Affirmative Action and What It Means for Women. Affirmative action programs have played a critical role in opening up opportunities for women and minorities to begin to take their rightful place in our society. But equal opportunity for women is still a long way off. Eliminating or curtailing affirmative action would not only halt the forward progress that women, as well as minorities, have been able to achieve; it would mark a giant leap backward in this nation’s journey toward equal opportunity for all. Barriers to Advancement for Women Remain Pervasive. Discrimination against women is deeply rooted in our society. Though much progress has been made since the days when classified ads listed job openings for women and men separately and many prestigious universities were completely closed to women, sex discrimination persists today. New examples surface on an almost daily basis. Over 9. 00 past and present women brokers at Merrill Lynch assert that they have experienced gender- based discrimination.(1) Officials at M. I. T. For example: According to the March 1. Glass Ceiling Commission, 9. Fortune 1. 00. 0 industrial and Fortune 5. In the Fortune 2. A 1. 99. 9 report reveals that only 3. Fortune 5. 00 companies are women.(8)An earnings gap exists between women and men across a wide spectrum of occupations. Real-World Affirmative Action: The Workplace. Affirmative action in. Proposal 2 bans public affirmative action programs that give. In 1. 99. 9, for example, full- time women physicians earned 6. A recent study of pediatricians on medical school faculties revealed a discrepancy between salaries of male and female professors at every rank.(1. Women working full- time, full- year still earn, on average, only 7. Minority women fare significantly worse. An African- American woman earns just 6. What is an Affirmative Action Plan? Affirmative Action programs contain a diagnostic component which includes a number of quantitative analyses designed to evaluate the composition of the workforce of the. This lesson provides you with an overview of affirmative action in the workplace. Affirmative Action in the Workplace. The term affirmative action means showing a preference for choosing and hiring members of a. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), under the. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that. The series of affirmative action programs was designed to boost minority employment by emphasizing hiring. Affirmative Action: State Universities that Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences. Georgia) chose not to reinstate racial affirmative action programs, even after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for them to do so. Discrimination and Affirmative Action by Dr. In fact, Affirmative Action programs are justified by the need to counteract the continuing effects of such discrimination against peoples of color or women.Hispanic woman earns only 5. While women are over half the adult population(1. For example, in 1. And while approximately 9. While the gender gap in higher education has all but disappeared with women now earning 5. Women earn only 3. According to the most recent available data, women receive only about 1. Define affirmative action: the practice of improving the educational and job opportunities of members of groups that have not been. Employment programs required by federal statutes and regulations designed to remedy discriminatory practices in hiring minority group members; i.e., positive s. In the lucrative and growing field of computer sciences, women receive only about 2. Yet women still account for over 7. Women remain severely under represented in most non- traditional professional occupations as well as blue collar trades. For example, women are only 1. Women are 9. 9% of dental hygienists, but are only 1. As a result of the wage gap, 4. Even where women have moved into occupations and professions in significant numbers, they have not moved up to the same degree. Women are 2. 6. 6% of lawyers, but only 1. Women are 7. 3% of public school teachers, but only 3. In 1. 99. 4, women comprised 2. Women of color have lagged particularly far behind in both employment and education. For example, in 1. Black women was $4. Hispanic women earned a median weekly income of only $3. Even in sectors where women have made inroads into management, minority women continue to be underrepresented. In the banking industry, only 2. Black women, and 5% by Hispanic women, compared to 3. In the hospital industry, Black and Hispanic women each held 4. At the top, women of color represented only 1. Fortune 5. 00 companies.(2. Women of color also earn fewer college degrees than white women. In 1. 99. 7, white women made up 3. Although white men constitute a minority of the total work force (4. Moreover, white males’ median weekly earnings in 1. America. A white man earns, on average for full- time work, almost 5. Black woman, and over 8. Hispanic woman.(3. Although some women choose to devote themselves to family concerns or to jobs with lower pay for a range of reasons, such choices do not fully explain the disparities between men’s and women’s salaries. One study shows that after about 1. Another study, of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from 1. These women have made the same career choices as men, worked the same hours as men, yet still earn less. Sex discrimination, including sexual harassment, continues to be a serious barrier to the advancement of women. In 1. 99. 9, nearly 2. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.(3. This number includes over 1. A 1. 99. 8 national survey found that the majority, 6. American women do not think employers are doing a good job in treating women fairly for pay and promotions.(3. In a 1. 99. 4 survey by the Labor Department, 6. The March 1. 99. 5 Glass Ceiling Commission report cites another survey finding that 2. A multi- year study of sex and race discrimination in employment that is now under way measures intentional discrimination by comparing employment patterns reported by individual business establishments with those in peer establishments operating in the same industry, in the same local labor market and employing workers in the same occupational group, based on data submitted by these businesses to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. According to the study’s findings in the first two states it has examined, 2. Washington State and over 2. Georgia were discriminating against women in at least one occupational category in 1. What Is Affirmative Action for Women? In employment, examples of affirmative action programs are recruitment and outreach efforts to include qualified women in the talent pool when hiring decisions are made; training programs to give all employees a fair chance at promotions; and in some cases the use of flexible goals and timetable (not quotas) as benchmarks by which to measure progress toward eliminating severe under- representation of qualified women in specific job categories. In education, affirmative action programs for women include grants and graduate fellowship programs aimed at helping women move into fields where their participation has been discouraged, such as engineering, math and the physical sciences. They also include programs to prepare and motivate girls and women for study in non- traditional fields. For women business owners, affirmative action programs include laws that encourage government agencies and contractors to do business with qualified women- owned companies, as well as programs providing financial, management and technical assistance to women business owners. Affirmative Action Works. Affirmative action programs make a difference. A government study showed that women made greater gains in employment at companies doing business with the federal government, and therefore subject to federal affirmative action requirements, than at other companies: female employment rose 1. The same study showed that federal contractors employed women at higher levels and in better paying jobs than other firms.(4. Many individual companies that have adopted affirmative action plans have demonstrated the impact on women. For example, after IBM set up its affirmative action program, its number of female officials and managers more than tripled in less than ten years.(4. Corporate commitment to women and minorities enabled Corning to double its number of female and black employees and increase the proportion of women managers to 2. Motorola has been rewarded with an increased representation of women and people of color in upper- level management. The company had two women and six persons of color as vice president in 1. Affirmative action requirements have changed entire industries. In 1. 97. 8, the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) reviewed the employment practices of the five largest banks in Cleveland. Three years later, the percentage of women officials and managers at these institutions had risen more than 2. When OFCCP first looked at the coal mining industry in 1. By 1. 98. 0, 8. 7% were women.(4. Litigation against police and fire departments has resulted in affirmative action plans that have produced dramatic increases in the employment of women (and minorities) in these fields as well.(4. In 1. 98. 3, for example, women made up 9. Sixteen years later, women are 1. Women- owned businesses, which have also benefitted from affirmative action requirements, have increased since 1. Today, there are nearly 9. Affirmative Action Is Not Quotas or Handouts for the Unqualified. Affirmative action is not “quotas” nor the substitution of numerical dictates for merit- based decisions. Some affirmative action plans include the management tools of numerical goals or targets for representation of women or minorities, and timetables for meeting those objectives. But the courts have held that these goals and timetables must be flexible and take into account such factors as the availability of qualified candidates. They may not constitute “blind hiring by the numbers; ” if they do, they are unlawful. The program that imposes affirmative action requirements on federal contractors, under Executive Order No. Goals may not be rigid and inflexible quotas which must be met, but must be targets reasonably attainable by means of applying every good faith effort to make all aspects of the entire affirmative action program work.”(4. Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County, illustrates the use of flexible goals in practice.(4. There were no women in the agency’s 2. Under its affirmative action plan, the agency set a target for increased employment of women in this category (and others in which they had been under- represented), and in its effort to meet the goal it took gender into account in deciding to promote a woman, rather than a man with substantially equal qualifications, to road dispatcher. Gender was only one factor among many considered, and the woman who received the promotion was fully qualified for the job. The Supreme Court ruled that this constituted a reasonable approach to eliminating an obvious gender imbalance in the workforce. Research confirms that affirmative action does not lower the quality of workers’ performance on the job. In a 1. 99. 6 study of the performance of new hires by over 3,2.
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