Supporters of affirmative action say it ensures diversity on the campus and at the workplace. It develops tolerance as it promotes exposure to various cultures. It helps level the playing field, as many groups were discriminated against and started late in the race to development.
Affirmative-action activists say the policy has helped remove racial stereotypes by providing opportunities to disadvantaged groups to prove their abilities—though critics say it has only reinforced stereotypes, through a suggestion that minorities and women can thrive only if they are given an unfair advantage over others.
In 2002, Lee Bollinger, the respondent President of the University of Michigan in the Gratz and Grutter cases, spoke at …show more content…
The schools, therefore, achieve diversity in different ways—for example, by partnering with the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, which provides financial aid, and by organizing outreach programs for minority students.
Time to scrap affirmative action?
In 1981, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination stipulated that the measures to reverse the ills of discrimination would be wound up once the objectives had been achieved, but in US and India, for example, affirmative action and reservation continue to be used.
Has the time come for phasing out affirmative action? Or should minorities continue to be compensated for the injustice they suffered in the past? Should compensation be handed out at the cost of the descendants of those who committed these injustices? What if the descendants continue to enjoy the fruits of unjust actions committed by their …show more content…
Preference to male applicants has been challenged in the courts. In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that an institution required compelling justification related to the government’s interests to adopt gender-based distinctions in admission. In 1999, the University of Georgia was sued by a white woman who challenged its system of awarding extra points to male and/or minority applicants. It withdrew the system before the court ruling.
Analysts say that in the interest of diversity, colleges that receive applications mainly from men or mainly from women may show some bias towards either male or female applicants, as the case may be. But activists say that any bias against women would be grossly unfair given the tortuous history of the women’s rights movement.
However, despite the fact that women graduates have long been outnumbering male graduates, women are yet to claim their rightful clout in the corporate world. According to the Center for American Progress, although women hold 52 percent of all professional-level jobs, only 15 percent of executive officers, 8 percent of top earners, and 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are