Embracing Equality with Sasha

What does equity mean to you?

For me, equality and equity are two words with an entirely different meaning. Equality is all about the law. It’s a framework that gives everyone the same opportunities. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has access to them. That’s what equity is all about.

Let me use a real-life example. When a meeting finishes and a plate of sandwiches remains, we might put it on the kitchen counter and say to the team ‘help yourself.’ But if a colleague is a wheelchair user, they might not be able to reach them – so although we offered the sandwiches to everyone, the wheelchair user may go hungry. When talking about gender equity, accessibility is key. It’s very easy to say that promotion is open to everybody. But is it really? In many ways, Covid has been a real eye-opener. When everyone was forced to work remotely during the healthcare crisis, technology enabled working from home, or even from another country. Yet although women and men had equity in access, we saw a huge percentage of women with multiple caring responsibilities (e.g. looking after the elderly, managing the household, raising children) drop out of the workforce. This in turn creates significant economic and social disadvantage. It results in an interesting paradox for equity and women.