The Triumph of ‘Equity’ Over ‘Equality’

Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flash point in the nation’s culture wars. Centers for teaching and learning embrace it, as do institutes and education schools promoting “inclusive excellence” and “equity in higher education.” Meanwhile, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have multiplied to such an extent that they have generated a reaction: Conservative politicians now seek to close them, and many on the right treat “equity” as a trigger word, progressive code for a litany of menacing ideas, including quotas and critical race theory, which emanate, they charge, from America’s “woke” colleges.

But what does “equity” really mean, and when and why did it emerge as a contemporary key word? The answers to those questions are bound up with the fate of a related concept, equality, and its troubled contemporary status in American life.

Whatever its current fortunes, “equity” is an old word, dating in English and other Indo-European languages to the Middle Ages, but with a classical heritage much older than that. Aristotle, for example, provided a seminal account of “equity” (epieikeia) in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric as “correction of the law, where law falls short because of its universality.” To be “equitable,” Aristotle argued, was to exercise sympathetic judgment regarding special circumstances and particular facts, like good judges do when they rule with discretion beyond the letter of the law. Equity, in short, was a corrective kind of justice, which aspired to fairness in cases where one size did not fit all.

The Romans, for their part, added to these associations by carving out for equity (aequitas) an ambiguous place between natural and civil law. Equity aimed for fairness and for justice, what Cicero described as “giving to each his own.”

It was largely on the basis of such classical precedents that equity emerged as a special branch of jurisprudence in the medieval and early modern periods, giving rise to “equity courts,” which ruled on subjects where the law was silent or unclear. As an English lawyer explained in a typical case, although a statute dating to the reign of King Edward III forbade giving alms to persons capable of work, equity could only be served by exonerating the man who did so after coming across a beggar naked and desperate in the snow. It was the purpose of equity, after all, to “temper and mitigate the rigor of the law.”

Given equity’s close connections to notions of justice and fairness, it drew the reflection of not only jurists, but theologians, philosophers, and humanists, who fought about its meanings in hundreds of learned treatises and disquisitions. While some praised equity as indispensable to the people’s welfare (salus populi), a “balm graciously soothing” the law’s “rugged forehead,” others decried it as a license to partiality and special pleading. “Clemency overmuch used is no clemency,” one treatise warned. “To be too submissive and too humane ingenerall, is to prove humane to none.”

One can certainly hear echoes of that venerable discussion in contemporary debates, along with the more recent sense of the term as it is employed in business and finance, where “equity” is the value or stake one has in an enterprise. Yet it can be easy to miss those overtones amid the cacophony of current cultural dialogue, where equity is used in a confusing variety of ways. One review of the literature identified at least five contrasting meanings of equity in current discussions of education, including equality of outcomes for individual students or racial or ethnic groups, and the equal distribution of resources across school districts and states to special efforts to assist the less advantaged and those who lag behind. “Educational equity,” the authors concluded, “is universally lauded but equally ill-defined.” In other domains, such as human resources and health, equity also defies simple definition. As one author acknowledged candidly while urging support for it in higher education, “Equity is many things.”

But if it can be difficult to say precisely what equity is, many find it easier to say what equity is not. And here the most useful point of comparison is “equality.” The two words, to be sure, are closely related. Both derive from the Latin aequus, meaning “even,” “level,” or “equal,” a reference to the position of the pans on a balance scale. And as that common etymology suggests, both entail efforts to measure and compare relative weight. Yet today the words are most often used to signal divergence. A booklet from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), which defines itself as “dedicated to advancing the democratic purposes of higher education by promoting equity, innovation, and excellence,” makes the point nicely, noting that “equality is about sameness; it focuses on making sure everyone gets the same thing.” “Equity,” by contrast, “is about fairness; it ensures that each person gets what he or she needs.”

Similarly, the YWCA’s social-justice glossary explains that equality means “to treat everyone exactly the same,” whereas equity means “to treat everyone fairly.” It adds that an “equality emphasis” strives to be “colorblind,” and so it often “ignores historical and structural factors that benefit some social groups” at the expense of others. An “equity emphasis” takes color into consideration, along with factors like gender and sexuality, seeking justice by bringing structural and historical factors to the fore. The YWCA is clear about the consequences. “Sometimes justice demands, for the purpose of equity, an unequal response.”

The candid recognition that not only are equity and equality different but that achieving equity might well require inequality is made plain in both these cases by graphic depiction. The AAC&U illustrates equality by showing three different-sized figures attempting to ring a bell on a cord.

The first, a tall figure, does so easily. The second manages to grab the very end of the string. But the third and shortest figure cannot reach the cord at all. In the equity example, by contrast, the shorter figures stand on raised platforms of different sizes so that they, too, can ring the bell with ease.

The YWCA makes the same point by showing three standing women of different heights. In the equality example, their heads each reach different levels. But in the equity example, the two shorter women stand on blocks so that they are all the same height. They have been, as it were, “leveled” up.

Images like these have been popular since the 2010s, when a cartoon showing people of different heights watching a baseball game from beyond the park fence went viral. In 2012 Craig Froehle illustrated equality according to a “conservative” perspective and a “liberal” one. In the conservative example, the three people watching the game stood on boxes of the same size, with the tallest spectator getting the best view, the middle one just managing to peer over the fence, and the third unable to see at all. In the liberal case, the boxes were of different sizes so that the figures all stood at the same level.

But if the original drawing aimed to illustrate two different types of equality — equality of opportunity and equality of ends — the critical terms have since changed. Hundreds of variations on the image now pit equality invidiously against justice, fairness, and equity. Equity and equality are no longer taken as complements, but as things opposed.

Educational professionals began invoking the term “equity” as early as the 1990s. But its stark opposition to equality is a more recent development, a product of the 21st century, and above all, its second decade. It was not until 2021, in fact, that an Inside Higher Education blog proclaimed “equity” as “higher ed’s word of the hour.” As one diversity officer at an Ivy League college told me the following year, “We are definitely in an equity and not an equality culture, and that is a good thing.”

Whether one thinks of the new equity culture as a good thing is, of course, a matter of perspective. But regardless of how one feels about the development, how can we account for it? What explains equity’s recent emergence and equality’s corresponding demise?

On one level, surely, the question is one of semantics, with “equity” simply expressing a preference for what Froehle’s 2012 cartoon originally called “liberal” (or social-democratic) equality, an equality of outcomes or ends. To seek equity, on that understanding, is to work to ensure that everyone ends up on a common level, taking special measures toward the marginalized and disadvantaged to help ensure the final result. To seek equity, in this regard, is to seek equality by other means. As the old socialist maxim put it, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”

That explanation in turn calls to mind the logic that governed affirmative action as it was applied in college hiring and admissions cases beginning in the 1970s. By making exceptions to the general standards and requirements on the basis of gender or race, institutions sought to make amends for historical injustices, righting past wrongs in a way that would eventually ensure true equality for all.

But if in certain respects the language of equity is just a new iteration of the older logic of affirmative action and the social-democratic emphasis on the equality of ends, there is something else at play in the insistent critique of equality as homogenizing sameness and the corresponding demand that institutions recognize and respond to difference. As the website Race Forward explains, “Equality uses the same strategies for everyone, but because people are situated differently, they are not likely to get to the same outcomes. Equity uses differentiated and targeted strategies to address different needs and to get to fair outcomes.” The critique builds upon the legacy of the politics of identity, which has been bound up with the discourse of equity from the start, and it echoes a formulation first articulated by feminist critics in the 1980s and 1990s.

Too often, those critics pointed out, aspirants to equality and equal rights had been forced to deny their differences (of gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation) in the name of an alleged common humanity that was in truth formed in the image of the white, heterosexual, male (the original identity of identity politics). Refusing the “blackmail” of a specious universalism that occluded particular differences, critics responded by asserting “differences as the very meaning of equality itself,” to quote the historian and feminist theorist Joan Scott. This was a demand for inclusion not on the basis of some shared or universal human attribute. Rather, it was, as the philosopher Sonia Kruks later summarized, a demand for inclusion because of them.

In the long history of egalitarian movements, this was a novel assertion. For although equality and difference are always compatible to some degree — if for no other reason than that no two human beings are alike — equality claims, historically, have been most often attended by appeals to similarity, sameness, or common belonging. It is revealing that early dictionaries regularly defined equality as “conformity,” or glossed the word, like Noah Webster did in 1806, as “likeness, evenness, uniformity.”

In rejecting those definitions, and by presenting difference as the path to equality’s ultimate end, yesterday’s theorists bequeathed a powerful set of resources out of which to fashion today’s equity. Well-read as they tended to be in the writings of Marx and Engels, those theorists were likely also aware that the two regularly criticized equality as an “illusion” and false universal, which covered over genuine interests of power and obscured real needs. In any case, equality looks that way to many proponents of equity today, who oppose it to justice and fairness.

Meanwhile, prominent conservatives along with defenders of classical liberal values within the academy (like the political theorist Yascha Mounk) assail equity as the enemy of justice, accusing it of eroding meritocracy, promoting reverse discrimination, and undermining the prospects of what Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, calls “colorblind equality.” At the same time, populist forces to their right dispense with equality talk altogether. Fanning resentment at the revelation that equity for some means inequality for others — above all, longtime beneficiaries of the bounty of historical privilege — they proclaim their own “difference” and “identity,” while railing at the unfairness of a system that, they claim, is rigged against them. If equality is a sham, they concede, a false universal, why not simply demand preferment for those who deem themselves superior?

These are the contemporary, competing logics of equity and equality. Until we can find a way to resolve our differences, acknowledging and then transcending them in a place of common ground, the underlying sameness of our humanity, to say nothing of equity and equality, will continue to elude us.