Equal opportunity
Equal opportunity is a state of fairness in which individuals are treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices, or preferences, except when particular distinctions can be explicitly justified.[1] For example, the intent of equal employment opportunity is that the important jobs in an organization should go to the people who are most qualified – persons most likely to perform ably in a given task – and not go to persons for reasons deemed arbitrary or irrelevant, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, having well-connected relatives or friends,[2] religion, sex,[3] ethnicity,[3] race, caste,[4] or involuntary personal attributes such as disability, age.[4][5] According to proponents of the concept, chances for advancement should be open to everybody without regard for wealth, status, or membership in a privileged group.[6][7] The idea is to remove arbitrariness from the selection process and base it on some "pre-agreed basis of fairness, with the assessment process being related to the type of position"[2] and emphasizing procedural and legal means.[4] Individuals should succeed or fail based on their efforts and not extraneous circumstances such as having well-connected parents.[8] It is opposed to nepotism[2] and plays a role in whether a social structure is seen as legitimate.[2][4][9] The concept is applicable in areas of public life in which benefits are earned and received such as employment and education, although it can apply to many other areas as well. Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy.[10] There are two major types of equality:[11]
Practical considerations[edit]
Difficulties with implementation[edit]
There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems.
A government policy that requires equal treatment can pose problems for lawmakers. A requirement for the government to provide equal health care services for all citizens can be prohibitively expensive. If the government seeks equality of opportunity for citizens to get health care by rationing services using a maximization model to try to save money, new difficulties might emerge. For example, trying to ration health care by maximizing the "quality-adjusted years of life" might steer monies away from disabled persons even though they may be more deserving, according to one analysis.[2][77] In another instance, BBC News questioned whether it was wise to ask female army recruits to undergo the same strenuous tests as their male counterparts since many women were being injured as a result.[78]
Age discrimination can present vexing challenges for policymakers trying to implement equal opportunity.[2][79][80] According to several studies, attempts to be equally fair to both a young and an old person are problematic because the older person has presumably fewer years left to live and it may make more sense for a society to invest greater resources in a younger person's health.[81][82] Treating both persons equally while following the letter of the equality of opportunity seems unfair from a different perspective.
Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions. For example, public bathrooms: If for the sake of fairness the physical area of men's and women's bathrooms is equal, the overall result may be unfair since men can use urinals, which require less physical space.[83] In other words, a more fair arrangement may be to allot more physical space for women's restrooms. The sociologist Harvey Molotch explained: "By creating men's and women's rooms of the same size, society guarantees that individual women will be worse off than individual men."[83]
Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or industry. If a nation focuses efforts on some industries or positions, then people with other talents may be left out. For example, in an example in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a warrior society might provide equal opportunity for all kinds of people to achieve military success through fair competition, but people with non-military skills such as farming may be left out.[2]
Lawmakers have run into problems trying to implement equality of opportunity. In 2010 in Britain, a legal requirement "forcing public bodies to try to reduce inequalities caused by class disadvantage" was scrapped after much debate and replaced by a hope that organizations would try to focus more on "fairness" than "equality" as fairness is generally seen as a much unclear concept than equality,[84] but easier for politicians to manage if they are seeking to avoid fractious debate. In New York City, mayor Ed Koch tried to find ways to maintain the "principle of equal treatment" while arguing against more substantive and abrupt transfer payments called minority set-asides.[85]
Cultural diversity of lifestyles, value systems, traditions, and beliefs[86][87] can explain differences in outcomes between subgroups.[88]
Measures[edit]
Many economists measure the degree of equal opportunity with measures of economic mobility. For instance, Joseph Stiglitz asserts that with five economic divisions and full equality of opportunity, "20 percent of those in the bottom fifth would see their children in the bottom fifth. Denmark almost achieves that – 25 percent are stuck there. Britain, supposedly notorious for its class divisions, does only a little worse (30 percent). That means they have a 70 percent chance of moving up. The chances of moving up in America, though, are markedly smaller (only 58 percent of children born to the bottom group make it out), and when they do move up, they tend to move up only a little". Similar analyses can be performed for each economic division and overall. They all show how far from the ideal all industrialized nations are and how correlated measures of equal opportunity are with income inequality and wealth inequality.[89] Equal opportunity has ramifications beyond income; the American Human Development Index, rooted in the capabilities approach pioneered by Amartya Sen, is used to measure opportunity across geographies in the U.S. using health, education, and standard of living outcomes.[90]