Our impact: Employment Law

Our priorities

We believe that every woman should be able to work in an environment that is safe, respectful and free from sexual harassment.

Too many women continue to experience harassment, discrimination and victimisation in the workplace. Many face barriers to challenging unlawful behaviour, including fear of losing their job, concerns about career progression, lack of awareness of their rights and difficulties accessing specialist legal advice.

Working alongside women with lived experience, we use learning from our advice services, education work and influencing activity to improve legal protections and workplace practice.

Read a summary of our top ten recommendations to Government for meaningful change, which we sent to the new elected government in August 2024.

Whilst we are pleased that some of these recommendations have now been enacted, there is still a long way to go to. You can read more about this progress in the Stories of Impact section below. In the meantime, we continue to carry out long term work to move towards greater access to justice for all women.

Our current recommendations to Government include:

→ Stronger employer accountability for preventing sexual harassment

→ Effective implementation of employers’ preventative duties

→ Improved access to justice for women pursuing employment tribunal claims

→ Better workplace protections for women experiencing Violence Against Women and Girls

→ Stronger regulation of confidentiality clauses and non-disclosure agreements

→ Trauma-informed approaches to workplace investigations and complaint handling

→ Greater recognition of the links between workplace sexual harassment and wider gender inequality

Advice

Every year our lawyers support over 250 women through our Employment Law services.

Women who contact us are often experiencing sexual harassment, sexual assault, victimisation, discrimination, retaliation after reporting concerns, or workplace cultures that tolerate unacceptable behaviour.

We are supported in this work by a dedicated team of around 22 volunteer women lawyers, whose expertise and commitment enable us to reach more women and increase access to specialist legal advice.

Our advice service won a Highly Commended Award in the LawWorks Pro Bono Awards in the Best New Pro Bono Activity category in 2019.

Our specialist women lawyers provide free, trauma-informed legal advice that assists women to:

• Understand their employment rights and legal protections
• Make informed decisions about reporting and challenging harassment
• Assess options for resolving workplace disputes
• Understand employment tribunal processes and time limits
• Navigate workplace procedures and investigations
• Challenge unlawful treatment and seek redress where appropriate

Through this work, women gain greater understanding of their rights and confidence to take action.

You can find out more about our employment law advice line and opening times here.

The need and demand for access to free, specialist legal advice far outweighs availability and this contributes to the scale and severity of VAWG.

When Rights of Women launched its specialist Sexual Harassment at Work service in 2019, no dedicated national legal advice service of its kind for women existed. Since then, the service has supported hundreds of women, become embedded within referral pathways and provided a vital source of evidence about the realities of workplace sexual harassment. After just one year, our advice line data revealed the scale and seriousness of the issue, including that almost half of callers had experienced sexual assault in the workplace. This evidence has helped strengthen public understanding of workplace sexual violence and underpins our calls for legal and policy change.

Read our newspiece on our advice line data findings here. We continue to analyse evidence from the service and will publish further findings on women’s experiences of workplace sexual harassment.

Influencing

Rights of Women plays an important role in influencing employment law and policy relating to workplace sexual harassment.

Our advice services provide a unique insight into women’s experiences of workplace harassment and the barriers they face when seeking justice.

We use learning from our frontline services to identify gaps in legal protection and advocate for changes to law, policy and workplace practice.

We frequently provide evidence to consultations, engage with policymakers and collaborate with partners to improve protections for women.

Examples of our employment law policy positions, submissions and reports can be found here.

Stories of impact

Ending the misuse of non-disclosure agreements

For many women, confidentiality clauses and non-disclosure agreements have been used to protect workplace reputations rather than those who have experienced harassment and discrimination.

Rights of Women has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that women are never forced to trade their silence for justice.

Since launching our Sexual Harassment at Work advice service in 2019, we have developed extensive expertise on the ways confidentiality clauses are used in workplace harassment cases. Through our frontline legal work, we have seen how women can be pressured into signing agreements at moments of acute vulnerability, often while dealing with trauma, financial insecurity and fears about their future employment.

We have supported the #CantBuyMySilence campaign and provided detailed evidence to Government consultations on reforming the law surrounding non-disclosure agreements. Our recommendations have focused on ensuring access to independent legal advice, preventing coercion, protecting survivors’ ability to access support and creating stronger safeguards against the misuse of confidentiality clauses.

This work is helping to shift the conversation away from institutional protection and towards survivor autonomy, safety and informed choice.

Read our consultation response to the Government’s consultation on Non Disclosure agreements here.

Protecting women who speak up

Too many women fear that reporting workplace sexual harassment will damage their careers, reputation or future employment prospects.

Rights of Women has worked to strengthen protections for women who raise concerns about harassment and challenge unlawful behaviour at work in the Employment Rights Act 2025.

Through our advice services, we frequently hear from women who have experienced victimisation, retaliation or threats after speaking out about workplace harassment. Women regularly tell us that fear of losing their job or damaging their career prevents them from reporting abuse in the first place.

We have welcomed developments that strengthen protections for workers who disclose workplace sexual harassment and have continued to advocate for a legal framework that enables women to raise concerns safely and confidently. We believe that women should never have to choose between their livelihood and their right to challenge harassment.

Read our newspiece on the Employment Rights Act 2025 in relation to whistleblowing protections here.

Strengthening employer responsibility for preventing sexual harassment

For many years, workplace sexual harassment law focused primarily on responding to incidents after harm had already occurred.

Rights of Women played an active role in campaigning for the Worker Protection Act 2023, which introduced a new duty on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

Drawing on evidence from women contacting our Sexual Harassment at Work advice line, we consistently highlighted the limitations of a system that placed responsibility on individual women to report harassment and pursue claims after harm had already occurred.

Through our policy work, consultation responses and campaigning activity, including our participation in the #ThisIsNotWorking alliance, we supported calls for stronger legal protections that place greater responsibility on employers to create safe workplaces. We also campaigned to retain protections relating to third-party harassment and challenged attempts to weaken the legislation as it progressed through Parliament.

The introduction of the preventative duty marked the most significant strengthening of workplace sexual harassment protections in a generation. It represented an important shift from a reactive system that responds to harassment after it occurs, to one that places greater emphasis on prevention and employer accountability.

Today, we continue to work to ensure that employers understand and implement their legal obligations. Following the passage of the Worker Protection Act, we submitted detailed evidence to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on its draft guidance and successfully secured the inclusion of a number of our recommendations, including stronger expectations around sexual harassment investigations, prevention action plans, risk assessments and monitoring.

Read our response to the EHRC’s guidance on sexual harassment here.