The United States is without a doubt one of the most diverse nations, with one out of every three

U.S. resident being of an ethnic minority. We welcome people of different nationalities to come here and have a better life. However, along with this diversity comes the challenge of ensuring fair and equitable treatment f men and women from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This challenge lies at the heat of the topic social equity, and meeting this challenge has and will continue to be one of the primary goals of human resource specialists and public managers at all levels of government. The means of achieving social equity in the workplace, however, has severed as one of the most politically charged and complex issues of the past fifty years (Klinger, Nalbandian, and Llorens, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to explore how social equity and diversity have evolved within public human resources management, to discuss the most pressing issues for public managers and human resources professionals concerning social equity and diversity, and finally to discuss prospects for how this topic may transform over the next twenty five years. There are a variety of definitions for social equity. Frederickson proposed a compound approach to social equity that includes simple individual equalities where individuals have equal standing, segmented equality based on division of labor, and block equalities with the focus on equality between groups and subclasses. The definition of social equity provided by the National Academy of Public Administration is used: The fair, just, and equitable management of all institutions serving the public directly or by contract, and the fair, just and equitable distribution of public services, and implementation of public policy (Bittick, 2009). A great deal of the research done on social equity was derived from John Rawls concept of justice as fairness, meaning each person has an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for all. As Rawls argued, a modern theory of government equalizes the

distribution of social and economic advantages. He challenged us to put ourselves behind a veil of ignorance and to use our innate sense of justice to derive principles of equity without the bias of knowing our own situation. This squarely invokes social equity as a core concern of public administration (Wooldridge and Gooden, 2009). The late Phillip Rutledge, former President of ASPA, noted that social equity can be traced back to writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Wilson, but connects the origins of social equity and public administration to Minnowbrook I, which was a conference held by Dwight Waldo, George Frederickson, and a group of young Turks in the 1960s. Against the national 1960s context focused on civil rights, racial inequality, and injustice, the young Minnows noted: A government built on a Constitution claiming equal protection of the laws had failed in that promise. Public administrators, who daily operate the government, were not without responsibility. It was during the 1960s that it became increasingly evident that the results of governmental policy and the work of public administrators implementing those policies were much better for some citizens than for other (Wooldridge and Gooden, 2009). The Minnowbrook I conference laid the foundation for the New Public Administration. New Public Administration rejected the idea that administrators ate value neutral and recognized a constellation of five normative core values that, although legitimate, can often be conflictual. These values include responsiveness, worker and citizen participation in decision making, social equity, citizen choice, and administrative responsibility. The link between the New Public Administration and social equity is so strong that Shafritz and Russell define the New Public Administration as: An academic advocacy movement for social equity in the performance and delivery of public service; it called for a proactive administrator with a burning desire for social equity to replace the traditional impersonal and neutral gun-forhire bureaucrat (Wooldridge and Gooden, 2009).

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