Female City worker wins £1.2m after boss’s breast joke

A female City worker won more than £1.2 million after her senior executive boss told her: “If I had breasts like yours, I would be demanding too.”

Robert Llewellyn is said to have smirked at Julia Sommer and added “I bet you like to be on top in bed” in front of colleagues at a work drinks event.

Ms Sommer, who was working as a junior underwriter at Swiss Re, the insurance giant, said the executive made the remarks after she had joked about trying to persuade her boyfriend to marry her.

An employment tribunal, held remotely in central London, heard that Mr Llewellyn then told the group that Ms Sommer was interested in pursuing an “open relationship”.

The hearing was told Ms Sommer and Mr Llewellyn had an increasingly difficult relationship, with him criticising her for her “dominant” personality and screaming at her to “shut up” in a meeting.

After she became pregnant and went on maternity leave, he plotted to have her forced out on the pretence that she was being made redundant.

‘It was unwanted conduct’

After taking Swiss Re to an employment tribunal, Ms Sommer successfully sued the company for sex discrimination, sex harassment, victimisation, pregnancy discrimination and unfair dismissal.

Following her victory, Ms Sommer, who was on a salary of £75,000 a year, was awarded £1,287,014 in compensation. The fee covers injury to feelings, financial losses, future losses, pension losses, aggravated damages and damages to cover “psychiatric injury”.

The tribunal, chaired by Employment Judge Mark Emery, concluded that Mr Llewellyn had made the remarks.

“It was unwanted conduct,” the panel found. “We noted that it was ‘blurted’... an attempt we felt as a joke – sexist, demeaning and derogatory but an attempted joke nonetheless – which went badly wrong and should never have been made.

“[Ms Sommer] didn’t complain. We felt this was because she was a new employee, a junior underwriter and he was the global head.

“It was not, we considered, designed to harass the claimant, it was a horrible attempt at a joke in the context of [her] often blunt comments about her private life. In this context it was not sexual, it was effectively a comment about [her] relationship with her partner. But it was related to [her] sex, it was a comment objectifying her body.”

Executive denied making remarks

The tribunal had heard that Ms Sommer started work at the company as a political risk underwriter in June 2017. Her team was led by Mr Llewellyn, the global head of the political risk and trade credit team, based in Zurich. Swiss Re also has a London office in the Gherkin skyscraper.

The tribunal heard that Ms Sommer was the victim of sexist conduct from Mr Llewellyn from early on in her career including an incident at work drinks on Dec 13 2017.

When she complained, the executive denied making the remarks. The hearing was also told that in February 2019 she raised a sex discrimination grievance after Mr Llewellyn shouted “Shut up, Julia!” during a global team conference call.

A month later, the tribunal was told, Mr Llewellyn accused Ms Sommer of having a “dominant personality”, asked her “why do you always try to be strong?” and told her to “show more vulnerability” and take a more “submissive role”.

He then asked her to take a personality test and to go through a “360 degree” feedback exercise with her colleagues.

‘Wide-ranging detrimental effects’

In April 2019 she told her employers she was pregnant, and that she intended to take maternity leave and return to work. The tribunal heard that within days of her announcement, Mr Llewellyn and other staff began exploring how to remove her from the business.

Ms Sommer returned from maternity leave to part-time work in July 2020, and in October was informed her role was at risk of redundancy, a move Swiss Re claimed was needed to cut costs.

However, this was a sham, the tribunal ruled. “We concluded that the rationale for [her] redundancy was retrofitted onto a decision already taken to dismiss [her],” it concluded. “This was not a genuine rationale, and it is not one which would have been applied to a male comparator – an employee with similar length of service and competence as the claimant.”

Ms Sommer said she suffered “severe and wide-ranging detrimental effects” on her mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. She left Swiss Re following the conclusion of a disciplinary investigation in February 2021.

The tribunal also ruled that the way Mr Llewellyn spoke to her was “intrinsically sexist” and that “he would not had a similar view of a male underwriter”.

Ms Sommer’s other claims, related to victimisation and equal pay, were dismissed.