Do We Need to Choose Between Fair and Equal?

When my children were small, they (often!) complained that I wasn’t fair. I wasn’t fair in so many ways: when they compared themselves to their friends, to each other, and to “everyone else.”  That’s because our values were different from all those other people’s.

And I’m pretty sure that when they got old enough to use a dictionary, at least one of them dragged me over to show me the definition that fair was equal treatment.

However, equal treatment is not always the same as equivalent treatment. While I do want equal treatment under the law, I want equivalent treatment in different circumstances.

Consider these cases:

• I want equivalent physical access to all buildings. While I might not like a handicapped entrance on the side or around the back, if I end up with equivalent access, I’m happy. That’s fair to me.
• What matters to a young professional might not matter to a seasoned professional. Different people may have different career expectations, including rewards, depending on where they are in their careers. (In the Modern Management Made Easy books, I said we need to treat people fairly, but maybe not equally.) That’s fair to the various people in the organization.

We can extend the idea of equivalence—not necessarily equal—to many other circumstances. That helps me consider what fair is in a given situation. I start with my values.

Values Can Drive Our Sense of Fairness and Equivalence

When I start with my values, I can explain why I see fairness—or lack thereof.

Many years ago, I had dinner with my parents, explaining to them why I was looking for a new job. Both my folks had the idea that you took a job and stayed there for much of your career.

I did not share their perspective. Not when my current managers told me they couldn’t pay me the equivalent of the men who did the same job.

My mom said, “But they either have families or will have families to support.”

My dad turned to my mom and said, “Do you really want to support Johanna if all the raises go to the men?”

I laughed out loud—as did they. I always knew my dad was a feminist, but my mom was not. That was the first time she started to change her mind.

When it comes to work, we need equivalence to create fairness.

As a society, we seem to have much more trouble deciding what’s fair in how we treat each other in many other circumstances. Here are just two of them:

• Do we make more room for disadvantaged people at elite colleges? Is that fair? (I have a distinct prejudice: I don’t see how an elite school offers more value to the student. That’s also about my values. You might disagree with me and have terrific arguments.)
• How about specifically creating diverse teams at work? I’m firmly in the diversity camp because I know that diverse teams create much better decisions, which lead to much better products. And I’ve worked with senior leadership teams where I was the only woman in the room. They made much better decisions with me there, because I had a different perspective. Every single time, they literally said these words, “I never considered that.”

Our values can be dissimilar. It’s the perspective we bring to the discussion that matters. The more we discuss our perspectives, the better choices we can make.

Two Choices is Insufficient

When we only consider “fair” or “equal,” we miss the nuance a discussion can bring. When we add the idea of equivalent, we might discover many more choices.

That’s the question this week: Do we need to choose between fair and equal?