Harriet Harman's proposals for equality legislation that were unveiled last week were greeted with predictable over-reaction. A letter to London's Metro said, 'The new discrimination laws will make young, white, healthy, Christian males virtually unemployable.' Another more measured response claimed that 'Only a meritocracy engenders mutal respect and only organisations that recognise merit in a colour- and gender-blind fashion thrive.'

What the proposed legislation says, in terms of gender and ethnicity, is that where two candidates are equally qualified for a job, employers can now make the final choice of candidate for no other reason than their gender or ethnicity. So a primary school that has all female teachers can choose to employ a man out of two otherwise equal candidates to begin to even things out. Or a youth work organisation who only has men on their leadership team can choose, in that situation, to employ a woman for the same reason. History has shown us that equality doesn't just happen; it needs to be worked for. The way that gender and colour blindness seem to work in many organisations is that people are blind to the possibility that women and minority ethnic candidates can do just as good a job, if not better, than white men. It has been said many times that women have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition and I think there is some truth in it. I don't agree with tokenism or with setting women up to fail by appointing them to posts for which they don't have the appropriate skills, and then stepping back and saying 'I told you so'. But I do think sometimes people need to have their eyes opened to the fact that a woman could do the job that they expected to be done by a man, and vice versa.