Dani Garavelli - Positively the wrong answer

IN the mid to late 80s, when I was a student at Glasgow University, I used to sit around the QM union listening to earnest young Labourites talking about how they were going to change the world.

When they weren't plotting Thatcher's downfall, organising the next poll tax demo or drunkenly singing Red Fly the Banners, O, the conversation would turn to positive discrimination. All of the women (and most of the men) agreed it wasn't just desirable, it was the only way sexual equality in the workplace would ever be achieved.

This was always the point at which I realised how little, late-night carousing aside, I had in common with them. Why would these intelligent, capable, articulate women support a policy that effectively patted them on the head; a policy that as good as said: "You won't succeed without special treatment"?

On the cusp of adulthood, I didn't know much, but I was sure of this. I was going to get wherever I was going on my own merits. I didn't need a leg-up from a bunch of patronising do-gooders. And I certainly didn't ever intend to be in a position where my co-workers could say: "You've only got this far because you're a girl."

Twenty-odd years later, my youthful bravado has been tempered by experience and my world view is a little more pragmatic. While I have never really found my gender a bar to success, I realise there are plenty of others whose careers have been stunted by sexual or racial prejudice. And I am forced to concede that, though progress has been made (particularly where maternity rights are concerned), women are still paid less than men and continue to be under-represented at the top of almost every profession.

Yet, when Harriet Harman last week proposed positive discrimination as part of a package of measures to tackle this situation, I found I was as implacably opposed as I've always been. Producing a white paper, the equality minister insisted public sector employers recruiting from a shortlist of equally qualified job applicants would now be entitled to opt for the female or ethnic minority candidate.

Now, I can see how this proposition makes sense in the abstract. If one section of society is under-represented in the workforce, then tinkering with the selection process until the imbalance is redressed seems to be the simplest solution. But once you stop viewing the labour market as an enormous Venn diagram, with men, women and ethnic minorities lumped together in three homogenous circles, and start seeing it as made up of individuals, each with their own set of talents, flaws and aspirations, it is less sustainable.

Should a hard-working indigenous man really be passed over in favour of a female or ethnic minority candidate to tackle a social injustice that is not of his making? Is the burden of several centuries of bias to fall on his shoulders? The problem is positive discrimination for one person almost always involves negative discrimination for another.

Personally, I don't want my rights to come at the expense of someone else's. But even if I did, I think this way of securing them could be counter-productive. You only have to look at the suspicion with which affirmative action programmes are regarded in the US to understand how easily a proposal like Harmen's could undermine rather than consolidate the position of women and ethnic minorities. It is hard enough for those groups to gain acceptance in the workplace without handing ammunition to those who believe they are incapable of competing on a level playing field.

There are problems with other aspects of Harmen's white paper too. Her proposal that companies should be forced to publish the salaries of their employees to expose any pay differential between men and women has its merits. But you would have to be sure you were comparing like with like.

To take – as Harmen did last week – two disparate statistics (the average hourly rate of pay for men working full-time and women working part-time) as an example of how women are victimised is disingenuous and likely to foment resentment amongst both sexes.

While men and women doing exactly the same work should, of course, be paid exactly the same wage, the fact that some women actively choose to take on lower paid, part-time jobs because of family commitments makes it difficult to assess just how much the wider gender pay gap is down to social prejudice and how much to lifestyle choice.

A similarly simplistic approach is taken towards the problem of age discrimination, with Harmen promising to force service providers to treat older customers the same way they treat younger ones. Again, it is clear where she is coming from. Travel insurance companies treat the over-70s in a appalling fashion charging them prohibitive rates without carrying out proper risk assessments.

But is it really wrong – as has been suggested – for a GP to tell an elderly patient that, at their age, poor health is only to be expected? Isn't that a fact of life and the very reason OAPs have a right to complain if local councils introduce automated "speaking" parking meters they can't hear or complicated voting forms they find difficult to understand?

True equality should be the goal of any civilised society. But I doubt it can be achieved by playing number games with the workforce or by forcing service providers to treat everyone exactly the same. Rather, it will be realised when difference is seen as something to be celebrated rather than feared and when every individual – regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or age – is accepted as such and treated with the respect they deserve.