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This chapter explores the Slovenian equal opportunities policy in the context of globalization debates. Focusing mainly on the equal opportunities legislation in Slovenia and the other recent European Union (EU) member states, the aim of the chapter is to reflect upon globalization as Europeanization and as supraterritorialization. Supraterritorial processes, such as the second wave of Western feminist movement established a mutual relationship with feminists in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s. Feminism and the feminist movement in Yugoslavia and in Slovenia in the 1980s and in the beginning of the 1990s, in particular, represent an important basis for gender equality politics and legislation in Slovenia. Another significant element that contributes to the introduction of gender equality legislation is EU integration. In Slovenia and also in other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that recently joined the European Union, the accession played a considerable role in adopting gender equality legislation. Europeanization in the context of equal opportunities policy leads to the homogenization process of standards for gender equality in the EU member states. In terms of legislation in member countries, the Europeanization of gender equality policy is performed as top-down politics particularly in recent member states, such as CEE. Using the example of gender equality policy in Slovenia, this chapter analyzes equal opportunities policy as a concept and as a legal mechanism emerging from the Western tradition, which was directly applied to CEE countries, such as Slovenia, when they joined the EU.

Diversity management concerns organizational practices to enhance the value of diversity in organizations by changing organizational culture and shaping work environment in which diversity can promote the organizational goals. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the diversity management practices in sustainability reports by exemplifying in the case of Turkey, which is an emerging economy with a complex and multiethnic society.

A comprehensive literature and qualitative research is conducted in order to understand the diversity management in a cultural context by looking at the company’s sustainability report in Turkey.

In Turkey, companies have responsibility to position the participation of employees in business opportunities as an important value of corporate culture by implementing diversity projects, and they announce these initiatives in their sustainability reports.

This research is a study about diversity in Turkey case. An example is limited to the company publishing a sustainability report.

This study may be useful for the board of directors and managers since they should become aware of understanding of the diversity management in the workplace especially in their sustainability mechanisms.

This study is valuable and attractive to create an open organizational culture where each employee is valued and where diversity issues all employment practices. Also, it is original to show why diversity is important in sustainability disclosures.

X = multiple interpretations

Purpose – The concept of equality of opportunity (EOp) goes back to Roemer (1993, 1998) who argues that a society should guarantee its members equal access to advantage regardless of their circumstances, while holding them responsible for turning that access into actual advantage by the application of effort. First, this chapter investigates how family background influences income acquisition in 17 European countries. Second, it particularly scrutinizes how governments affect EOp through redistributive policies.

Methodology – We apply two different methods in order to measure EOp: the Gini opportunity index defined by Lefranc et al. (2008) and a parametric estimation method. Effective redistribution is measured via income concepts at different stages of the tax-and-transfer schemes.

Findings – We find clear country clustering in terms of EOp for Nordic, Continental European, and Anglo-Saxon countries. For Eastern Europe our results are less definitive. By examining the impact of redistributive policies in the countries under analysis, it can be concluded that both taxes and transfers reduce inequality of opportunity (IOp), with social benefits typically playing a key role. Furthermore, the equalizing impacts of the tax-benefit system on IOp differ substantially from the ones observed in the traditional notion of inequality of outcomes.

Originality – We systematically compare two approaches used to identify the extent of EOp. Our results reveal that both methods yield rather robust country rankings for various circumstance sets. Furthermore, the impact of tax-benefit policies on EOp is rarely addressed in the existing literature. We contribute by focusing on effective redistribution directly related to different income concepts.

These public programs have typically been advanced on the grounds that social and economic inequality is at least partly the result of a vicious cycle that can best be broken by intervening in the victim's childhood – that poor children have poor parents who will rear them poorly to lead poor lives unless society steps in to “help.” It has been generally assumed that programs of individual assistance to children caught in this cycle can enhance their social and intellectual development and therefore improve their life chances – that is, the likelihood that they will capitalize on opportunity to achieve secure, comfortable, or even rich status as adults. These are claims that programs to help individual children will help equalize opportunity for them, making the odds facing Bobby and Jimmy faker. Whether or not programs of assistance to individuals can do this is a matter of debate (and is discussed at some length in Chapter 3). But the interesting point is how quickly the hopes for more equal opportunity for all have been confused with the presumption that making opportunity more equal will reduce the overall extent of poverty or economic inequality in the society. For 150 years this has been a recurrent claim of public policy concerning children and concerning inequality.

Recent studies show that Italian women’s education and skills are high and that they have access to the job market, but, at the same time, there are many difficulties in maintaining a job in certain periods of their lives. Exactly, the critic period is connected to the choice of having children or a “traditional family” and, in general, with family duties. To explain the different percentage of women participation to job market in different countries, recent studies have looked to peculiar institutional structure of “municipal” job market and to social support services. The public offer of childcare and family support explains lots of the differences among different countries, but it is a complex datum, really hard to detect, collect, and interpret. Other relevant data are statute provisions on parental leave (mother or father oriented). A systematic analysis has shown that we have, both at a national and at a European level, legal rules and models which should promote equal opportunities, but that we miss cultural promises going in the direction of supporting families and encouraging the preservation of female job place. This study also investigates two different kinds of answers, analyzing and comparing microchoices (technical and juridical instruments) and macrochoices (legal policies) that different legal systems, have adopted in the European context to promote an effective integration between lifetime and job time, to support families in terms of public services, and suggest possible new instruments connected with partnership of public and private programs.¹

This chapter will discuss diversity and discrimination within Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) (in employment and wider society) and critically assess the findings of the extant literature as it relates to such small island developing states. The chapter will examine race, sex, disability, and sexual orientation, specifically exploring current accepted practice and the effect of the recently enacted anti-discrimination legislation. This discussion is important as there is limited available literature as it relates to discrimination, diversity, inclusion and equality in the Caribbean region.

This chapter will rely on secondary data, primarily studies which focus on T&T, in the fields of management, psychology and sociology; as well as country reports published by international agencies including the United Nations and the World Health Organization; and T&T Equality Commission Reports.

Diversity exists within T&T, as does discrimination, within employment and wider society. This reflects an acceptance of the status quo as part of the culture of the twin island state, rather than challenging why it is still regarded as acceptable to treat some minority groups less favorably than others as a result of their immutable characteristics.

The use of secondary data may have limited the scope of the findings.

The development of the Equal Opportunity Act (2000) is a pivotal event in the trajectory towards equality; however, further action will be needed to reduce discrimination within society. The exclusion of sexual orientation from the Act and the criminalization of private sexual behavior must be addressed in order for Trinidadian society to become truly inclusive and diverse.

This discussion is important as there is limited available literature as it relates to discrimination, diversity, inclusion and equality in the Caribbean region and much of what is accepted as representative of reality is based on anecdotal evidence.

At first glance, it might seem from the statistics that 18- to 20-year-old members of minority ethnic groups are doing relatively well in terms of higher education. They are in fact better represented in UK colleges and universities than young whites. However, this is far from the whole story. Certain black groups, such as African–Caribbean males and Bangladeshi females, are significantly underrepresented in higher education in general and certain programmes in particular. For example, there has been difficulty recruiting Black and ethnic minority students into teacher training programmes (DfEE, 1998). The experience of participating in higher education is also often different for black and white students. Black and minority ethnic students are more likely to be concentrated in the new universities. In the mid-1990s, only 0.5 percent of the students at the older established universities came from a Black or minority ethnic background, compared with 14.4 percent in the new universities (DfEE, 1998). This inequality helps to perpetuate a system of white privilege, one that is entrenched in other areas of public life in the UK. Black and minority ethnic students are also more likely to study part-time than white students, are more likely to drop out of courses, and more frequently opt for lower-level qualifications (i.e., a diploma rather than a degree).

Purpose – This chapter aims at proposing a methodology for evaluating long-term income distributions according to the equality of opportunity principle.

Approach – We refer to the concept that there is equality of opportunity if the value of the set of opportunities is the same for all individuals, regardless of their circumstances. This approach partitions the population into types, that is, groups of individuals with the same set of circumstances. The type-specific outcome distribution is interpreted as the opportunity set of individuals with the same circumstances. We propose partial and complete rankings on long-term type-specific distributions. Accordingly, these rankings capture inequality between types, and are neutral to inequality within types.

Findings – We show the relationship between long-run and short-run inequality of opportunity and that this relationship can be interpreted in terms of intragenerational mobility. We also show that mobility can act as an equalizer of opportunities when the accounting period is extended.

Originality – The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we develop a decomposition of some measures of long-term inequality of opportunity into measures of short-term inequality of opportunity, applied to distributions, which neutralize the effect of effort on individual income, and may be employed to explain eventual differences arising from an analysis based on the intertemporal context. Second, we propose an index to measure intragenerational mobility and show how it can be interpreted as long-term EOp. Our measure captures only that part of reranking due to the equalization of opportunities over time.