Equal What?

Few pairs of words cause more confusion in modern workplaces than equality and equity. They sound similar, they share a root, and they turn up side by side in policies, mission statements and the occasional heated all-staff meeting. Yet people use them to mean quite different things, often without noticing.

Both come from the Latin aequus, meaning level or even. Equality comes through aequalis, equal in amount or status. Equity comes through aequitas, which meant fairness or justice. That difference has been there for a long time. In English law, “equity” was the name for a whole system of justice, developed in the Court of Chancery, designed to soften the common law when following the rules to the letter produced an obviously unfair result. Equity, in that sense, was about fairness beyond strict sameness.

In current debate, the usual distinction runs like this. Equality means treating everyone the same: the same rules, the same resources, the same starting line. Equity means giving people what they need to reach a fair result, which may mean treating them differently because their circumstances differ.

You’ve probably seen the cartoon: three people of different heights trying to watch a game over a fence. In the “equality” panel, they each get the same box to stand on, and the shortest still can’t see. In the “equity” panel, the boxes are shared out so everyone can.

It’s a persuasive picture, and plenty of people find it captures something important. Identical treatment can preserve disadvantages that people didn’t choose, so fairness sometimes requires different treatment.

Plenty of others find it misleading. Their concern is that “equity” can slide from equal opportunity towards equal outcomes, that it can mean treating individuals differently according to the group they belong to, and that people judged by different standards may reasonably feel that’s unfair. To them, equal treatment under the same rules is the principle that protects everyone.

I’m not going to settle that argument here; it’s a real disagreement about values, and reasonable people land in different places. But as someone who spends a lot of time listening to how organisations talk, I can point to the part of the argument that’s usually missing.

In 1979, the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave a famous lecture with a wonderfully blunt title: “Equality of What?” His point was that almost everyone believes in equality of something. The arguments are about what that something is. Equal treatment? Equal opportunity? Equal access to resources? Equal outcomes? Each one is a reasonable goal, and they frequently pull against each other.

That’s where a lot of workplace confusion comes from. A policy says the organisation is committed to “equity”, and one person reads it as “we’ll remove barriers so everyone gets a fair shot”, while another reads it as “we’ll adjust results until the numbers match”. Both feel strongly. Both are reacting to a word the policy never defined.

So if your organisation uses either word, it’s worth being precise about which kind of equal you mean, and in what. What will be the same for everyone? What might differ, and why? Who decides? You may still disagree after that conversation, but at least you’ll be disagreeing about the same thing, which is a considerable improvement on most meetings.