Managing Equality and Diversity

Discrimination can occur at any decision point within an organisation. Employees are legally protected in terms of certain characteristics. The type and extent of protection necessarily vary from country to country, although within the EU there is a common platform of protection. A key feature is the protection against direct and indirect discrimination.

It is vital to recognise the diversity between social groups and also within social groups. It is also important to acknowledge that some people are discriminated against due to more than one characteristic – an effect that is described by academic commentators as multiple discrimination or intersectionality, depending on the assumed impact on the individual. This diversity means policies need to be sensitive to different experiences of discrimination and different needs of disadvantaged groups and individuals.

The reason for managers to intervene in order to prevent discrimination can be based on arguments of social justice or business needs – or both. The social justice case stresses the moral argument with reference to equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, fairness and human rights. Critics argue that managers should be concerned with profit and efficiency, not morality. The business case stresses various ways that equality and diversity are good for business needs (wider recruitment, effective use of human resources, innovation, attracting customers and company image), but critics point to limitations of the business case, including instances where it can make good business sense not to act in the interests of equality and diversity.

Deep-rooted problems are often caused by institutional discrimination. This term is used to describe organisations that have processes and practices that are fundamentally discriminatory – sometimes without managers realising it – and are reinforced through existing organisational structures and workplace cultures. Tackling such fundamental problems might require a more radical agenda than that being proposed by many advocates of equality and diversity.

Equality and diversity policies vary between organisations; they range from those that are simply empty statements to others that are backed up by effective action programmes. For policies to be effective, they need to have positive action initiatives to ensure policy is implemented, and monitoring to assess the effectiveness of the initiatives over time. It is important to recognise that positive action and positive discrimination are not the same – although they are often confused – and offer very different solutions to the problems of discrimination and disadvantage.

Managers devise equality and diversity policies based on assumptions of sameness or assumptions of difference. These two perspectives help to explain why there is often a lack of agreement about how to ensure fairness. The sameness perspective emphasises similarities between people and advocates equal treatment. The difference perspective emphasises diversity either between social groups or between individuals. These two branches of the difference perspective are similar in that they both advocate special treatment that takes the differences between people into account, but they differ in their suggestions about the types of initiative that organisations should adopt.

The term ‘managing diversity’ is often used to describe the approach to fairness that emphasises the individual differences between people. In some instances, it is an alternative approach advocated by commentators who think traditional equal opportunities policies have failed and are fundamentally flawed.

It is important for managers to recognise that unfair treatment sometimes results from treating people differently when they ought to be treated the same, and sometimes from treating people the same when key differences ought to be recognised. Policies, procedures and attitudes within an organisation should therefore be based on recognising both the similarities and differences between people.

The process of discrimination can be seen as the combination of personal, external and internal pressures on managers to make choices according to principles of sameness or difference, in their decisions about appointments, promotions, allocation of work, training opportunities and so forth. Perceptions of unfairness are the result of a mismatch between the expectations of employees and the manager’s decisions. Viewed in this way, all decisions are susceptible to claims of unfairness, depending on the perspective of the individuals concerned, the perceived appropriateness of the criterion for the decision and the individual and social acceptability of the type of treatment (special or equal).

A recent development within the field has been the emergence of the concept of managing inclusion, which seems to be an acknowledgement of the need for managers not only to recognise the value of diversity but also to develop policies, processes and initiatives that harness the differences to better and more productive effect.