I find this rather odd. There’s no barriers to women entering tech sectors, and I suspect women are positively discriminated for when they do apply.

Women are free to enter the tech sector any time they like, and if they tend to choose not to, well that’s their choice, and who is to say that’s somehow unacceptable, that we must have more. Is it Equality in Tech Week again? So soon.

Then I look at wealth and poverty in the UK, it again makes equality a meaningless ideal. In Sheffield you can be on Millionaires’ Row at midday and Skid Row at ten past, from mansions to towers of benefit claimants in minutes. It’s the same in most cities. What does equality look like in this situation? It’s nonsensical.

I spent today delivering food support to people in rural Cambodia. It’s caused me to consider the concept, the ideal, of equality, and to wonder if it’s not just unachievable, but unrealistic and even unnecessary.

Equality of what? Opportunity?

But how can you have equality of opportunity when everyone is starting at different places, with different backgrounds, under different circumstances?

The children I’ve seen today have very few opportunities. Hopefully some will go to school, but not all of them will, that’s for sure. Just as the UK kids growing up on benefits in a drug infested broken home on a crime sodden broken estate do not and cannot have the same opportunities as their peers a mile away.

Our current trend of ‘equality’ is a hopeful ideal when implemented in the workplace, but does that have any social impact? It’s like saying everyone on the ship is treated equally. But unless you're on the ship it makes no difference.

I guess my point is that all the striving for ‘equality in the workplace’ doesn’t necessarily have any impact in society.

What would be helpful is a lot of informal, non metric based support for people, decentralised in structure and freely accessible to those who require it, but ultimately, humanity is a mess and always has been and will be into the future for as long as it exists unless something very radical indeed happens.

I feel like equality as a concept has died for me today. And not in a bad way, or a sad way, or a cynical way. Just in a realistic way, a truthful way.

So if equality is dead, what then? People can still support one another, still love one another, which is of course the actual remedy but one we are incapable of at scale due to a deep spiritual malfunction. But to think we can achieve some sort of equality between the rich and poor is delusional. In practice the divide deepens and stretches, because wealth gives an advantage in everything material, and poverty does the opposite.

Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with you.’ If that’s true, and I reluctantly accept that it is, how then does that change our attitude to poverty, our response to inequality?

I think poverty is a symptom of a disease, and until the disease is cured the poor will indeed always be with us. But just as we don’t shun the sick but instead try to heal them, so should we treat the disease of poverty, one by one, patient by patient, and with great patience and not a little grace.

Bird Lovegod is MD of EthicalMuch

What time in Cambodia has taught me about UK 'equality' initiatives - Bird Lovegod