Is Equality fair?

You'd think it was straightforward wouldn't you? It turns out that equality might not be fair after all.

As often happens, my source of blog inspiration comes from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. I do have to admit that I was half awake and showering at the time, but the debate was about a researched assertion that boys and girls natural capacity for maths is naturally and genetically different. Then there was someone complaining that the UK has the lowest number of female engineers in Europe.

At other times, we might hear about the differences in school grades in various subjects between the sexes.

I don't really accept this modern "liberal" phenomenon that everything has to be equally distributed or else foul play must be at work. There really are times when you would and should expect things to be distributed in a certain way. For example, academic results across the range should always be a Bell curve (like an upturned bathtub) unless the exam is made so facile that everyone gets 100%. In fact, if that were to happen, that would be unfair to the brighter, higher achievers. In this case, total equality would be the most unfair way to proceed.

Having said that, teachers are on a hiding to nothing when it comes to results, especially in certain section of the media. This is particularly true of A level results. Every August, you can guarantee that the same "newspapers" will launch the annual "A levels getting easier" line. If A level results did not improve year on year, you can guarantee that the same sections of the press would be lamblasting the teachers for not improving results. A story carried in the Daily Mail within the last couple of months ran "Only 10 teachers sacked for incompetence in the last year". I love the Daily Mail headlines; the screaming prejudice and lack of fairness that's regularly exhibited is at least consistent. The story neatly sidesteps any discussion about how many teachers actually are incompetent, the discussion is just about why more aren't sacked. This was followed in the last couple of weeks by an "initiative" by the Court Jester, sorry Education Secretary, Michael Gove that he was going to make it easier to sack bad teachers. Hmmm.

Anyway, back to the point in hand - equality. There are nearly always several debates running at any one time which are similarly framed. "Police recruits from ethnic minorities aren't representative of the proportion of the population", "top executives are under-represented by women".

There are several things wrong with these complaints. Firstly, there's the major question of Free Will. Women typically do not choose Engineering as a profession because, by and large, women aren't interested in these things, whereas boys are always taking things apart to see how they work, whether they be bicycles or flies. Of course it would be valid to ask Ethnic minorities why they choose not to apply for the Police force, and police authorities should do all that it reasonable to encourage them to apply and change any perceptions within both the force and the community that conflict with that aim. However, they should not have to bend over backwards or take steps which dilute the service. Police height restrictions were removed as a step towards sexual and racial equality. Personally I would rather that the policeman who turns up to a pub fight was taller than 5'2".

The next point is ability. A decent size secondary school will have in excess of 1500 pupils. Of those, let's face it, not everyone is of equal ability. There will be a large number of children who will excel at university and academic subjects, but there will be a not inconsiderable number who will be better suited to vocational education and employment. That seems to me to be an immutable fact, obvious to all but the most blinkered. This represents a problem either way: no parent would want to hear that their child had been shunted towards vocational courses, dashing their aspirations for their offspring. Equally, one would not want a school to cast a borderline student towards vocational education purely for the sake of the school's league table placement. Indeed, school league tables are another Utopian folly that all schools are capable of competing together. The columnist Peter Hitchens has written much on the naivety of educational equality, and argues for the return of selective education.

I honestly don't remember where I heard the quotation now, but I recall something about management of employees, and how treating everyone equally was the most unfair thing that a manager can do. I personally think the same applies to the population.