From Equal Opportunity to Equal Results and Back?

Work in the area of equal opportunity long enough and you'll notice an odd evolution.

The initial requirement of nondiscrimination was soon joined by the Affirmative Action outreach requirements. These could be reconciled with equal opportunity so long as the best candidate was selected. Unfortunately, many organizations transformed flexible outreach goals into rigid hiring and promotion quotas.

Those same organizations were, shall we say, economical with the truth. They would - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - deny the use of quotas both because some were ideologically wedded to them and because many had learned that the best way to get federal monitors off of the front porch was to have the right numbers. If the numbers looked good, there were no further questions. Equality of opportunity was transformed into equality of result.

[The sound you hear is the late Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who declared during the debate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he would eat the bill if anyone could find it contained a requirement for quotas, spinning in his grave.]

As organizations got the right numbers, the emphasis began to shift from Affirmative Action to "Diversity." The justification was that even if your numbers look good, you still need to know how to manage a diverse bunch of folks. That made sense, but many of the die-hard quota folks also added that even if there was no evidence of discrimination, you needed to make sure your workforce "reflected the community." They made bold pronouncements about the inherent virtues of diversity; a virtue that seems to have eluded Toyota and which has yet to be empirically established.

Notice the clever sleight of hand. At first, the outreach was needed to achieve equal opportunity and then it became necessary to achieve diversity. The same "wink, wink" use of quotas, however, remained a problem that not even the U.S. Supreme Court could sort out.

It is somewhat amusing to see where the Office of Federal Compliance Programs (OFCCP) is headed. The OFCCP is now less interested in the Affirmative Action Plans of federal contractors and more focused on whether or not discrimination exists. Those of you who thought that investigating employment discrimination was the job of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) underestimate the ability of an organization to redefine itself in order to justify its existence. Thar's gold in them thar discrimination cases! Especially when more and more organizations have their Affirmative Action programs squared away. And OFCCP has an advantage. It need not wait for someone to walk in with a complaint.

Well, that's the way the world of organizations works and if the OFCCP folks find discrimination by federal contractors, then more power to their auditors. Discrimination should be dug out root and branch and the wisest organizations will do so before the feds arrive.

It would be nice, however, if after the meandering through quotas to remedy past discrimination and quotas to achieve diversity, the process wound up and remained where it was supposed to stay: providing equal opportunity - not equal result - and eliminating illegal discrimination.

And with no winks or nudges.