A former sales director in the UK has been awarded more than £71,000 by an employment tribunal after his boss allegedly told him he did not want a team of ‘bald-headed 50-year-old men’, reports the Business Insider. Mark Jones was a sales director at UK-based cell phone company Tango Networks. He began working at the company in January 2019, when he was 59 years old. In 2020, the company sought to hire a new salesperson. Jones claims that during that interview process, his line manager Phillip Hesketh, told him, "A lot of the candidates we were interviewing were a mirror image of me, white middle-aged men" and that "it was a shame that we did not attract more diversity into the application process."

Hesketh said he didn’t want a team of ‘50 odd year-old balding men’ and ‘ideally a woman’. Jones was subsequently put on a performance improvement plan, which he calls a ‘sham’, a few years after joining. Hesketh claimed he was ‘underwhelmed’ by his employee and that Jones ‘needed handholding’, but the tribunal said it was ‘unable to find that the claimant was actually not performing adequately’.  Jones resigned in March 2021 and subsequently alleged wrongful dismissal and age discrimination. The tribunal ultimately ruled that Tango Networks had unfairly dismissed Jones and breached its contract with him.

In a separate ruling from a different case last year, a UK employment tribunal ruled that calling a man ‘bald’ constitutes workplace sexual harassment.