Equal Opportunity

Equal Opportunity means providing the same opportunities with regards to employment decisions to all individuals without discriminating based upon their membership in or identification with a protected class group. A protected class is a group of people who share common characteristics and are protected from employment discrimination by federal and state laws or an institution's policy. There are twelve protected classes or groups at East Carolina University: race, sex, creed, religion, national origin, age, color, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation, genetic information, and veterans' status.

The concepts "equal employment opportunity" and "affirmative action" are often confused and/or misunderstood. Basically Equal Opportunity laws ban discrimination, while affirmative action goes farther by requiring employers to take "affirmative" steps to achieve a balanced representation of workers. It means actively seeking to recruit underrepresented groups to the workplace. Affirmative action seeks to recruit a diverse pool of applicants to select from and equal employment opportunity requires applying the same standards to all applicants during the application review and interview process. In this manner, the practice of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity work together to form the basis of the affirmative action planning.

There is a common misperception that affirmative action requires meeting quotas or that a female or minority candidate should be hired regardless of qualifications. This is wrong. Although there are often goals associated with affirmative action, there are no quotas that must be met to be in compliance with the law. Affirmative action does not seek to hire individuals because of minority status or membership in an underrepresented population who are not qualified for the position. Affirmative action means casting a wider net by developing a recruitment plan that will reach a diverse pool of qualified individuals for the position and applying all screening standards fairly and equitably. This usually means setting  goals and timetables and using a variety of aggressive recruitment and outreach methods, these include discipline specific journals and periodicals, web based advertising, networking at conferences, word of mouth, local/state media, etc. Visit our Search Committee Resources page for resources to help you cast your net wider.