New legislation to prevent sexual harassment webinar

Rebecca Thomas leads on employment policy for the Equality and Human Rights Commission which, as Britain’s national equality body and ‘A’ status National Human Rights Institute, is responsible for safeguarding human rights and enforcing the Equality Act 2010.

During her time at the EHRC, Rebecca has worked extensively with a range of government departments, regulators, public bodies and the private sector, providing insight and advice to help them understand and fulfil their obligations under equality and human rights law. She oversees the EHRC’s work on the sexual harassment preventative duty and is currently leading the EHRC’s engagement on the Government’s New Deal for Working People.

Julie is a Diversity and Inclusion specialist with 20 years’ experience, gained within the public and voluntary sector. As Head of Inclusive Workplace Policy at Acas, Julie is responsible for leading Acas’ Inclusive Workplaces policy programme covering EDI and Wellbeing.

She has successfully developed and delivered strategic D&I initiatives relating to employment and service delivery and is one of the country’s most experienced professionals in this field.

Over the years, Julie has developed and sustained robust corporate diversity and inclusion infrastructures including internal diversity staff networks and diversity champions, a wide range of positive action initiatives, internal diversity monitoring across all diversity strands, award winning diversity campaigns in order to increase awareness of diversity and inclusion and its relationship with cultural change, along with a suite of diversity and inclusion training packages, including unconscious bias and inclusive leadership.

During her career, her work on D&I has been recognised repeatedly and was named as an Inspirational D&I leader of 2021, in the Global D&I Leaders Benchmarking Survey 2021. More recently she featured in a publication that showcased the most inspiring businesswomen to watch in 2022.

Julie is passionate about diversity and inclusion in the workplace and strives to create an environment where people can be themselves at work. She is proud to be a diversity ally and a champion for mental health awareness, often sharing her own personal story about living with anxiety caused by PTSD.