#equal outcomes

By: Jill Foster

Published: Jun 13, 2026

The brutal stabbing of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak in Southampton has triggered a national conversation about “two-tiered” policing, racism and accountability. But while this new debate is noisy and heated, it is quietly being informed by a single word – “equity”.

Apparently unobjectionable, seemingly even virtuous, the term “equity” has spread through the official lexicon of the state and its services over the past decade, marking a subtle but dramatic shift in how those services treat different groups within the public at large. As it has done so, it has frequently come to replace the word “equality” in policies, training and public statements.

The distinction between the two may sound semantic. But for policy-makers, legal experts and campaigners, the difference is profound. “Most people probably use ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ interchangeably and think they are roughly the same,” says Simon Fanshawe, managing director of consultancy Diversity By Design.

In fact, he explains, they reflect profoundly different outlooks, with “equality” focussing on “equality of opportunity” while “equity” aims to engineer “equality of outcome” – despite the distortions or discriminations that might be required to orchestrate it.

“‘Equality’ is nuanced and about the individual’s situation,” says Fanshawe. It is not about treating everyone the same – a notion he considers “ludicrous”: “You don’t treat someone in a wheelchair the same as someone who is walking. What you do is provide people with the platform that gives them an equality of opportunity and the fairness to live well.”

Crucially though, he adds, ‘You don’t do that on [an aggregate] basis, you have to look at the individual.” But “equity” results in the notion “that any disparity in the data between ‘black’ and ‘white’ or between ‘men’ and ‘women’ must be racism or sexism”.

Positive discrimination

For Baroness Kishwer Falkner, former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, this conceptual leap from equality to equity is a disturbing development. She points out that in the UK it is “equality” that is the law, not equity.

“The law emphasises equality of opportunity,” she says. “For example, to accommodate a disabled student, we place a ramp up into a building so they can take their exam. No one is saying the person needing the ramp would be marked to a lower or higher standard because they’re in a wheelchair, but we’ve enabled the person to get there in the first place so they’re equally able to take it.

“Yet when you read guidance such as the Hampshire Police guidance [which was involved in the Henry Nowak case], it talked of making arrest and charge rates ‘equal’ between groups. That is simply wrong.”

[ University student Henry Nowak was killed on his way home from a night out in Southampton ]

Far from a minor semantic difference, then, the swapping of “equality” for “equity” actually represents a significant change in approach – and one potentially at variance with the law. As such, the public might have expected significant consultation and debate before its adoption by major state and private-sector services.

Instead, Telegraph analysis of guidance documents shows it has spread widely but quietly, from policing to the NHS, higher education to the wider workplace.

“To me, diversity is a very good thing,” says Falkner. “But what started happening was that organisations tended to move to ‘virtue-signalling’ so that they were ‘inclusive’ of everyone and ‘equity’ was an element of that. Organisations which add ‘equity’ to their policies are ‘gold-plating’ them unnecessarily.

“The really worrying part is that they’re doing it quietly because they wish to appear ‘progressive’. They’re following trends rather than sticking to our own well-developed laws.”

[ Baroness Falkner: ‘Organisations add “equity” to their policies to seem progressive’ ]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, equity policies are now particularly embedded in UK universities. Research last year by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) found that at least 20 universities across the country now understand the “E” in the acronym DEI (Diversity, Equality, Inclusion) to refer not to “equality” but “equity”. These include Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, and the London School of Economics.

“The term ‘equity’ is increasingly being used in universities and DEI departments to ensure equal outcomes for under-represented groups – ie. giving them a leg up where that’s necessary to achieve equality of outcome,” says Dr Edward Skidelsky, director of CAF.

“Many have policies which include positive discrimination or affirmative action, and that’s very concerning because one should aim to treat all students and all academics equally and not give them special consideration because they belong to some group. That’s unjust.

“Students and academics should be treated on their own merits. It’s deeply patronising and insulting to try to favour people because of their background.”

Skidelsky says he believes that this kind of policy actually “encourages racism and sexism”.

“It’s very divisive,” he says. “Because if, for instance, you have a black professor, people say things like ‘You know why he got the job, don’t you?’ and that could be completely unfair, but the suspicion is already planted in people’s minds if you have an ‘equity’ policy in place.”

Betrayed values

In healthcare, several NHS trusts – including East London, Bristol and Weston and UCL – have explicitly adopted “equity” either alongside or in place of “equality” in their DEI strategies. Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust describes itself as on a “journey to become a pro-equity organisation” – but this has come under intense scrutiny and criticism this year.

In February, during a public inquiry into the brutal murders of three people in Nottingham, it emerged that professionals at the Trust decided not to detain the killer Valdo Calocane after considering research that noted the over-representation of young black men detained after being sectioned on mental health grounds.

[ Critics have claimed that the treatment of Valdo Calocane, who murdered three people in Nottingham, was influenced by concerns over the number of black men being sectioned ]

A search on the gov.uk website today shows there are 354 results for “health equity” and just 71 for “health equality”, with an acceleration of publications mentioning the term through the 2010s. In 2010, for example, the Coalition government presented its vision for the health service. It was entitled “Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS”. Seven years later, Public Health England, the since-scrapped quango which, by its own definition, existed “to… reduce health inequalities”, published instead a “Health Equity Report”. It was subtitled “Focus on ethnicity”.

“When the NHS determines that it will favour one group of people over another, it betrays the values on which it is based,” says Gareth Lyon, head of health and social care at think tank Policy Exchange. “Any attempt to replace ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ means introducing a subjective value judgment about perceived challenges or history which has no place in a universal public service.

“NHS trusts should judge each individual case on the basis of clinical need. Polling for Policy Exchange shows that the public want the NHS to focus on improving GP access and treatment for life-threatening conditions – the health service should be prioritising these areas and avoiding this kind of damaging, distracting mission creep.”

In the world of employment, large companies, too, began to adopt the new word, though the shifts tended to be gradual and without fanfare. HR expert Tanya de Grunwald, host of the This Isn’t Working podcast, noticed the change arriving in employers’ language with “no challenge”.

“We were still calling it D&I [Diversity and Inclusion] in 2018 and the E came later,” she says. “Initially it stood for ‘equality’, but we were quickly told ‘equity’ was superior as people didn’t come from ‘equal’ starting points in life.

“Suddenly, graphics of people peeping over walls [to illustrate that tall people could see easily while short people would struggle] or running races from different start lines were everywhere and they were so simple that a child could understand why someone might need a box to stand on, or a longer ladder, or a start from the same place as other runners.”

[ An example of the cartoons used by pro-equity campaigners to support their cause ]

Equality law specialist Audrey Ludwig, who carries out training for firms, also says this trend for employers and organisations to adopt “equity” alongside or instead of “equality” began in the late 2010s. “It was influenced by North American DEI frameworks and has been problematic,” she says.

The beginning of that decade, 2010, was the date of the Equality – not Equity – Act, which replaced multiple anti-discrimination laws with a single, streamlined Act to help protect individuals against discrimination based on nine protected characteristics. They included race, sex, age and disability.

It marked a major evolution from landmark laws like the Race Relations Act 1968 or the Equal Pay Act 1970, says Fanshawe, which aimed to address inequality brought about by “disadvantage or discrimination” demonstrable by fundamental facts: “They were data driven.”

Ironically, some critics say it was the Equality Act which ushered in the era of equity. “Unfortunately, the Equality Act does licence universities and other institutions to treat applicants favourably on the grounds of race, sex and so forth,” says Dr Skidelsky. “I think it was a disastrous piece of legislation.”

Perverse outcomes

The “equity” era of the late 2010s marked a new ideological direction after decades of equality campaigning the need for which few contested. The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent MacPherson report emphasised the need for more training to tackle “institutional racism” and was broadly welcomed by officers and the public alike.

But during the 2010s, equity-focused approaches began to appear in DEI training, initially in America. Those influencing this subtle change include individuals such as US historian and professor Ibram X Kendi, author of the 2019 book How To Be An Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo, who wrote White Fragility in 2018 and co-wrote Is Everyone Really Equal?.

In the UK, organisations such as Stonewall began encouraging the idea of “equitable outcomes” for LGBTQ+ people in the early 2020s, even announcing a new strategy based on three pillars: Freedom, Equity and Potential. But it was following George Floyd’s death in 2020, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, that the drive for equity accelerated, with UK institutions and bodies increasingly using it in place of “equality” in action plans to address disparities.

[ The Black Lives Matter protests were a turning point for British institutions in the battle of ‘equality’ vs ‘equity’ ]

“I did wonder why it was happening and saw an element of American DEI practice coming over the water,” says Baroness Falkner. “It’s been part of the overall progressive bent in the last 15 or 20 years where corporate values – even for public bodies – have become much more significant and are seen as the done thing.”

Even if such public bodies were trying to do the right thing, however, perverse and discriminatory outcomes soon emerged.

“One such example,” says Ludwig, “is a case in 2019 when a white, heterosexual male – Matthew Furlong – was unsuccessful in applying for the role of police constable for Cheshire Police.

“Mr Furlong brought claims of direct discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, race and sex against Cheshire Police. While the Force argued that it had lawfully applied the ‘positive action in recruitment measures’ under the Equality Act to increase diversity, the Employment Tribunal found Cheshire Police had directly discriminated against Mr Furlong by deeming all candidates equal at interview stage but then offering a role to those with a protected characteristic in preference to him.

“What was a well-intentioned policy to increase much-needed workforce diversity led to unlawful discrimination in recruitment. When organisations substitute equity for equality, they risk moving away from universal rights towards discretionary preferences, based sometimes on no more than fashionable views.”

The equity-equality switch has become hot politics. This week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch underlined her stance as one of the fiercest opponents of ideological “equity”, under which outcomes must be engineered to be equal for everyone.

[ Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has pledged to scrap the ‘equality duty’ ]

“We need to make sure that we do not create a society where people retreat into groups,” she said. “We’re seeing separatism in our country occur because different people are being treated differently. And when you have that, there will be a backlash.”

That backlash, as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer can attest, is already underway. But Baroness Falkner insists the remedy is straightforward. “My answer to private and public organisations would be: stick to the law first and then worry about inclusion and equity and what your outcomes look like.”

David Rose, director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union, says the correction is already underway: “Unfortunately analogous ideas, derived from Critical Race Theory, have come to be applied in other public spheres.

“If the death of Henry Nowak can be said to have any positive aspect, it is that it may lead to a long overdue re-evaluation of this ideology and its pernicious effects.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/TksSW ]

==

There is no such thing as "positive" discrimination. When you discriminate for someone, you're discriminating against someone else. So-called "positive" discriminate for black people or women is just discrimination against white, Asian, etc, people or men.

By: Carlos Carvalho

Published: Sep 5, 2025

Good evening—students, parents, and all the supporters helping us build the University of Austin. I am honored to be with you today at your convocation, at the most important and exciting university in America.

Thank you for trusting us with your education. We are thrilled to welcome you into the UATX family.

Tonight, as we gather on the threshold of America’s 250th anniversary, I want to share why this moment and UATX represent something essential about the American experiment.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, King George III formally declared Americans to be rebels and traitors. This dashed the colonists’ hopes for a peaceful reconciliation, and set the path to declare a new nation based on the proposition that all men are created equal.

But on the heels of America’s quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, I want to do something a bit unfashionable: I want to defend inequality.

Of course, all men are created equal. But all men are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement.

I want to defend this kind of inequality because I believe it is the most important way that UATX distinguishes itself, and because being honest about inequality is the most important way that UATX can help you be extraordinary.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th-century critic of American democracy, noticed that the passion for equality dominates every American institution. He admired this democratic spirit, but he also issued a warning.

De Tocqueville warned that the concept of equality is the most powerful compulsion in the American mind. A dominating drive for equality suffocates the very people whose uncommon talent, courage, and vision could pull everyone else upward.

Without those rare sparks of excellence, there are no breakthroughs. No bold leaders. No innovations. No radical thought that disrupts the human tendency toward lazy conformity.

De Tocqueville famously observed that people in democracies might come to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. In the name of making all things equal, we end up equal only in mediocrity.

And that is the surest path to slavishly submitting to authority, submitting to bad ideas, submitting to an overbearing government, and submitting to the soft tyranny of low expectations.

Equality, without excellence, is the surest path to national decline.

A free society, to remain dynamic and free, must enable those gifts to develop rather than force them into a common mold. So even in a republic of equals, we need small sanctuaries of aristocracy and excellence to ensure the success of liberty.

Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality.

The tension between those two realities shapes almost every real problem in education today. How do we respect every person’s equal dignity and opportunity while also recognizing and cultivating individual excellence?

Nearly every university in America has decided to answer that question by abandoning excellence. Harvard hands out more A’s than any other grade. Yale gives nearly 60 percent of students straight A’s. Princeton no longer requires Greek or Latin to major in the classics. Columbia proudly ditched the SAT. In our leading institutions, honors are handed out like candy while calculus is quietly dropped.

At UATX, we know you cannot democratize a serious education by watering it down and expecting to keep its substance. Plato fed through ChatGPT turns Plato into a mediocre social media post. Macroeconomics without some basis in calculus is just cable news polemics.

[ “Each of you carries different strengths, abilities, and passions. To pretend otherwise is to flatten human experience into mediocrity,” Carvalho says in his convocation address at the University of Austin. (UATX) ]

The truth is that excellence has no shortcut. When people mass-produce artificial diamonds, they turn out to be pebbles that nobody values. The attempt to counterfeit excellence only cheapens it. If you make the difficult and the extraordinary dumbed down or commonplace, you destroy it.

At UATX, we will not counterfeit excellence. For students, that means being asked to do the hardest academic work you’ve ever done: carefully reading what an author actually wrote, stepping through an argument line by line, breaking down a scientific methodology and reproducing it, or building a model that fails 10 times before it works.

You will be graded according to standards, not your intentions or our wishes. You will hear “no,” “not yet,” “try again” often.

Our students should never accept anything uncritically. But, thriving in an aristocratic institution requires starting with humility and charity—assuming, at least at first, that the authors you read, the professors who guide you, and the administrators who correct you might know more than you do.

You won’t always like it. But if we’re doing our jobs well, you will always benefit from it.

High standards are the highest sign of respect. Telling you the truth about where you stand is respect. Holding you to the mark is respect. It’s the only way to draw the best out of you. If we demanded anything less, we would be insulting your potential.

UATX is aristocratic because it dares to tell the truth that inequality is everywhere. As Thomas Jefferson put it: “There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”

Each of you carries different strengths, abilities, and passions. Some books will shape your mind for life, while others deserve to be forgotten. Some disciplines wrestle honestly with reality, while others are unserious and don’t deserve your time.

To pretend otherwise is to flatten human experience into mediocrity. We refuse that pretense.

Jefferson proposed a model school where each year, quote, “Twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish.”

Bold phrasing aside, Jefferson’s point was crucial: Let the best rise from any condition, and educate them deeply for the common good. That, to us, is the most American solution to the reality of human inequality.

We cannot (and should not) make everyone the same, but we can ensure that anyone, from anywhere, with ability and drive, has the chance to climb as high as they are able to.

At UATX, we open our gates to any American, from any background, regardless of means, family legacy, or identity. A child of an American president and the child of a waitress get the same treatment in our admissions process and in our seminar rooms.

Our job as educators is to get the best in each of you, unequal though your gifts may be, by setting high standards and insisting on excellence.

Although we believe this approach is the best kind of education for you, our acceptance—or, I should say, our embrace—of inequality is not selfless. Ultimately, it is not about you and your potential. We do it because we believe it’s the best way to make our institution excellent, our country excellent, and our future free.

Before I close, a word to the parents.

Since your kids decided to come here, we already know that you have raised children who seek challenge, and who put substance over mere credentials. That speaks to your success as families.

And although I haven’t met all of you yet, I suspect that raising such strong-willed, confident young people means that you are pretty strong-willed and confident yourselves.

So I expect feedback from you. Perhaps even the occasional complaint. And I welcome it—honestly.

I have only one small request: When you do complain, please make it about UATX not being challenging enough. Hold us accountable not for coddling your kids, but for challenging them.

To the class of 2029: You have chosen to rebel. Not against hierarchy, but against its abandonment. Not against standards, but against their erosion. Not against excellence, but against those who would fake it.

You rebel against a world that tells you mediocrity is enough, that comfort is the highest good, that all answers are equally valid. Your rebellion is in service of ancient truths: that wisdom deserves deference, and that difficulty breeds strength.

America’s next quarter-millennium begins right here, with you.

Welcome to the rebellion. Welcome to the University of Austin! Thank you.

==

"If you cannot achieve equality of performance amng people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deper social divisions?" – Thomas Sowell

"No one is equal to anything. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days." – Thomas Sowell

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free." – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is nothing wrong with inequality. As long as the rules are the same for everyone, the outcomes should not be.

Smarter people should succeed at intellectual endeavours over those who aren't as smart. Stronger and faster people should win at sports over the weaker and slower. Those who work hard should progress and succeed over those who put in less effort.

Inequality is how evolution works. If unequal outcomes was unfair, then a herd of gazelles either all gets away or all gets killed by the lion. That means evolution stops.

Evolution is undirected. So are outcomes when the rules are the same for everyone. Achieving "equity" - that is, equal outcomes - not only requires unequal rules but someone in charget to direct what the outcomes "should" be. That is tyranny and authoritarianism.

Equity: The Thief of Human Potential | Thomas Sowell

A speech from 1999, eerily prescient.

He touches on a point I hadn't really considered before. That equity ("cosmic justice") requires someone to be put in charge to decide what everyone should end up with. Henry Rogers (aka "Ibram X. Kendi") has designs on himself being that authority. In this situation, someone is assigned to act as the cosmic authority to decide what should be the outcome, what the cosmos should want, essentially making themselves what we might call karma. That way leads authoritarianism and corruption. It's no wonder that any society based on equity turns into a communist hellhole, when the apportionment of social and economic equity is dependent on the incorruptibility of people operating arbitrarily and opaquely.

In an equality ("equal opportunity") scenario, there may need to be people put in charge, but their role is different, to make sure that the rules of the game are being adhered to, not deciding how the game should play out. Referees, for example, are tasked with making sure that the participants in a race don't jump the gun or interfere with other participants. Their job is not to make sure the outcome is morally correct. Someone will win. Other people will lose. That's fair, as long as the rules were fair and everyone abided by them. Referees aren't incorruptible or even infallible, but their decisions are discrete and specific, and can be reviewed and checked.

By: The Rabbit Hole

Published: Jan 22, 2023

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago, and a racist today.

— Thomas Sowell

We have all heard the mantra of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or “DEI” for short. At face value, the slogan seems harmless enough, but in practice pursuing “equity” in particular acts as a trojan horse by perpetuating the very discriminatory trends many adherents to DEI would prefer to see come to an end. When you opt to avoid thinking through the practical ramifications of your ideology, it creates room for bad things to happen.

One of the reasons this occurs is due to a seemingly inconsequential shift in the vocabulary: from “Equality” to “Equity.” Let’s break it down:

Classical concepts of “equality” meant equal opportunity regardless of race or gender under the law

The modern concept of “equity” means equal outcomes in regard to race and gender.

It is a subtle but significant difference. Thomas Sowell described the futility of pursuing equity quite well.

When you have people with different familial backgrounds, cultures, habits, interests, and hobbies it becomes clear how counterproductive the pursuit of equity is and why it can only be achieved through discriminatory measures.

Equity, in theory, seems noble but equity in practice amounts to crippling more qualified individuals to artificially keep everyone at the same level as we have seen with Affirmative Action, which is one of the most prominent forms of systemic racism in the West today. Some, like Ibram X Kendi, openly acknowledge that their worldview entails cycles of discrimination:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” — Ibram X Kendi

The ‘discrimination’ Kendi hints at is not only present in Affirmative Action, but also at the grade school level where the effects of equity have done what the above visual indicates and begun to ‘cripple’ the ability of certain students to get ahead.

Take a moment to imagine getting into an honors student program only for some equity-minded bureaucrat to eliminate the program; unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine and can reference the news to see examples of the aforementioned occurring.

The elimination of honors programs in California is not the result of some local school bureaucrat executing an isolated bad idea. It is the result of prominent figures like Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the 1619 Project for the New York Times, railing against programs promoting excellence.

We can also compare a definition of equity provided by a DEI website:

“Is often used interchangeably with equality, but there’s a core difference: Where equality is a system in which each individual is offered the same opportunities regardless of circumstance, equity distributes resources based on needs. We live in a disproportionate society, and equity tries to correct its imbalance by creating more opportunities for people who have historically had less access.”

To a quote from Karl Marx:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” - Karl Marx

There is a clear overlap between Marx and the concept of equity. An advertisement from the current Vice President, Kamala Harris, also describes equity in a similar manner and ends by advocating for equal outcomes: “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

Imagine if we applied equity to physical activities and held back gifted athletes - every sport would be boring and it would be even more difficult to find extraordinary individuals whose feats inspire us to be better; now recognize this description applies to academia.

For anyone who still wishes to defend equity (especially in the context of race and gender), please ponder the following question: Would you rather people be judged by the content of their character or the color of their skin? Answer this question honestly and consider whether your answer is in line with the dreams of MLK.

Social constructivists believe that we’ve all been socially manipulated to accept things as “true” - such as that 2+2=4, humans are biologically dimorphic and evolution is true, and the false authority of (the white man’s) science - simply because powerful groups want us to accept them as true - to uphold their power. Rather than because they demonstrably work, bitches.

And that the way we talk to each other is designed to validate and uphold this manipulation, and keep everyone to it and in their place.

That is, 2+2=4 only because there are people who want it to equal four, for their own ends.

Basically, they think reality is a giant conspiracy, that we live in someone’s Matrix, that we're socially programmed sleeper Agents, reinforcing the Matrix without even knowing it, and only they, the Chosen Neos, can tell.

Social constructivists aren’t concerned about whether a claim is true, but rather who benefits from people believing that it is. Their goal is to benefit someone else - ostensibly, “marginalized groups,” but in practice, themselves, by making people accept other “truths.” Again, what those “truths” are is irrelevant. It could be 2+2=5, or it could be 2+2=🥔 or 2+2=🦋, or that biological dimorphism is a lie (because humans don’t sexually reproduce, I guess 🤷‍♀️).

Given they think that objective reality is itself a grand lie and conspiracy, how do you imagine they’ll go about “correcting” the problem so others will accept their parallel universe? By doing what they think has already been done - just, you know, they’re “on the right side of history.” That is, they don’t want to remove the Matrix, they want to put you into a Matrix they control.