Page "Equal opportunity" Paragraph 6

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the concept assumes that society is stratified with a diverse range of roles, some of which are more desirable than others.

And the benefit of equality of opportunity is to bring fairness to the selection process for coveted roles in corporations, associations, nonprofits, universities, and elsewhere.

There is no " formal linking " between equality of opportunity and political structure, according to one view, in the sense that there can be equality of opportunity in democracies, autocracies, and in communist nations, although it is primarily associated with a competitive market economy and embedded within the legal frameworks of democratic societies.

People with different political perspectives see equality of opportunity differently: liberals disagree about which conditions are needed to ensure it ; many " old-style " conservatives see inequality and hierarchy in general as beneficial out of a respect for tradition.

It can apply to a specific hiring decision, or to all hiring decisions by a specific company, or rules governing hiring decisions for an entire nation.

The scope of equal opportunity has expanded to cover more than issues regarding the rights of minority groups, but covers practices regarding " recruitment, hiring, training, layoffs, discharge, recall, promotions, responsibility, wages, sick leave, vacation, overtime, insurance, retirement, pensions, and various other benefits.

" The concept has been applied to numerous aspects of public life, including accessibility of polling stations, care provided to HIV patients, whether men and women have equal opportunities to travel on a spaceship, bilingual education, skin color of models in Brazil, television time for political candidates, army promotions, admittance to universities, and ethnicity in the United States.

The term is interrelated with and often contrasted with other conceptions of equality such as equality of outcome and equality of autonomy.