The Presence Of Equal Opportunities In Hr Management

Ensuring equal opportunities is a priority for CEO-s and decision makers, however, it is often not put into practice. Changes in recent years along with the priorities of the EU and the efforts made to banish discrimination becoming more prominent brought with themselves a pressure on firms to provide equal opportunities for the different under-privileged social groups. In Hungary the Act CXXV of 2003 on discrimination and equal opportunities lists the groups in need of protection. The law requires employers with more than fifty employees to have an equal opportunities program. In spite of this, these programs are often general and do not implement the changes and goals identified after the assessment. Still, strategies and plans are only worth how much of them are realized. Our article is about the conscious principles of the Hungarian business sector about equality and whether there are regional differences. We compare answers given by both employers and employees on the subject of the extent to which the above mentioned principles are realized by the management and whether the employees experience these changes. Our theory is that the prioritisation of equal opportunities in firms is more the result of access to project funds than that of inner initiative from the firm's management. We analyse our research questions using a quantitative method on a regionally representative national sample. We examined 992 firms with special attention on those and their employees who had some sort of written guidelines on equal opportunities and plans on implementing these. In our paper we give a short review on the importance of equal opportunities, it's manifestation in HR management and it's written declaration, the so called Equal Opportunities Plan (EOP). The efforts of the EU and access to financial resources for the EU projects as a condition our hypotheses are that (1) at least 30% of the firms studied have written guidelines or declaration on equal opportunities, (2) the majority of these firms have a higher rate of disadvantaged employees and operate in economically undeveloped areas.