Equality and Human Rights Commission

What’s in this guide?

This guide tells you how you can avoid all the different types of unlawful discrimination

It covers the following situations and subjects (we tell you what any unusual words mean as we go along):

• whether equality law applies to your organisation
• what is meant by ‘member’, ‘associate member’ and ‘guest’
• making sure you know what equality law means for your association
• what equality law means for membership of an association
  • membership just for people who share a protected characteristic
  • access by associate members and guests who share the same characteristic as members
  • when an association cannot take protected characteristics into account in deciding membership or terms of membership
  • pregnant women’s health and safety
  • positive action
  • more favourable treatment for disabled people
• the special rules applying to sports clubs. 

Equality law affects everyone responsible for running your association or who might do something on its behalf, including staff if you have them. 

This guide is for you if you run an ‘association’ as this is defined by equality law.

If equality law does apply to you, this affects your activities, including how you behave towards members, associate members and guests (or potential members, associate members and guests).

Pages in this section include:

Core guidance: Association

Does equality law apply to my organisation?

What equality law means for a membership of an association

Special rules applying to sports clubs.

This guide also contains the following sections, which are similar in each guide in the series, and contain information you are likely to need to understand what we tell you about running an association: