Employment Equity As multicultural countries advance their understanding of employment disadvantage, surveys of international best practice show that the focus is increasingly being placed on a contextual approach to discrimination. A contextualized approach puts less emphasis on characteristics of disadvantaged individuals and more on the ways in which society’s response to these people plays a vital role in holding them back. Changing the experiences of disadvantaged groups in the labour market requires government policies, organisational systems and employer decision-making. This has been a prime area of focus for several of our clients who are intent on reversing the institutional bias that helps entrench negative disparities in labour markets for certain groups. Our work in this area has helped to advance the policy discourse to the stage where it is officially recognised that the most socially excluded people in the economy tend to suffer from multiple discrimination, and also that employment discrimination and deprivation on the basis of race, gender, age or disability should be considered not just in parallel with each other but also for the ways in which they “intersect” with and help to intensify each other.