Equal opportunities at work could be about to give way to managing diversity as the key to tackling race and gender difficulties, writes Stephen Overell
THERE are very few senior women managers. Everyone knows that. Women get only 80pc of the pay of men in comparable jobs. It is probably not entirely due to downright misogyny among the top brass. More likely conservatism and stereotypes about leadership play their part.
So what's to be done? Most local authorities believe they have found the answer in offering assertiveness training to women managers in the hope of encouraging more of them to go for senior jobs. They do not practice positive discrimination, but they take targeted action.
This is equal opportunities in action. It has never been without its share of critics - not least due to the campus hysteria of political correctness, the "victimhood vogue" in America. But equal opportunities is also facing a challenge from a movement with similar aims: it is called managing diversity. The followers of the two concepts have not made happy bedfellows. There is scant agreement on what managing diversity actually means, but this has done little to halt its advance. Among its followers are some admired employers: Hewlett Packard, Chase Manhattan Bank, International Distillers and Vintners, and Procter & Gamble have all made much of their belief in managing diversity.
The founding belief of equal opportunities is that prejudice is so pervasive in society that disadvantaged groups need special treatment - "segregated initiatives" in the words of its critics - to get a level playing field.
The managing diversity lobby believes such remedies are harmful to the people they are aiming to help. Action is based solely on membership of a group, thereby promoting skin colour or gender in importance (there was the London borough that wanted to reflect the community it served by requiring 15pc of the staff in each department to be from ethnic minorities) above individual ability.
It may even create a stigma: every office has heard sniping about someone's sudden elevation up the hierarchy being due to their gender, skin colour, disability or whatever. The managing diversity theorists accuse equal opportunities departments of seeking to fix numbers while leaving the root causes of discrimination untouched.
Positive action can lead to inter-group conflict which the very notion of equal opportunities was designed to mitigate. If an employer decides to try and attract more applications from black people, do gay people have any right to seek the same opportunity? What is the most pressing division?
Binna Kandola, a partner in Pearn Kandola, the consultancy that has done more than anyone else to push diversity up boardroom agendas, and author of Diversity in Action: Managing the Mosaic, is adamant that equal opportunities has had its day. "Equal opportunities is too focused on groups," he says. "Rather than looking at the way organisations operate, it says, 'what can we do to this group to help them?' It never says, 'what do we need to do to the organisation to help individuals and promote success?' Membership of groups determines the treatment."
Instead, managing diversity offers the simple (if vacuous) lesson that difference - whether related sex or age or to factors such as personality - is a commercial benefit which needs to be maximised and then related directly to business. While its followers concede that the laws on equality have achieved major changes, managing diversity is not about legal compliance or discrimination. It is about business goals.
"What we are aiming to do is to encourage the maximum diversity in our workforce and harness difference as a competitive advantage," says Kate Fordham, UK sales region diversity consultant with Hewlett Packard. "We want to create an environment where everyone can give their most."
It is managing diversity above equal opportunities that the Institute of Personnel and Development advocates to its membership. Managing diversity marks the "evolutionary next step" for equal opportunities.
But, lest anyone think that the equal opportunities lobby has taken all this lying down, it is important to emphasise that diversity, too, has its critics. Its very vagueness can imply that managing diversity can mean anything and nothing. Some of the diversity proponents have tended to define diversity in phrases of peerless blandness.
After acknowledging the need for employers to attract talent, one pair of diversity authors write: "One such strategy is to understand our own cultural filters and to accept differences in people so that each person is treated and valued as a unique individual."
Such concerns have fed a scepticism from equal opportunities specialists that the more managing diversity catches on, the more society will water down its hard-won obligations to tackling inequality at work.
One of the more waspish critics of the managing diversity vogue has in the past been Herman Ouseley, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. He suspected companies were jumping on a bandwagon that enabled them to parrot saccharine slogans while quietly side-stepping the need to reduce inequality.
The only way an employer will have a diverse workforce in the first place is through equal opportunities, he reasoned. After all, inequality is unquestionably based on membership of groups.
Sonia Liff, senior lecturer in industrial relations and organisational behaviour at Warwick Business School, says there has been a cynicism about managing diversity from many equality experts because it appears to demand little action.
"Equal opportunities has aimed at progressing equality by getting different groups to try and fit into the patterns established by white male managers. But it does little to affect the culture of an organisation. Managing diversity may well have something to offer in terms of encouraging organisations to think about their structures."
However, while Mr Kandola says that diversity not only requires top level commitment and a lot of training, but is totally different from equal opportunities, others, and most probably a majority, believe it is entirely compatible with the way equal opportunities has developed. It may even be a repackaging, a semantic amendment.
Kamlesh Bahl, chairwoman of the Equal Opportunities Commission, defends targets and positive action, saying they have been "very successful" in changing attitudes.
She says that managing diversity can be "helpful" in emphasising that "equality should be integrated into every aspect of the organisation".
