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.

[21] The concept has been applied to numerous aspects of public life, including accessibility of polling stations,[24] care provided to HIV patients,[25] whether men and women have equal opportunities to travel on a spaceship,[26] bilingual education,[27] skin color of models in Brazil,[28] television time for political candidates,[29] army promotions,[30] admittance to universities[31] and ethnicity in the United States.

Equal opportunity emphasizes the personal ambition and talent and abilities of the individual, rather than his or her qualities based on membership in a group, such as a social class or race or extended family.

[4] In sociological analysis, equal opportunity is seen as a factor correlating positively with social mobility, in the sense that it can benefit society overall by maximizing well-being.

[37] A political party that formally allows anyone to join, but meets in a non-wheelchair-accessible building far from public transit, substantively discriminates against both young and old members as they are less likely to be able-bodied car-owners.

Grade-cutoff university admission is formally fair, but if in practice it overwhelmingly picks women and graduates of expensive user-fee schools, it is substantively unfair to men and the poor.

Japan banned gender-specific job descriptions in advertising as well as sexual discrimination in employment as well as other practices deemed unfair,[47] although a subsequent report suggested that the law was having minimal effect in securing Japanese women high positions in management.

[48][needs update] In the United States, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a private test preparation firm, Kaplan, for unfairly using credit histories to discriminate against African Americans in terms of hiring decisions.

There is some overlap among these different conceptions with the term meritocracy which describes an administrative system which rewards such factors as individual intelligence, credentials, education, morality, knowledge or other criteria believed to confer merit.

Some people are simply better placed to take advantage of opportunity.If higher inequality makes intergenerational mobility more difficult, it is likely because opportunities for economic advancement are more unequally distributed among children.

In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology found that to achieve substantive equality of opportunity the school had to reserve 22.5 percent of seats for applicants from "historically disadvantaged schedule castes and tribes".

[41] Matt Cavanagh argued that race and sex should not matter when getting a job, but that the sense of equality of opportunity should not extend much further than preventing straightforward discrimination.

Philosopher John Rawls offered this variant of substantive equality of opportunity and explained that it happens when individuals with the same "native talent and the same ambition" have the same prospects of success in competitions.

[72] This system helps undergird the legitimacy of a society's divvying up of roles as a result in the sense that it makes certain achieved inequalities "morally acceptable", according to persons who advocate this approach.

[73][74][75] John Rawls postulated the difference principle which argued that "inequalities are justified only if needed to improve the lot of the worst off, for example by giving the talented an incentive to create wealth".

][disputed – discuss] 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.

[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.

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.

[100] The study suggested that newspaper accounts showing that "nine relatives from three generations of a single-family (were) on the economics faculty" at the University of Bari were not aberrations, but indicated a pattern of nepotism throughout Italian academia.

[102][103] In another instance, a cross-sectional statistical analysis was conducted to see whether social class affected participation in the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War: a report in Time by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that soldiers came from a variety of social classes and that the principle of equal opportunity had worked,[104] possibly because soldiers had been chosen by a lottery process for conscription.

[1] There has been research suggesting that "competitive markets will tend to drive out such discrimination" since employers or institutions which hire based on arbitrary criteria will be weaker as a result and not perform as well as firms that embrace equality of opportunity.

[2] Firms competing for overseas contracts have sometimes argued in the press for equal chances during the bidding process, such as when American oil corporations wanted equal shots at developing oil fields in Sumatra;[107] and firms, seeing how fairness is beneficial while competing for contracts, can apply the lesson to other areas such as internal hiring and promotion decisions.

A report in USA Today suggested that the goal of equal opportunity was "being achieved throughout most of the business and government labor markets because major employers pay based on potential and actual productivity".

[21] The amendment did not mention equal opportunity directly, but it helped undergird a series of later rulings which dealt with legal struggles, particularly by African Americans and later women, seeking greater political and economic power in the growing republic.

[21] Businesses and other organizations learned to comply with the rulings by specifying fair hiring and promoting practices and posting these policy notices on bulletin boards, employee handbooks, and manuals as well ain s training sessions and films.

[118] One of the group's members explained: I am not asking for sympathy but for an equal right with men to earn my own living in the best way open and under the most favorable conditions that I could choose for myself.

[2][121] While it generally describes "open and fair competition" with equal chances for achieving sought-after jobs or positions[4] as well as an absence of discrimination,[4][13][122] the concept is elusive with a "wide range of meanings".

[125] A slightly different view in The Guardian suggested that equality of opportunity was merely a "buzzword" to sidestep the thornier political question of income inequality.

[23] By sheer chance or random circumstances, a person may become wealthy just by being in the right place and time and Hayek argued that it is impossible to devise a system to make opportunities equal without knowing how such interactions may play out.

[23] Some conceptions of equality of opportunity, particularly the substantive and level playing field variants, have been criticized on the basis that they make assumptions to the effect that people have similar genetic makeups.

Equal opportunity for all: "We fight God when our Social System dooms the brilliant clever child of a poor man to the same level as his father", British Admiral Jacky Fisher , Records (1919)
In a factory setting, equality of opportunity is often seen as a procedural fairness along the lines of "if you assemble twice as many lamps, you'll be paid double" and in this sense the concept is in contrast to the concept of equality of outcome , which might require that all workers be paid similarly regardless of how many lamps they made.
The formal conception focuses on procedural fairness during the competition: are the hurdles the same height? (photo: athletes Ulrike Urbansky and Michelle Carey in Osaka)
The Great Gatsby Curve shows that countries with more equality of wealth also have more social mobility, which indicates that equality of wealth and equality of opportunity go together: [ 38 ]

If higher inequality makes intergenerational mobility more difficult, it is likely because opportunities for economic advancement are more unequally distributed among children. [ 51 ]

Issues about substantive equality have been raised about the skin color of runway models at the São Paulo Fashion Week and in 2009 quotas requiring that at least 10 percent of models be "black or indigenous" were imposed as a substantive way to counteract a "bias towards white models", according to one account. [ 28 ]
The match's outcome is deemed legitimate if there is a level playing field and rules do not favor either player or team arbitrarily. (photo: Cesc Fàbregas duels with Anderson in a football match in 2008)
A computerized statistical analysis suggested nepotism and practice of unequal opportunity within Italy's academic community. (photo: University of Bari ) [ 100 ]
African-American civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall fought numerous battles in the courts for equal opportunity for all races in the United States; argued the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case and won, and in 1967 was appointed to the Supreme Court .
Equal opportunity issues are discussed at an army roundtable in Alabama .
Equal opportunity theorists generally agree that once the race begins, who wins is a function of talent, hard work, and competitive drive. (photo: runner Billy Mills crossing the finish line in the 1964 Olympics )