Equal opportunity is a stipulation that all people should be treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers or prejudices or preferences, except when particular “distinctions can be explicitly justified. The aim according to this often "complex and contested concept" is that important jobs should go to those “the most qualified”––persons most likely to perform ably in a given task––and not to go to persons for arbitrary or irrelevant reasons, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, friendship ties to whoever is in power, religion, sex, ethnicity, race, caste. or “involuntary personal attributes” such as disability, age, or sexual preferences. Chances for advancement are open to everybody interested such that they have “an equal chance to compete within the framework of goals and the structure of rules established.” The idea is to remove arbitrariness from the selection process and base it on some “pre-agreed basis of fairness, with the assessment process being related to the type of position,” and emphasizing procedural and legal means. It is opposed to nepotism and plays a role in whether a social structure is seen as legitimate. People with differing political viewpoints see it differently.The concept is debated in fields such as political philosophy, sociology and psychology. It is being applied to increasingly wider areas beyond employment. including lending, housing, college admissions, voting rights, and elsewhere.
In the classical sense, the equality of opportunity is closely aligned with the concept of equality before the law and ideas of meritocracy.
Generally the terms “the equality of opportunity” and “equal opportunity” are interchangeable, with occasional slight variations: “the equality of opportunity” has more of a sense of being an abstract political concept, while “equal opportunity” is sometimes used as an adjective, usually in the context of employment regulations, to identify an employer, a hiring approach, or law. Equal opportunity provisions have been written into regulations and have been debated in courtrooms. It is sometimes conceived as a legal right against discrimination. It is an ideal which has become increasingly "widespread" in Western nations during the last several centuries and is intertwined with social mobility, most often with upward mobility rags to riches stories:
