Introduction to Affirmative Action and Its Purpose
Imagine growing up as a child with the mindset that you want to become a successful engineer. You study hard, get into college, and graduated at the top of your class. Suddenly, you are gifted the opportunity of a lifetime when a top-tier company has a vacant position in your area of expertise. After applying for the position, sending in your resume, and outshining all the other people that applied, you don’t get the position. Why? Because you’re a woman. Does that seem fair? How about being denied admission into a university due to your background not fitting the “image” of that particular institution? Our country was founded on the belief that all men and women are created equally regardless of their race, yet women and minority groups are still held to a higher standard than “the white man” in areas of work and higher education. This issue has been plaguing our nation since the sixties. The simple, yet controversial solution to this problem is called affirmative action. Affirmative action is a policy that states that a person’s color, gender, sex, religion, race or national origin are all considered in order to increase opportunities for women and those in minority groups. I believe that affirmative action is a way to spread diversity throughout the workplace and education system. It also exposes people to different ideas and cultures that they are not used to.
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Historical Background of Affirmative Action
In order to understand why affirmative action is a good thing, one must first know the background and history behind it. Life as a black American was not easy in 1960. They had half the chance of white people to finish high school, a third of a chance to graduate college, and their life expectancy was seven years less. The term “affirmative action” was originally introduced in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy instructed federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”(qtd. In Martinez) Then in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed. This law banned racial segregation in public places such as schools and workplaces. It also outlawed discrimination based on race and national origin. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued E.O. 11246, which required all government contractors to implement affirmative action to increase job opportunities for minorities. Later, in 1967 President Johnson revised the document to include affirmative action for women. (Martinez) Although the premise of affirmative action has not changed, its overall implementation in modern society can still be improved.
Benefits of Affirmative Action for Society
Affirmative action has many advantages that better society. Larissa Jesanis states in her article “Arguments For and Against Affirmative Action” that “Affirmative action is a way to help compensate for the fact that, due to many years of oppression, some races ‘started late in the race.’ Again, it helps level the playing field.” Due to the many years of segregation and discrimination that those in minority groups suffered, whenever freedom was granted to them it was not easy to adjust. There was a looming stereotype that most positions in power, whether it be as small as a business to as large as the president, were predominantly held by white men. Robert Chrisman also emphasizes this in his peer-edited article “Affirmative Action: Extend It.” In the article, Chrisman states that “Racial preference exists in the United States – but it continues to benefit white Americans, as it has for the past 375 years.” The goal of affirmative action is to shatter this stereotype by implementing rules that help promote diversity. It will also raise the net worth of those of minority groups since they would then have access to better work opportunities.
Economic Implications and Societal Loss Reversal through Affirmative Action
The gap between the net worths of whites compared to other races is clearly illustrated in Figure one. The average net worth of white people is $88,651, which is eleven times more than blacks ($7932), and about fifteen times more than Hispanics ($5988). This is directly proportional to the jobs and education that each race has. Unfortunately, a lot of minority workers did not get the chance to attend college, get a degree, and pursue a career of their choice. Thus, their average income reflects that. With the implementation of affirmative action, this graph will look drastically different over time. When more students from minority backgrounds are admitted into universities, giving them access to a plethora of career choices, the net worth of the minority groups will begin to rise. This will raise the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the nation, which in turn benefits everyone. Figure 1: Magaletta, Antonio. “Challenging Racism Within The Workforce Affirmative Action.” Antiracistresistance.wordpress.com, 11 Dec. 2011.
Affirmative action also provides a way to reverse the societal loss. The connectusfund.org article “15 Advantages and Disadvantages of Affirmative Action in the Workplace” discovered that
In the United States, 1 in 3 African American men will spend time in jail at some point in their lives. For African American women, the rate is 1 in 18. Even though the gap between minorities and Caucasians in prison has been tightening since 2009, there are still clear discrepancies in the figures. African Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population but are 33% of the U.S. prison population. Many of the crimes committed are because of a lack of socioeconomic opportunities, which Affirmative Action in the workplace seeks to reverse.
This implementation of affirmative action will grant less fortunate people of minority groups a greater chance at being economically successful so that statistics such as the one stated above can become a thing of the past.
Addressing Gender Bias with Affirmative Action
Gender bias is also taken into consideration when implementing affirmative action. Most women in the first part of the 20th century used to stay home and prioritize raising a family rather than out searching for employment. However, since the nineteenth amendment was passed on June 4th, 1919, granting women the right to vote, there has been a fight for their equal representation in the workplace and education system. Women were working small jobs as teachers and secretaries but soon began aiming higher, creating the need for them to have access to the same level of education and status that men had. In 1967, when affirmative action was extended to cover gender-based discrimination, women were expected to be treated equally as men.(Martinez) Unfortunately, even today, that is not the case. Loukas Balafoutas and Matthias Sutter state in their peer-edited article “Affirmative Action Policies Promote Women and Do Not Harm Efficiency in the Laboratory” that in today’s society “there are still substantial gender differences in labor markets, both in the private sector and in the public sector, including… wage differentials between men and women and fewer opportunities for career advancement of women.” They later explain that those gender differences come from different preferences based on the type of job, the power the position holds, or discrimination against women. Affirmative action would allow women to evenly contest with men for certain job positions without the fear of losing it strictly because of gender.
Figure 2: Source: Frohlich, Lauren. “6 Pie Charts for Pi Day: Women and the Low-Wage Workforce.” NWLC, 14 Mar. 2014, nwlc.org/blog/6-pie-charts-pi-day-women-and-low-wage-workforce/.
As shown above in figure 2, although women now make up almost half of the overall workforce in the United States, they still make up ¾ of the low-wage workforce. This is a result of gender bias and female discrimination. However, this does not have to be permanent. Affirmative action will create better job opportunities for women as society slowly moves towards gender equality.
Since affirmative action is a controversial subject, there are those who oppose it. Instead of seeing it as a way to implement equality and spread diversity, it is instead viewed as a new form of discrimination. This means that choosing someone for a position based predominantly on their race may unknowingly exclude someone who is better suited for the job. Roger Clegg and John S. Rosenberg say it best in their peer-edited article “Against 'Diversity'” when they state that, “Whether in admissions or hiring, its purpose and effect is the selection of individuals who would not have been selected but for their race or ethnicity. And that means, inescapably, that an equal number of others were not selected because of their race or ethnicity.” I understand how some people may view affirmative action this way, but I wanted to examine how my peers viewed [image: ]affirmative action in order to see which side had the greater following.
I began my survey by asking for people’s age. I wanted to see the age range of the people who found interest in my survey, and I also believe that it would help me visualize the kind of people who took part in the survey.
Because the topic of my survey was affirmative action, I assumed it would be wise to also ask for the race of those who participated in the survey. Most of the participants were either white or African-American, followed by some Hispanic and “other” people.
In figure 6 results are slightly different. 58.3% of participants support affirmative action based on race for college admission, while 46.2% of participants disagree with it.
Opposition and Public Perception of Affirmative Action
When I asked people whether or not they agreed with affirmative action based on race for hiring I honestly did not know what the outcome would be. I was surprised to find out that exactly half of the participants of the survey chose either yes or no.
As shown in figure 8, when asked if they agree with affirmative action based on gender for college admissions, 73.1% of participants agree while 26.9% disagree.
For figure 7, interestingly 65.4% of participants disagree with affirmative action based on gender for hiring, while 34.6% agree with it.
Whenever I asked people if they have ever seen someone given preference over another because of their gender, 84.6% of participants said yes, while only 15.4% said no.
Whenever I asked people if they have ever seen someone given preference over another because of their race, 88.5% if the participants said yes, while 11.5% said no.
To conclude my survey, I asked the participants to state their gender. 42.3% of them were females, while 57.7% were males.
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