This is correct. Everyone is an individual and no two people are, strictly speaking, equal. But that doesn't justify all instances of treating people differen

This is correct. Everyone is an individual and no two people are, strictly speaking, equal. But that doesn't justify all instances of treating people differently. If I steal from you, you would expect me to receive the same punishment as if you had stolen from me. We are therefore "equal before the law". In the case of the law, we ask our legal system to suspend judgment of certain inequalities and to focus only on the facts of the case. There's no reason why we should not do this in other matters - if we're judging someone on their merits as a software developer, we can legitimately consider their unequal experience, intelligence, skills and abilities, but we should not consider their age, gender or ethnicity. Now, you might argue at this point that we wouldn't consider age/gender/ethnicity anyway, because these have no bearing on software development. And you would be mostly right to do so - these factors are genuinely unimportant. But most people are imperfect judges; they use heuristics and intuition in ways which can sometimes go awry. We might apply stereotypes, we might allow our judgment of other similar individuals we have met in the past to cloud our judgment of the person before us now, and so on. When people talk about equality, they're really asking that we find an effective way to ensure that we're making our judgments using only the truly relevant criteria. Past experience suggests that this takes effort and requires some cultural reinforcement. It's emphatically not about denying that people are different, but about ensuring that only the most contextually important differences are considered.