Tribunal ‘wrong to reject menopausal symptoms as a disability’

An employment tribunal had been wrong to hold that an employee’s alleged menopausal symptoms did not amount to a disability for the purposes of a discrimination claim.

That was the ruling of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in a case involving Leicester City Council and one of its childcare social workers, Ms Rooney.

Rooney had worked for the authority from 2006 to 2018. Her case was that she had been suffering severe menopausal symptoms since 2017, she was struggling physically and mentally at work and the local authority had treated her unfairly to the point that she had no option but to resign.

She submitted a claim giving details of disability, harassment and victimisation.

She provided a disability impact statement and medical evidence. At a preliminary hearing, the Employment Tribunal allowed the unfair dismissal and non-payment claims to proceed but dismissed the other claims.

It found that Rooney did not have a disability for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. 

The EAT overturned that decision. It held that for the following reasons, the tribunal had erred in holding that she was not a disabled person at the relevant time:

• The tribunal stated that she had not relied on physical symptoms associated with the menopause. That statement was inconsistent with the employee’s description of her menopausal symptoms, which included several physical symptoms and which the tribunal had not rejected.

• The tribunal stated, alternatively, that any physical symptoms were not physical impairments that were long standing or had a substantial effect on the employee’s ability to carry out day-to-day activities. That was contrary to the employee’s evidence of significant impairments caused by her physical symptoms since 2017 that were still ongoing when she resigned over a year later. The tribunal had not rejected her evidence yet had failed to explain why it concluded that the impairments were not long term or more than minor or trivial.

• The tribunal had focused on the things that the employee was able to do, thereby falling into the error of weighing what she could do against what she could not.

It followed that the tribunal had erred in dismissing the disability discrimination claim on the basis that the employee was not disabled.

The question of whether she was a disabled person required a careful factual analysis and was remitted to be considered again by a fresh tribunal.

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Rooney v Leicester City Council
Employment Appeal Tribunal
7 October 2021
Judge James Tayler