Read on Twitter
1/ It’s not normal for a company CEO to email all staff tell them there are certain views they should not express. But that’s what Guy Goodwin ( @GuyNatCen) of @NatCen did over sex and the census.
2/ Companies like NatCen have policies on their employees communications that let them know the boundaries on how they may engage in public debate without risking the companies reputation for impartiality.
3/ Guy Goodwin decided that believing that the census should contain an unambiguous question on sex was such an inflammatory idea that existing policies no longer applied.
4/ Goodwin emailed all staff to recommend they should not sign a letter on sex and the census as it may upset some of their colleagues and that they must not mention their role at NatCen if they sign.
5/ Professor Alice Sulivan who wrote the letter talks about what happened in this article, we can deduce she is talking about NatCen from the article “Stonewall’s new boss Nancy Kelley let census expert be no-platformed” in today’s Times. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13645579.2020.1768346?journalCode=tsrm20
6/ The normal formulation is to say that you should make clear the views are your own, but Goodwin went further and said that employees shouldn’t mention their role.
7/ Apparently any association with the view that human sex is essentially binary might jeopardize NatCen’s reputation for scientific impartialiy.
8/ As a research organization, NatCen’s usual approach is quite different. Employees blog about their research findings. Guy Goodwin tweets as NatCen CEO without any caveats that the views expressed are his own.
9/ Usually NatCen thinks we are intelligent enough to distinguish an individual’s view from an organization. When he tweets to recommend The Clink restaurant in Sutton, no-one believes this reflects official NatCen policy on dining in the North Downs.
10/ By reinventing company policy on-the-fly for this one issue Goodwin is intimidating his staff. Would you feel comfortable as an employee in expressing a view when your CEO has sent an all-staff email saying that this is a view the company wishes to distance itself from? No.
11/ NatCen boasts on their website that “As a non profit organisation we are never compromised by commercial or political agendas”.
12/ When the CEO is silencing staff over the reality of sex and the deputy CEO, Nancy Kelley, then becomes head of Stonewall you have to conclude that they have allowed their integrity to be compromised.
