can you disclose?

There are two places on HR Organiser that you should update your information. Once you log in, you can click on ‘my profile,’ and then go to the ‘sensitive information’ page where you can choose to disclose information related to protected characteristics. The second page is under ‘my profile,’ ‘employment,’ and then under ‘view or amend HESA details.’ This information is held internally and returned to HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, as part of our annual submission to them.

Please contact the Inclusion Team if you have any questions about disclosing your information on HR Organiser.