Talk:Equal opportunity

message: What other countries make affirmative action illegal?  For whom do they make it illegal? What is their history of dealing with ethnic and gender differences and the residues of slavery? We need this information, or we just have an unsupported allegation.
Zulitz —Preceding undated comment added 17:15, 24 October 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illegality 

message: Jeez, this page is terrible as of now. Not sure how to flag it, I'll do so in a couple hours, hopefully I'll be able to work on it some. I think a straight-out revert to a couple of months ago might be in order. --AdamGomaa 18:37, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Troll Fest

message: Here are the changes I have made. Some overall thoughts:
*Ton of junk. Removed a lot of it. The article is significantly smaller.
*I moved USoA stuff to it's own section. It doesn't look nice, but I don't want it to look nice, because it should be out of place on it's own. More countries should be added, or the section just plain removed. 
*Took out loaded language. For example, there was a phrase that said something along the lines of "this could harm all classes (including the protected classes)." That's redundant and thus not explicit and clear in its meaning. 
*Cut a ton of BS added in the last couple of months that broke Godwin's law. Not that WP has to follow Godwin, but tying Equal Opportunity legislation to Fascism is a doozy. 
*Took out a couple of out-of-context links. I think they were added accidentally, although I don't feel like wading through the history to find out when they were added. 
*If you look at the last major paragraph that I changed, it absolutely contains my POV. It's not strictly wrong, or even POV to say that, although the clear line that is pushed is thus that "inheritance breeds inequality," which I believe to be true. But others may not. I'll leave it in anyway. The language could be toned down, but I'll let someone who actually wants to do the toning do so.
*I like meritocracy and equal opportunity. Someone cross-check it to make sure it's still npov. kplzthx. 
Thats all I can think of. Actually, the caffeine is wearing off. All the same. --AdamGomaa 19:28, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Changes

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:Please read all Wikipedia core content policies, particularly Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not.  Specifically, Wikipedia is not a Web directory or link farm!  --Coolcaesar 18:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  We would like to be added as a link on this page 

message: I'm removing four of the external links:
* Equality and Diversity Training Specialists link is blatant spam;
* Equal Opportunities International link is semi-spam (there may be relevant journal articles there but one wouldn't know that from the linked page—they're apparently not readily accessed without a subscription);
* NAFEO link fails to provide useful information to complement article;
* Center for Equal Opportunity link fails to provide useful information to complement article (and btw is a political advocacy group with an agenda whose scope goes way beyond thwarting equal opportunity).
This article needs a lot of work. I don't have time. Grrrr. Rivertorch 20:54, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: equal opportunity is ideally about giving everyone universal and equal access to health care universal and equal access to education, police protection, legal protection and defence, any one who puts in affirmative action is either confused, and uninformed or white middle class and trying to muddy the water, or both.
once you come out of high school with the same education as everyone else you're on you're own if you won't work you'll have to live off $50 a week! tuff cookies
affirmative action is wrong and racist, any liberal supporting it is harmin the cause of the disadvantaged.
any americans who travels to a real democracy and studies that society will learn their master/slave society is a sick excuse for a nation Esmehwp 15:55, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ooh look, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this. --165.173.126.126 (talk) 15:30, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Equal opportunity  X=   affirmative action   

message: Frequently in employment advertisements in the USA, the letters "M/F/D/V" appear at the end of the ad. I suspect they have some relevance to Equal Opportunity, as described in this article, and in fact if one types "M/F/D/V" into Wikipedia's search box, it redirects to this article. However, it is not defined in the article, nor is its significance explained anywhere. My hunch is that it refers to "male/female/disabled/veterans" but I do not know for sure. If someone knowledgeable could please add (or add back?) some explanation, that would be very much appreciated. Thank you.
Typofixer76 02:28, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of M/F/D/V, please? 

message: What relevance does the scouts association have to this? Moreover the link is broken and dosn't lead to anything. I'm removing it. Billsmith453 (talk) 12:23, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: removing link

message: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Equal_opportunity&action=historysubmit&diff=361550179&oldid=355442304
This edit still persists in the current version: Unfair opportunity practices include measures taken by an organization to ensure fairness in the employment process. Why are measures to "ensure fairness" deemed "unfair"? Someone please edit or explain this. 78.90.134.151 (talk) 08:09, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Unfair" vs "Equal" in an earlier edit 

message: Hopefully it's much better than before. The past version, being so small, needed improvement as per tag. I had worked on the other equalities -- equality of outcome and equality of autonomy and thought this one would be easy, but it's kind of the toughest one of the bunch, perhaps. A real challenge will be trying to get a few relevant pictures in so the article doesn't look so texty. I found myself avoiding the issue of how differing political views thought of equality of opportunity (it was somewhat divisive on the outcomes article) and focused more on serious thinkers (Nozick, Friedman, Rawls etc) and a basic split emerged (formal vs substantive), akin to Sowell's stuff about constrained vs unconstrained from his book A Conflict of Visions.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 06:28, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Upgrade 

message: Is a photo of almost nude runway models necessary for an encyclopedic article of this subject? Seems to push the line on appropriateness without adding anything truly helpful. Soonercary (talk) 21:23, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, for five reasons: (1) It's directly relevant to the subject of equal opportunity -- the Fashion Week models had been almost exclusively light skinned and it became the subject of an equal opportunity battle over skin color with extensive coverage in the Brazilian press. (2) It's different -- since people expect encyclopedia articles to be boring and texty, it creates visual interest and catches attention and helps build readership (I bet most "readers" of Wikipedia only glance at articles, so that photos are relatively more important than sheer text (3) It's beautiful to look at. (4) it emphasizes a worldwide focus -- not just US and Britain, but an under-covered country like Brazil -- there is a consensus view that Wikipedia should be written for people all over the world. (5) the discrimination is ongoing and even evident in Wikipedia -- if you look through all the photos in the Commons, you will not find any showing dark-skinned or indigenous models at the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (I had wanted to include one of them) -- which is unfortunate and highly unfair to these beautiful women. Overall the idea is to illustrate with photos the idea that equal opportunity is not just about minority groups struggling over jobs but affects all kinds of people in various situations.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 23:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your thoughtful response, but I would say the following regarding your points: 1) The photo itself is not directly relevant to the subject of equal opportunity. 2) Encyclopedia articles are not magazine articles that need flash and sex appeal to draw readership. 3) Irrelevant. 4) The "photo" is not important to emphasize the worldwide significance of the equal opportunity subject. A section addressing this would be more substantive. 5) Let that issue be addressed in an article about the Sao Paulo Fashion Week. Soonercary (talk) 17:39, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: And thank you for your response, but I remain unpersuaded. I continue to think the photo is highly relevant: the subject of the article is equal opportunity; a major point in the article is how equal opportunity is becoming applied increasingly widely (ie not just African-Americans vying for jobs) but for diverse areas including modeling; modeling is one of these areas where people don't normally think of discrimination being practiced (but it is) so the focus on this aspect enhances people's understanding of equal opportunity. Essentially, the photo makes two points rather nicely: (a) the widening sense of the concept of equal opportunity and (b) the substantive problem (that perceptions of what is considered beautiful can persist for generation after generation, so that people get used to equating "beauty" with "white skin", and seeing models with white skin reinforces a fixed idea of "beauty".) Substantive equality of opportunity is all about remedying that and breaking the cycle. Further, while other types of discrimination are no longer being practiced since they're illegal, discrimination in the fashion industry based on skin color is ongoing and still happening. I chose this photo because it prominently featured two of the three things I wanted (i) Brazilian models (ii) on a fashion runway (iii) skin color was dark-skinned. I had wanted to find "dark skinned or indigenous" but I could not find any in Wikipedia -- so, for me, I only got (i) and (ii). That was the best that I could find. I searched. There were other photos of the Sao Paulo fashion week but they didn't focus on the runway or the models or their skin color as nicely (mostly on judges). Last, this may not be much of an issue to you or me or most of us here at Wikipedia (I'm a card-carrying member of the Caucasian persuasion, and most writers at Wikipedia are men) but when I worked on articles such as physical attractiveness and if you see the talk page there, it is evident that skin color and beauty are ongoing issues -- with concerns about which women are included being rather contentious. See, you might think differently about the photo selection if you were a dark-skinned model who was rejected from the Fashion show only because of what you could not control -- your skin color. So, for these reasons, and trying to maintain a spirit of inclusiveness, I see the photo as directly relevant and apropos to furthering the gist of this article. (And I did address the discrimination issue in the Sao Paulo fashion week article.)Tomwsulcer (talk) 18:51, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

text: Wondering, what is it about this photo that bothers you so much? You wrote that they're "almost nude" -- by contemporary standards, they're clothed -- this is not pornography by any stretch but a public event. While I agree that encyclopedia articles do not need "flash and sex appeal to draw readership", I think Wikipedia benefits when we can have beauty and yes even sexiness in our articles. I like readership. I want people to read this article. I want this Wikipedia article to be the best one out there on the web. Right now I think it competes favorably with the other sources I came across (most of which have no pictures whatsoever, not even any diagrams like the ones I included). And, when applicable and relevant, which I think describes this situation, I have no problem using the best-looking pictures I can find in Wikimedia Commons to illustrate the text.Tomwsulcer (talk) 18:51, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It's simply a matter of maintaining high community standards. No censorship. The photo is obviously not pornography, but it borders on what many people - the community at large - would consider generally acceptable and appropriate for a quality encyclopedia, especially for an otherwise cerebral subject like equal opportunity. You've made a huge deal here about the issue of the Fashion Week, but the article is about the general subject, not this issue. The photo itself lends no credence to the core issue. It's a scintillating photo of sexy models - which would be appropriate for a page about scintillating sexy models, but not about equal opportunity, as much as you feel the circumstance related to the photo is relevant. It's not a huge issue here, but I think we need to work hard to uphold and respect community standards at large, because they generally exist to draw us back to what is important. You've put a lot of good work into this article; thanks for that. Let's keep that quality high. Soonercary (talk) 13:26, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough. Clearly you feel strongly about this so I'll defer to your judgment here.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:02, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

text: By the way, check out these traffic stats Equal opportunity readership stats. Over 1000 in one day, up from the usual 500. I wonder why this happened.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:08, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're implying that it is because of a photo of scantily clad models, well then you're probably right. But I thought Wikipedia had different purposes. Soonercary (talk) 18:25, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, I'd like to think that the upsurge in readership was because the article was vastly improved in terms of overall quality and not because of Brazilian models, but who knows? It doubled. Why? I don't know. In past months the shorter unrevamped article got around 700 readers/day, particularly during weekdays, and in summer it dropped off, around 400/day. I wish I understood the readership dynamic better, but that's one of the great things about Wikipedia -- people read it, and I'm a big fan of getting people to read it, and the best overall draw is good, quality information, clearly written, well-referenced, and I think all of us -- collectively -- do an excellent job here, overall, wouldn't you agree?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 19:09, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

text: Hey what do you think about this photo to the right? would it be suitable.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 15:46, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Runway model photo?

message: I'm adding new references, expanding some sections, hopefully getting this article to rival the others out there.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:01, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Great job, but the description of equal opportunity as a useful standard strikes me as utterly wrong.  It is a political concept with many implications.  If you look at many encyclopeidas, this is what they generally say, so I will make the change. Imersion (talk) 18:28, 27 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for the "great job" comment. About the concept of equal opportunity being primarily a political concept -- I did look at many encyclopedias. And when I looked into this, there were of course political aspects, but the concept itself I think is much bigger than merely politics, because it reaches into diverse areas and means many things to many people. So I would say it is not merely a political concept, but moral (in terms of fairness), economic, legal (the concept is highly embedded in law.) And in each of these areas, the concept of equal opportunity is like a standard (the etymology of standard is derived partially from the Roman sense -- a sort of military marker -- which has come to be used as a way to think about measurements) -- and the standard applies to many areas -- economic, legal, moral, and yes political too. If you'd like to argue that equal opportunity is primarily a political concept, please provide references attesting to this way of looking at things.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 01:25, 28 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: More revamping

message: This subject dealing with equality of opportunity is fundamental to the creation of social justice in the community. Yet when it comes to the contribution made by Henry George to it, nothing has yet been written here. Equality of opportunity means the right to work and earn a decent living, but this basic need, which somewhat obtusely appears in the Charter for the United Nations, is not properly explained, and the philosophy of creating a natural kind of macroeconomics is avoided.
What George was saying (130 years ago), is that whenever a site of useful land is owned and held unused or when it is occupied whatever use is made of it, these actions place the rest of the surrounding community at a number of disadvantages. There being a limited amount of useful land and its value being a function of its distance from the center of the community, this occupancy has the effect of reducing the productivity of the rest of the working community who must travel further or work harder to make the same amount of goods as could be made on the original site. The cost of the goods made further away rises too, which is likely to reduce consumption and limit the number of workers that are worthwhile to employ. Thus the best land is always used first, but subsequently becomes the most advantageous to its owner for the monopolization of its opportuntites. 
Thus land ownership and speculation in its value, when it is partly used or withheld from use, damages the equality of opportunity that would otherwise occur. George went on to claim that the continuous advantage that the land owner gets when the land is in use, in terms of money is known as the ground rent. By collecting this economic rent a government can "level the playing field", causing the advantage of land ownership to become equal for all useful sites. George proposed to tax the value of the land in this way and to use this national income instead of income tax, purchase tax and property tax of buildings, machinery, etc. as the means for relieving the un-natural situation presently affecting the whole macroeconomy. Thus the ideal for social justice through the equality of opportunity to work is seen as a more natural and greater freedom creation kind of society than what our present system of land tenure has to offer.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.65.25.27 (talk) 09:54, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree the thinking of the socialist Henry George as it applied to his sense of the term equality of opportunity might merit a line or two, but not much more, and provided that we can find a good reference or two for it. To put any more emphasis on George's thinking risks turning this article into a WP:SOAPBOX. Also, Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply a right to work -- rather, it is about, well, equal opportunities, fair treatment, and so forth.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:20, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Equality of Opportunity of Henry George 

message: The article covers a lot of ground on race/ethnic and gender discrimination and employment equity for those groups. Where's the info on people with disabilities and employment equity, mainstreaming (education), the Americans with Disabilities Act, and so on? That's a big oversight. OttawaAC (talk) 01:47, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Noted. Consider expanding the article to cover this.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 02:23, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

text: What is employment equity?--Tomwsulcer (talk) 02:23, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Disabilities? Accessibility, ADA 

message: To me, this article is covering two seperate things in contemporary discourse:
1) Anti-discrimination, eg not excluding people based on race etc
2) The idea that your upbringing does not determine your life chances. Linked to social mobility. (To me this is what most people mean when they talk about equality of opportunity).
The article here, especially the intro, mainly stresses point 1. But a lot of articles link to this page referring to the second point. 
I think this page should be exclusively about point 2, and a second article should be created for point 1. Entitled something like 'Movements against discrimination'
Jandrews23jandrews23 (talk) 16:49, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If you wish to create a new article entitled Movements against discrimination, that might be a helpful addition to Wikipedia, and one could use perhaps some of the source material here in this article in the new one; however, I am not all that happy with the title Movements against discrimination since it sounds a bit POV-ish. And the term anti-discrimination -- well it can mean different things; in one sense, discrimination has already happened, and there are efforts of some sort to undo it or fight it or roll it back; in another sense, it means preventive efforts to discourage it from happening; so it would be important to be clear about what is meant here. About your suggestion to split this article into separate articles -- I was the contributor who revamped this article a while back, and my sense is that it is almost impossible to disentangle the notions of anti-discrimination and the concept of life chances & social mobility -- for me, these are all wrapped together, and one can not really talk about one thing without talking about the other. The current article as it is, is essentially what the sources say equality of opportunity and equal opportunity mean, essentially. When I researched the topic, I pretty much stuck with those two exact phrases in every search string, and the resulting secondary source material emerged from strictly adhering to those terms. So the article is solid, as I see it. Splitting it up might add elements of original research possibly. I guess what I am saying is that a split is possible, but only if carefully done, and it might risk causing a whole host of problems down the road, so I am mostly opposed to the idea unless I get a sense that whoever is doing the splitting has really researched this subject and done the homework. This whole subject is somewhat prone (but not as much as pure religion or philosophy or politics) to wikibattling, and too many changes might open up a Pandora's Box of new problems.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 17:40, 23 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two topics/ split the article 

message: ...I moved the sentence down a bit in the lede paragraph since I'm assuming that people who are reading this article don't yet know what equal opportunity is, so it doesn't make sense to say what the concept includes until more of the definition is outlined. But what I think is important to say, which I think is what you're trying to say, is that two key areas of equal opportunity are employment and education, so I tried (rather awkwardly) to convey this idea in the last sentence of the lede. Please see if you like the whole lede paragraph first before reverting.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 10:29, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks good. Thanks for the effort. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:10, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  How about this... 

message: Regarding this proposed change (which I reverted). What do we call this article? I pondered this for a long time when I revamped this article many years ago, and while the intellectual side of me likes the construct Equality of opportunity, what I found is that there are many more references to the term Equal opportunity being used in the media. The two terms are close to being interchangeable (I tried to mention the nuances in meaning in the article). So it's kind of a tossup, although I think the Wikipedia guidelines tell us to stick with the more-often-used term. Plus the style manual will suggest that we stick with the article title in the lede paragraph, to avoid confusing readers. Also, Equality of opportunity redirects to Equal opportunity. If a contributor can make a case that the two terms are separate and distinct, and each term deserves its own article, please make a case for that, and we can discuss it, although my sense is it would probably be a duplication of effort.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 13:21, 23 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Equal opportunity versus Equality of Opportunity 

message: Terms like "attitudinal" and "physical" and "systemic" such as in this change are vague -- what exactly do they mean? What, for example, is an "attitudinal barrier"? What are examples of it? This is the second sentence in the lede paragraph of a highly read article, and it really needs to be clear and concrete, and it is best to avoid academic-y sounding jargon from fields such as psychology or sociology. It would be helpful if not only the terms were either (1) clarified or better yet (2) switched to terms that are better understood, and if references can be found explicitly describing the concept of equal opportunity using such terms.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 12:26, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Those words could be seen in https://books.google.com/books?id=a9zfAvTABDoC&pg=PA191, UN Reports and other related sources. Attitudinal barrier: prejudices or preferences(lede intro), everything else is self-explanatory. The words provide a condensed clarity and appropriate with "ref name=twsL18." However, the sentence and the content that starts with "the intent is that important jobs in an organization should go to those persons who are the "most qualified"..... is antithetical to the article and it is mentioned no where in those referred sources. The second paragraph of the lede section expect the last sentence starting with "The concept..." does not hold validity for being in the intro, and it could be refactored further below by confirming the sources. Regards.174.4.26.61 (talk) 16:38, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: So an attitudinal barrier is an attitude held by decision maker(s) that prevents/blocks them from making a choice based on real qualifications (ie skill/qualifications for doing the job) so that they make their decision based on arbitrary/irrelevant factors such as sex or race? That is, the attitude (a thought in the mind) acts like a concrete wall blocking them from thinking correctly -- is that what you're trying to get at here? About jobs going to the person most qualified -- my sense is that this is at the heart of the concept of equal opportunity, and there are many examples in the article as well as references which reinforce the idea that in a hiring situation, the applicant with the best qualifications -- relevant to the position -- should get the position, and not an applicant with irrelevant characteristics like being the 'correct' race etc. I do think there is something to what you're trying to get at -- that the ultimate problem is faulty thinking within the minds of the hiring committee -- just wondering how we could clarify that.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 20:00, 2 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Issues with wording 

message: Tomwsulcer, please explain your removal, on 3 April 2019, of two citations per WP:REFSPAM. I haven't seen that one before, and those two citations seemed to me to be legit. What gives? Paulmlieberman (talk) 20:59, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  RefSPAM? 

message: The entry in the Stanford Encyclopeedia of Philosophy was revised in 2015. Not sure how much it will affect this page, but it might be a good idea to double-check it. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:25, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Update?