Equal Opportunity
Equal Opportunity
FORMAL EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
LIMITATIONS OF FORMAL EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
SUBSTANTIVE EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
JUSTICE AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
The term equal opportunity refers to the absence of discrimination based on involuntary personal attributes, such as sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual orientation. The concept of equality of opportunity identifies equality with open and fair competition for scarce resources but does not challenge an inequalitarian distribution of resources within society. This has sparked disagreement in political and theoretical struggles over what constitutes a “just society.”
FORMAL EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
The notion of formal equality of opportunity requires that positions, offices, and admissions in society are open to all applicants and that formal procedures are used to select candidates based on qualifications deemed relevant to successful performance in a position or program. Individual abilities and ambition are valued as criteria while factors derived from group identities assigned by birth or social class, such as race, family, caste, religion, are excluded. Equality of opportunity carries with it the promise of upward social and economic mobility due to the removal of legally protected rights and privileges for particular classes or groups. Equality of opportunity emphasizes procedural and legal means of providing equal access to social goods, in contrast to alternative approaches to equality; for example, equality of outcomes, equality of resources, and democratic equality.
Equality of opportunity assumes that it is unfair if factors beyond the control of an individual significantly shape a person’s chances in life. Formal equality of opportunity can be justified as an enhancement of individual life chances as well as a means for maximizing the well-being of society. Proponents of equality of opportunity associate it with a meritocratic system in which the most talented and ambitious are the most rewarded regardless of socioeconomic background.
LIMITATIONS OF FORMAL EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
A central challenge to the very concept of formal equality of opportunity is that it does not take into consideration how circumstances beyond the control of an individual influence the ability to compete for scarce resources. In the case of standardized tests to evaluate a student’s educational and professional potential, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the United States, formal equality of opportunity requires students to take the test under the same conditions and use the final test score as a measure to evaluate students’ performance. It thereby disregards the access some students have to more economic and educational resources to prepare for these test than others. By asserting neutrality toward all students, the test indirectly reinforces preexisting social inequalities.
A narrow perception of equality of opportunity is not inherently incompatible with profiling or statistical discrimination, which uses group characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, or age as a proxy for productivity in hiring and promotion. Profiling occurs when statistical trends are used to justify associating negative attributes with members of a group, such as a high crime rate, or risks associated with a particular phase in the life course like having children. These group characteristics are used as indicators for current and future productivity, thereby compromising the notion of equality that calls for an evaluation of each applicant on its own merits.
Equality of opportunity has historically been confined to the public sphere, neglecting the sources of inequality identified with areas traditionally held as private, such as family, marriage, and religion. Opening up all sectors of employment to women, for example, does not offer them equal opportunity for advancement when employers deny them (paid) pregnancy leave. While all workers may be subject to identical rules, women are disproportionately adversely affected. Formal equality of opportunity does not seek to change the social, economic, and cultural forces that structure the division of labor along gender, race, and class lines. Rather than resolving the question of equality, a larger degree of formal equality often reveals the impact of socioeconomic inequality within society.
SUBSTANTIVE EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
Substantive equality of opportunity takes the broader social situation into consideration in determining criteria for qualification and performance. The appropriate means for achieving substantive equality of opportunity are often controversial. One possibility for achieving substantive equality of opportunity is affirmative action. The challenges of affirmative action in theory and practice are illustrated in the reform of the admissions system of the Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs), French elite universities, and higher education in the United States.
Indian Institutes of Technology were founded in 1951 and became a leading institution in professional training in India. Entrance is based on a standardized test without consideration of socioeconomic status and is granted to approximately 2 percent of the applicants. Despite the formal neutrality of the test, the vast majority of students admitted come from the urban middle class with access to good schools and the resources to attend costly preparatory courses. To further substantive equality of opportunity IITs were required to reserve 22.5 percent of seats for students of historically disadvantaged schedule castes and tribes in 1973. Reserved seats were awarded to candidates scoring at least 66 percent of the score of the lowest admitted applicant in the general test or to candidates successfully completing a one-year preparatory course. Despite these lower admission standards not all reserved seats are filled pointing to the challenge of opening elite educational institutions to low-income students without further counterbalancing vast power and wealth disparities in Indian society (Murali 2003).
France’s elite universities also use highly competitive standardized exams for admission. The vast majority of students performing well on these tests have attended very selective preparatory schools that rarely admit working class or immigrant students. In 2001 Sciences Po, one of these universities, began a special entrance program that admits a limited number of students from designated zones in impoverished suburbs. Relying on geographic criteria rather than socioeconomic status or ethnicity, the program does not directly challenge “republican values” that hold the French republic to be indivisible and all citizens to share equally in a common civic culture. While in practice the program admits many first- and second-generation immigrants from Morocco and Algeria their ethnicity is not officially taken into consideration, thereby avoiding discrimination between citizens or delineating the separate communities within France.
In the United States President Lyndon Johnson introduced affirmative action as a method of redressing the legacy of racial discrimination in 1965. Affirmative action programs in education and training were brought before the Supreme Court in the 1970s. In Bakke v. Regents of the University of California (1978) the Supreme Court struck down a medical school’s affirmative action program that set aside sixteen seats for consideration by a separate admissions committee but the court upheld the legality of affirmative action per se. In 2003 the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action in higher education ruling that race can be one of many factors considered for college admission (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger [2003]). Affirmative is no longer justified on the basis of redressing past oppressions and injustice but in terms of a “compelling state interest” in diversity at all levels of society.
These three examples show that substantive equality can be furthered through very different affirmative action programs posing different kinds of challenges. India relies on reserved seats while the United States dismissed such quotas as unconstitutional. The United States uses race as one of many factors in evaluating an application while France dismisses affirmative action based on socioeconomic and ethnic status as running counter to its republican values. France, while not having a formal affirmative action policy in higher education, is currently experimenting with geographically based programs. The political struggle over substantive equality of opportunity is inseparable from the normative question, what makes institutions legitimate? As Xavier Brunschvicg, the Science Po’s director of communication explains: “We believe, here, that we are creating the elite of French society. But in order for these elites to be accepted, they have to be legitimate. Reproduction is not legitimate. We need to diversify to be legitimate, to help the egalité des chances [equality of opportunity] along” (Conley 2003). Pursuing substantive equality of opportunity redresses many of the limitations of formal equality, but it cannot resolve the question of why so many must compete for so little.
JUSTICE AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
Is equality of opportunity the most basic formulation of equality, or merely one type of equality among others? In his theory of justice as “fairness,” John Rawls argues that equality of opportunity must be combined with a redistribution of social goods. Rawls incorporates both formal and substantive forms of equality of opportunity into his theory of a just society through his second principle of justice, which holds that “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged [the “difference principle”] and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (Rawls 1971, p. 83). Rawls argues that even without formal barriers to equality, those with greater social and natural advantages, for example intelligence and strength, will get a disproportionate percentage of social goods like income and positions. These advantages are beyond an individual’s control and thus the unequal outcomes are unjust.
Rawls’s theory of fair equality of opportunity requires that resources be redistributed across social classes. In order to give every individual the same opportunity to cultivate his or her abilities and pursue his or her ambitions, the state must provide additional resources, for example bilingual education or health care, when individual families are unable to provide them. No amount of substantive equality of opportunity, however, will eliminate all socioeconomic and natural inequality. Consequently, Rawls argues that equal opportunity requires the addition of the “difference principle.” By restricting the unequal distribution of goods to the benefit of the least advantaged, the difference principle requires that the rewards gained from individual talents benefit society as a whole and not solely the individual who possesses them.
In contrast to Rawls, there are many who question whether equality of opportunity is compatible with alternative conceptions of equality. John Schaar criticizes the idea that equality of opportunity is a basic definition of equality because it “really only defends the equal right to become unequal by competing against one’s fellows” (Schaar 1967, p. 241). He rejects the supposed neutrality of equality of opportunity and emphasizes its underlying individualistic competitive ethic. As Schaar contends, equality of opportunity reinforces particular social values to the exclusion of others and rewards only those with talents that conform to these values.
Robert Nozick (1974) embraces this individualistic competitive ethic in his libertarian approach and argues that the equality of opportunity Rawls endorses is undermined by the difference principle. Nozick’s “entitlement theory” insists that only the process by which goods are acquired is relevant for a just distribution. He thus rules out redistributive approaches to equality like Rawls’s that consider equality of outcome as well as procedures.
Michael Walzer (1983) concurs with Schaar as well as many communitarians that there is no single, universal standard for what constitutes an egalitarian society. Equality of opportunity is one principle of just distribution among others, each of which expresses a particular set of social values. These alternative conceptions are not necessarily compatible and compete for priority within a particular society. Walzer argues for a “complex equality” approach that maintains a plurality of distributive principles in light of the diverse range of social goods and actors in any society.
Feminist theorists question Rawls’s basic assumption, shared by many in equality of opportunity debates, that equality must be based on qualities that are shared by all and that certain kinds of difference (such as sex, race, sexual orientation, and religion) should not be taken into consideration. Universal standards like Rawls’s theory of justice often assume values and characteristics that are drawn from more privileged members of society. Susan Okin (1989) shows how Rawls’s theory of justice depends on the family, but does not sufficiently address whether relationships within the family are equal. Iris Young (1990) argues that forms of inequality are not limited to material resources, such as wealth, income, and positions that can be redistributed among members of society. Evaluating equality of opportunity also requires an analysis of the particular social structures (i.e., decision-making procedures, the division of labor, and culture) in which opportunities can be realized.
The debate over equality of opportunity opens onto core political and theoretical questions, including the delineation of public and private domains, individual versus group identity, and the possibility of impartial standards. At stake in this debate are shared concerns with legitimating and transforming political institutions, negotiating competing social values, and cultivating practices of social justice.
SEE ALSO Egalitarianism; Equality
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, John M. 2003. Inequality, Poverty, and Affirmative Action: Contemporary Trends in India. Paper prepared for the WIDER conference Inequality, Poverty, and Human Well-Being, May 30–31, 2003. Helsinki, Finland.
Altbach, Philip. 1993. The Dilemma of Change in Indian Higher Education. Higher Education 26 (1): 3–20.
Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
Cohen, G. A. 1999. Socialism and Equality of Opportunity. In Political Thought, eds. Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff, 354–358. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
Conley, Marjorie. 2003. Sciences Po: An Elite Institution’s Introspection on its Power, Position, and Worth in French Society. http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/conley/sciencespo.html.
Dworkin, Ronald. 1981. What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources. Philosophy & Public Affairs 10: 283–345.
Economist. 2002. A Question of Colour, a Matter of Faith. Economist 365, November 16.
Fishkin, James S. 1993. Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Galston, William. 1986. Equality of Opportunity and Liberal Theory. In Justice and Equality Here and Now, ed. Frank S. Lucash, 89–107. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003).
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2003. The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jacobs, Lesley A. 2004. Pursuing Equal Opportunities. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Murali, Kanta. 2003. The IIT Story: Issues and Concerns. http://www.flonnet.com/fl2003/stories/20030214007506500.htm.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Okin, Susan. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.
Pateman, Carole. 1993. Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy. Public and Private in Social Life, eds. Stanley Benn and Gerald Gaus. London: Croom Helm.
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Sandel, Michael. 1998. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Schaar, John H. 1967. Equality of Opportunity, and Beyond. In Equality: Nomos IX, eds. Roland Pennock and John Chapman, 137–147. New York: Atherton Press.
Scott, Joan. 1988. Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism. Feminist Studies 14 (1): 32–50.
Sen, Amartya. 1992. Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smith, Craig. 2005. Elite French Schools Block the Poor’s Path to Power. New York Times, December 18.
Tawney, Richard H.1964. Equality. 4th ed. New York: Barnes & Noble.
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Young, Iris. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nicole Richardt
Torrey Shanks
Equal Opportunity
Equal Opportunity
What It Means
The United States and other countries officially aspire to provide every citizen with an equal chance of obtaining an education and a job and of being treated fairly on the job and in life generally. This aspiration is encapsulated in the term “equal opportunity,” which is most commonly used to refer to a company or organization’s hiring and business practices. In the United States it is illegal for companies or organizations that employ more than 15 people to discriminate based on race, sex, religion, color, national origin, disability, or age. In all their dealings with employees (hiring, firing, promoting, setting wages, allotting vacation time, etc.), employers must enforce state and federal guidelines regarding equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity became a pressing national goal during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, prior to which African Americans were subject to widespread mistreatment and unfairness, particularly when it came to voting, education, and employment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson, gave the federal government the power to stop discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (the act consisted of different sections or “titles,” each of which focused on a particular subject important to the larger goal of equality) dealt specifically with employment and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that investigates situations in which individuals claim they have been subject to discriminatory treatment.
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Title VII has been supplemented by numerous state and federal laws that have updated the original protections and widened the scope of equal opportunity to defend the rights of such groups as disabled and older workers. Additionally, Title VII has been the basis of the practice known as affirmative action, according to which the government requires employers to diversify their workforce by giving preferential treatment, in the hiring process, to women and minority groups. While there have always been some critics of equal opportunity in general, affirmative action in particular has been by far the most controversial portion of the government’s drive to promote fairness and equality.
When Did It Begin
While the Civil Rights Movement brought the issue of equal opportunity to the forefront of American politics and culture, the roots for the goals of the movement go back to 1868 when, following the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed. The Fourteenth Amendment promises “equal protection under the law”: in other words, all citizens were to be treated fairly by the government. In practice, however, this did not happen. African Americans were systematically mistreated, often with the knowledge or direct cooperation of government. So-called Jim Crow laws in the southern United States mandated separate public facilities and educational systems for African Americans, and on a national level employers did not commonly make any effort to promote equality when it came to hiring employees. Though minority groups as well as groups concerned with justice continually tried to force societal change based on the promises of the Fourteenth Amendment, it was not until 1954 that a major victory came. In the court case Brown v. Board of Education of that year, the Supreme Court explicitly forbade the segregation of schools by race. This provided the spark that ignited the Civil Rights Movement.
Equal opportunity in employment became a key part of the broader Civil Rights Movement. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing equal opportunity in competing for government jobs. The crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. Title VII of the act set guidelines for employers and established the EEOC, which was empowered to investigate claims of unfairness. The Civil Rights Act went into effect in 1965.
More Detailed Information
The concept of equal opportunity is closely connected to basic beliefs in what kind of country the United States should be. U.S. citizens like to believe that their country is a meritocracy, a society in which those who succeed do so because of ability and hard work. This belief has always been a simplistic view of the reality of life in the United States, however. While there has never been a class of aristocrats (people whose ancestry entitles them to occupy a privileged place in society) in the United States, wealth can be handed down from one generation to the next. This means that equal opportunity has never been strictly possible, because inherited wealth necessarily tilts the scales in favor of certain people. Two children with identical abilities and work ethics, for instance, cannot be said to enjoy equal opportunity if one of them is born wealthy and the other poor.
But most Americans see a difference between this form of inequality, which does not occur because of active wrongdoing, and the racial and gender inequality that existed for roughly 200 years after the country’s founding. The systems of slavery (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and segregation (in the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century) actively promoted discrimination against African Americans. Likewise, women at all levels of society were subject to a wide range of discriminatory laws and customs. When people of certain races, or when women, are prohibited from participating fully in society, then an obvious inequality of opportunity exists.
The system of equal-opportunity laws that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement seeks to correct these and other forms of inequality. The most accepted way in which these laws have functioned is by setting standards for employers. Those employing 15 or more employees must, if they want to stay in business, ensure that they do not display any biases against prospective or current employees because of factors such as race, religion, color, gender, national origin, age, or disability. In practice, however, identifying biases is not always a simple matter.
If, for example, someone born in another country is fired from his job as a computer programmer in the United States, he might believe he was fired because of his national origin, while his boss might argue that he was fired for poor performance. If this employee feels strongly about the matter, he might contact the EEOC and file a complaint about his employer. The EEOC would then investigate the matter to determine whether or not national origin played a role in the employee’s firing. If the agency found that national origin did play a role in the firing, it might attempt to mediate between the employer and the employee. In the event that no agreement could be reached between the two parties, the EEOC might file a lawsuit against the company.
Recent Trends
Companies, of course, want to avoid the potentially costly attentions of the EEOC. It is common today for large companies to have entire departments and substantial portions of their operating budgets devoted to making sure that the work environment is fair to employees regardless of their race, religion, color, gender, national origin, age, or disability. These so-called “race-blind” or “gender-blind” policies (policies that attempt to get people to look beyond categories such as race and gender) have been widely accepted by the American public despite the effort and expense they impose upon businesses.
Since the Civil Rights era, another major way in which the federal government and state governments have attempted to promote equal opportunity is through affirmative action. Affirmative action means giving preferential treatment to certain groups in matters of education and employment. Especially in the area of university admissions, racial minorities have benefited from affirmative action. But whether or not the increase in racial diversity at universities has promoted equal opportunity remained a subject of debate among experts as well as ordinary people at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the legal status of affirmative action was likewise coming under increased scrutiny.