It was international men’s day recently. It’s fair to say this is both a recent and controversial ‘day’. One side saying why do we need to celebrate and recognise men when the system has been rigged to be biased towards men in progression, pay and perceived desirable characteristics. The other side saying every demographic has its time to be recognised it’s only fair that men do too. The hashtag #equality being regularly attached to posts, blogs, tweets and the like.

Let me forewarn you that this is controversial but I’ll say it clearly;

The idea of equality terrifies me and is something I will fight tooth and nail to prevent.

Right, now that’s out of the way and you’re suitably shocked let me explain myself. It lies in the difference between fairness and equality, two terms that are often used interchangeably but to me mean quite different things. The difference is more than semantics as could appear on first glance.

We live in a world where you’d find few people disagreeing with the benefits of a meritocracy. Where people should be rewarded in line with the magnitude of their achievements. The economist in me still believes in efficient allocation of resources with output being the key determinant. At school I once asked (a fairly left wing) history teacher what the simple difference between capitalism and communism was and his response was ‘capitalism is equality of opportunity, communism is equality of outcome’. It’s simple but it’s stuck with me to this day.

This brings me to the difference between fairness and equality. Equality is an oppressive totalitarian force that requires everyone’s outcome be the same no matter what inputs they provide, true communism. I want capitalism and fairness, the kind we’ve strived for and not what we currently have, where everyone has the opportunities to achieve the same amount, where they’re judged for their content and not their presentation.

This has all stayed fairly conceptual and therefore can be easily brushed aside.

So what if I were to say we already target fairness and inequality in certain areas and are happy about it. Let’s take a tangible example; pregnancy and maternity. Women, rightly so, are protected by law and in many cases by their companies in ways a man could easily say is unequal. During pregnancy women have the right to have any illness or absences recorded separately and they are not legally allowed to be used in any disciplinary or dismissal processes. This is unequal, men don’t get these sort of protections, but it is quite clearly a fair policy. Secondly, we can move onto something very close to my heart; maternity and paternity leaves. It’s clear that these are unequal, people can cite companies such as Aviva but even their policies try to equalise an unequal field don’t do it fully, I believe (if you work at Aviva or have knowledge of the policy I’d love to understand the details better). As someone who is a huge advocate of paternity rights and introduced 8 weeks of fully paid share parental leave irrelevant of gender I’ll never go as far to say these should be equalised. There’s simply a period after birth where the physical effects that women experience simply don’t apply to men. Therefore fairness would suggest that the approaches to maternity and paternity should be different or unequal in order to be fair.

I can cite many more examples but for the sake of brevity I won’t list them here. Those of you who’ve made it to this point in the article will be glad to know I’m almost done. I hope I’ve explained why my controversial, click bait point above is something I believe in. I’d love to hear you views in the comments below, am I talking your language? Or am I so far off the mark that it’s dangerous? Please let me know……