Equal Opportunity & Diversity Management

Equal Opportunity & Diversity Management

Part 1:

Introduction

The issue of gender inequality has been in the eyes of the public and been in awareness of society for decades. The problem of inequality in employment is one of the most vital issues in today's society. In order to understand this situation one must try to get to the root of the problem and must understand the factors that cause the female sex to have a much more difficult time in getting the same benefits, wages, and job opportunities as the male sex. The society in which we live has been shaped historically by men.

Equal opportunities and managing diversity approaches

Despite the best efforts of these organizations the dominance of male influence continues. At the level of the employing organization, a common approach to dealing with the effects of dominant male influence is one which focuses on equal opportunities, and the public sector has been at the forefront of developments in this field. In the last few years, however, the assumptions and characteristics of this approach have been under particular scrutiny with the advent of a new concept: managing diversity.

This term originated in the USA in the late 1980s with the publication of the forecast that white males would be a minority of new entrants to the American labour force in the year 2000. Managing diversity has been defined as follows: “The basic concept of managing diversity accepts that the workforce consists of a diverse population of people. The diversity consists of visible and non-visible differences which will include factors such as sex, age, background, race, disability, personality and workstyle. It is founded on the premiss that harnessing these differences will create a productive environment in which everybody feels valued, where their talents are being fully utilized and in which organizational goals are met”.

In comparing equal opportunities with managing diversity, one possibility is that the difference is purely one of semantics - that this new concept represents no more than a change in language, perhaps because of frustration at the slow speed of change to date. Indeed, the point has been made, that such language change is itself helpful, that “new terms as well as new solutions have to be found for old problems if the issue is to be kept alive. Given that structures relating to gender issues have been in place in the UK now for over 20 years, changing vocabulary could be one way of maintaining news worthiness for this subject. It has certainly been welcomed by many consultants who perceive the change in language as a means of creating a new market niche.

However, comparisons between these two approaches have been made which relate to differences other than simply language. The goal of equal opportunities has been described in terms of social justice and of redressing past wrongs: “to correct an imbalance, an injustice, a mistake”. The goal of managing diversity on the other hand is described in wider terms - to treat people as individuals, recognizing that ...