Clients are often entertained at lap-dancing clubs, the report found

MOST lap-dancing clubs in London provide "discrete receipts" enabling staff to claim back expenses from their employer, says a new report.

Women's equality at work is being threatened by the use of lap-dancing clubs to entertain clients and displays of pornography, research by The Fawcett Society has found.

It revealed lads' mags were displayed for sale in more than 50,000 workplaces.

The sex industry had "infiltrated" the workplace after an "unprecedented" expansion over the past decade, the campaign group found.

It said exposure of employees to pornography at work was "rife", ranging from the display of pornography and a trend of entertaining clients and staff in lap-dancing clubs.

Research for the Fawcett Society found that 41 per cent of UK lap-dancing clubs directly targeted employers through marketing on their websites.

There were no independent, compulsory guidelines about the display and sale of pornography, and no major retailer had a policy of covering up lads' mags or putting them on the top shelf, said the Fawcett Society.

A fifth of men admitted accessing pornography at work.

Kat Banyard, campaigns officer at the Fawcett Society, said: "Despite relative silence on the issue within employer circles, our research shows that the sex industry is a major threat to women's equality at work.

"For too long, employers have engaged with the sex industry without due regard for the impact on female employees, and have failed to prevent the illicit use of the sex industry by employees in a work context. But this is an issue that employers cannot afford to ignore.

"The sex industry is increasingly targeting the corporate market"

"The sex industry is increasingly targeting the corporate market, with lap-dancing clubs marketing themselves as ideal venues to host meetings and client entertaining.

"Yet lap-dancing clubs are a form of commercial sexual exploitation and fuel sexist attitudes towards women. Their use in a work context discriminates against female employees and undermines women's status at work.

"While the days when it was deemed acceptable to hang girly calendars on office walls may be long gone, the presence of degrading imagery of women in UK workplaces has never been more endemic.

"Pornographic lads' mags are openly displayed in over 50,000 retail shops, each one of them somebody's workplace. But displaying these magazines in this way is in violation of the Sex Discrimination Act, so it is crucial that retail employers cover up pornographic newspapers and lads' mags and place them on the top shelf."

A woman interviewed by the Fawcett Society, said: "I am a contractor and when I visit a site the ground engineers frequently use lads' mags and pornography, and as it isn't my usual place of work I am made to feel that I can't make a complaint, otherwise they simply won't use my services again."