White male banker from "prestigious university" claims discrimination

Investment banks are becoming more diverse, but it's still hard to claim that they're bastions of diversity when - for example - just 27% of the people recently promoted to managing director at Credit Suisse were women. As efforts are made to correct the imbalance, some white male bankers complain they're being unfairly overlooked.

One of those bankers took his case to the British employment tribunal system but has had it thrown out on a technicality.

As first reported in Financial News, B Drummond, a former member of Lloyds Bank's large corporates team in the UK, complained that as a white male he was subject to systemic "direct sex and race discrimination" at the bank over a period of 12 months in 2020.

Drummond, who the judge described as, "an extremely intelligent and articulate individual," with, "very impressive grades in secondary school culminating in a degree with a very prestigious university," was first placed at risk of redundancy in January 2020 after he ranked in the bottom 5% of employees in the large corporates group. - He claims that this scoring process represented the first instance of discrimination. 

Drummond didn't lose his job, however. Instead, from 23 March 2020 until 30 September 2020 he moved jobs within Lloyds and became a member of the corporate and institutional debt team, covering a colleague who was on maternity leave. During that period, he applied for an alternative job, two grades below his previous role, in the large corporates team. However, he was unsuccessful. In August 2020, he applied for a role at his previous grade in the large corporates team, but was unsuccessful again. Both roles appear to have gone to candidates from diverse groups. Instead, he was given a short term opportunity in the real estate credit team between October and December 2020, and then his role was terminated. 

Drummond, whose first name isn't given, claimed that although the three instances of alleged discrimination appear unrelated, the managers involved in his complaints, "were within a close-knit management group within the respondent and operated under the same cultural mores."

The judge who considered the case said that while Drummond's claims might have had some merit, it was impossible to establish whether he really had a case without far more detailed evidence than Drummond provided. However, he ran out of time for providing supplementary detail. Drummond submitted his claim form to the Tribunal in March 2021, two months after the deadline for doing so. His argued for more time on the basis that he hadn't wanted to upset Lloyds by bringing a case while he was still working there, but the judge deemed this, "an unsatisfactory and unconvincing explanation for delay."

B. Drummond has presumably, therefore, been looking for a new banking job in London ever since. 

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