Week 17 - Equal Opportunities

Week 17 – Equal opportunities

Equality and diversity. Equality is all about equal rights for everybody, but focusing on things like race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and age etc. It basically means that in the workplace all people should be treated the same and given the same opportunities regardless of any of these factors. Diversity is all about peoples differing characteristics and personality traits, although it can sometimes overlap with things like age (as older people are likely to show different characteristics to younger people for example). Diversity in a business means that every employee needs to be treated as a different person, as all people are different. 

Age legislation – Age legislation was bought in in October 2006 which is the final strand of equality legislation to be put into practice, along with existing legislation on race, sex, disability, sexual orientation and belief. The legislation was put into place to stop businesses discriminating against age, which means that if the business is hiring employees they can’t reflect on the persons age. Another example would be that when promotions become available the person in charge or filling this role can’t discriminate on age, so the person can’t think ‘oh he’s too young, I’ll go for someone older with more life experience’ because that’s not fair on the younger person. This new legislation would have had some big effects on employers, some would have had to have changed company policy in order to comply with these new legislations. Some changes could be that if a company is hiring it now can’t specify that an applicant must be a particular age, unless the age restriction can be justified or is imposed by law. The business will have to recruit people solely based on the skills and ability as opposed to the age. Even the phrases used when thinking about hiring someone or writing a job advert have to be thought about, it is seen as ageism if you use phrases like ‘’energetic and keen to learn’’ or ‘’experienced and accomplished’’ as both of these could suggest age bias. Businesses will have to make all their employees familiar with this new legislation to make sure that they comply with them, this can take time and time equals money. 

There are some stereotypes when talking about older and younger people, these are –

Older –

• ·         Slower to respond to change
• ·         Not very good with technology
• ·         Slow to process anything
• ·         Not as good as young people at physical things
• ·         Set in their ways

Younger –

• ·         Lazy
• ·         Not as reliable
• ·         Good with technology
• ·         Good with change
• ·         Rude
• ·         Un-motivated
• ·         No-respect

There are a lot of stereotypes when looking at younger and older people, although more often than not the majority aren’t true. Now that organisations aren’t allowed to discriminate against age these stereotypes may begin to die out. If organisations give older people the chance to try jobs involving new technology, whereas in the past they may have preferred younger people to use computers. Then this stereotype may die out, as older people will get the chance to use computers. Senior roles In companies are more often than not populated by older people, if younger people get the chance to take on this roles, and they should because organisations can’t discriminate against age, then they may lose the reputation for being lazy and may also become more reliable. 

Conclusion – This blog has looked at equality and diversity in a different ways, from different people’s point of views. It has helped me to understand the difference between the two, that equality is more physical attributes that you’re born with, whereas diversity is more focused on a person’s characteristics and personality. The blog has also looked at the problems that businesses faced when the new age legislation came in, problems like job adverts having to be re-written to take the focus off age and more onto the skills a person has.