Equality? or Equal opportunities?

Regardless of what you believe in, regarding the creation of evolution of human beings it would appear we do not all start off on an “equal” footing. Some are male, some are female, some are born to wealthy families, some to poor families, some in developed countries, some in impoverished locations. That initial choice of where we each show up, is made for us right?

As such, creating equal opportunities for all, could be a target we may stand a chance in achieving. Putting slogans out there and aiming for equality is a concept that is widely misunderstood. We talk about encouraging more women into science, but where does it all start?

Does it begin with how we treat female and male babies? the toys we buy the, the differing activities we expose them to (and that could be partly due to our perceptions of their physical build – we can’t change that “inequality” right?). Do female babies gravitate towards activities they see their Mums do and male babies towards activities they see their Dads do?

Young boys get taken to football games at the weekend and again, due to physical differences that are not of anyone’s choosing, the teams are separate and that separation leads to different kinds of discussions and the environment is different and what each set gravitate towards could be different.

In my humble opinion, what we must have in place, is a situation where influencers and in particular, early influencers: parents, teachers etc. avoid bias such as assuming males will prefer maths and females prefer history or that males should play with tractor toys while females should only have dolls.

The workplace is all about supply & demand. Global population is almost an equal split of men & women. We should see a similar number of boys and girls in classrooms for starters. Then we should see an equal number of boys and girls showing interest in all subjects, then that following through to similar numbers in higher education across all subjects. Then and only then, will we begin seeing similar numbers of men & women qualified to work across all fields of endeavour: post men & women, milkman and milkwoman, doctors, road sweepers, nurses, engineers, teachers etc. And then, we will begin to see similar numbers on boards etc. Unfortunately, at this point in time, there remains a very disproportionate supply but we think equality can be achieved by forced selection: an office of 100 employees with 90 men and 10 women will argue for a board of Directors that must include 5 men and 5 women. That is not how equality is to be achieved and sustained. Equality should never be an attempt to replace white middle-aged men with white middle-aged women as an example. It is about equal opportunities right from birth, creating an environment without bias, where everyone can secure a similar standard of education (you can imagine how far away we are, from achieving that; when there are still large parts of the world where women are still not allowed to make those choices e.g. go to school, drive a car etc.). And in our supposedly developed world, access to education is still by wealth and affluence, with private schools providing more than state schools offer and in any case, how do you force equality when a child from a poor background makes his first travel abroad at the age of 15, while a child from a wealthy background has already travelled the world (learning all sorts along the way) by the age of 15. Both cannot surely have an equal access to learning and one would have had a much better opportunity to learn more than the other. As such, the notion of ‘equality’ begins to unravel as you examine it and it is unlikely to ever be achieved. Whereas, the concept of equal opportunities can be, to an extent.

It is sometimes frightening to see what some deem to be equality. While trying to ram inequality through, in order to purportedly achieve equality….