Affirmative Action Source Page

What Is Affirmative Action?

Born of the civil rights movement three decades ago, affirmative action calls for minorities and women to be given special consideration in employment, education and contracting decisions.

Institutions with affirmative action policies generally set goals and timetables for increased diversity – and use recruitment, set-asides and preference as ways of achieving those goals.

In its modern form, affirmative action can call for an admissions officer faced with two similarly qualified applicants to choose the minority over the white, or for a manager to recruit and hire a qualified woman for a job instead of a man. Affirmative action decisions are generally not supposed to be based on quotas, nor are they supposed to give any preference to unqualified candidates. And they are not supposed to harm anyone through "reverse discrimination."

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The Politics of Affirmative Action

President Clinton, asserting that the job of ending discrimination remains unfinished, strongly defends affirmative action. "Mend it, but don't end it," he says.

Conservatives, however, see ending affirmative action as a powerful political issue. Heartened by recent Supreme Court decisions that have limited affirmative action – and by the passage in 1996 of a California ballot initiative abolishing sexual and racial preferences – Republicans are taking up the battle wherever they can.

The debate over affirmative action takes on a particularly bitter tenor in the trenches. "Angry white men" blame affirmative action for robbing them of promotions and other opportunities. And while many minorities and women support affirmative action, a growing number say its benefits are no longer worth its side effect: the perception that their success is unearned.

Judging simply by the results, the playing field would appear to still be tilted very much in favor of white men. Overall, minorities and women are in vastly lower paying jobs and still face active discrimination in some sense. At this point in our nation's history, does affirmative action make things better or worse? The debate rages on.

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Positive Aspects of Affirmative Action

Now that we have given a brief overview of the history of affirmative action, we will discuss the positive aspects. As you already know affirmative action was implemented with the idea and hope that America would finally become truly equal. ; The tension of the 1960s civil rights movement had made it very clear, that the nations minority and female population were not receiving equal social and economic opportunity. The implementation of affirmative action was America's first honest attempt at solving a problem, it had previously chose to ignore.

Affirmative action has had its greatest amount of success in city, state, and government jobs. Since the 1960s the area of law enforcement witnessed the greatest increase in minority applicants, and in jobs offered to minorities. This should be viewed as an extremely positive thing, because prior to affirmative action these jobs were almost completely closed off to minorities and woman. The influx has been greatest in the area of government, state and city, because this type of work is easier for affirmative action to watch over and regulate. Affirmative action has experienced considerably less success in integration in big business. ; This is do to the fact that big business has been more resistant to affirmative action and harder to regulate. However, this is an area that most supporters of affirmative action expect to see a change.

There are many people who don't see affirmative action as a positive thing and would like to see it eliminated. In my opinion these people need to realize that thirty years of affirmative action isn't a long enough time to solve a major societal problem. Affirmative action is making steady strides in helping the problem of racial inequality in America. Affirmative action is something we should all support, until better and more effective plans are proposed.

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Negative Aspects of Affirmative Action

Since Affirmative Action is a compromise, it does not please everybody. On the contrary: Affirmative Action is far from perfect.

First of all, Affirmative Action uses reverse discrimination to solve the problem of discrimination. In that, it promotes the hiring of less skilled workers: the employers have to choose from the best available employee from the minorities, instead of having the possibility to choose simply the best available employee.

This bothers employers as well as employees who do not qualify for Affirmative Action; the employers feel they ended up with a lesser quality worker. Here we come to yet another disadvantage of Affirmative Action, namely that now every employee from a minority that benefits from Affirmative Action bears a mark of "not being the best pick, but only the best pick from a limited group", even if the person was selected for being the best available on the complete job market. The bypassed employees feel tricked by the government or the minority. The last could fire up racism among the bypassed group, while Affirmative Action was introduced to decrease racism.

Affirmative Action does provide people from certain minorities with a job they would not have gotten otherwise (that is what Affirmative Action was introduced for). But if, after reading all the above, you think of the quality of this job, in a surroundings hostile towards the minority the employee is from, one could seriously doubt the fact whether this employee is happy with this job. It is better than no job, but that is about it.

This brings me to the last negative aspect of Affirmative Action, and that is: Affirmative Action. In a situation like this, nothing, no matter what kind of regulation you think of, will change unless the people (employers in this case) are willing to cooperate. I find it sad that in America, the "Melting-pot" of cultures from all over the world, the "Most Powerful Nation on Earth", is so weak inside. As long as people are not willing to live with each other and respect each other, the "Melting-pot" will keep on boiling.

Despite all of the negative aspects of Affirmative Action I mentioned above (without doubt there are many, many more), I feel that Affirmative Action is necessary. Until a better solution is found or until the people of America finally stop quarreling about race, color and culture and establish peace in the country itself, Affirmative Action should stay, being the best solution available: a compromise.

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Alternative for Affirmative Action

There are a few possible alternatives to affirmative action, some of them are very simple and some are a little more complex. The alternatives discussed in this paper will include: reconstruction of civil society in minority communities, increasing minority and female applicant flow, and most important promote broad policies for economic opportunity and security that benefit low- and middle-income Americans, black and white.

"Building up civil society means strengthening 'intermediate' institutions, lying between the state and the individual, such as community associations, schools, media, and independent social agencies, which provide the organizational foundation for collective development and effective public representation." (Starr p. 4) If the same capital was made available for minority institutions, as other institutions, they would be able to develop in the society and eventually become a strong part of the minority community. ; These institutions would give direction and guidance that is needed by all to play a major role in his/her community.

Increasing minority and female applicant flow would be very easy for a company to do. They simply need to include minority colleges and universities in campus recruitment programs, place employment opportunities in minority oriented print and broadcast media, and retain applications of un-hired minority applicants to be reviewed as a position opens. This would be a great opportunity for applicants and employers.

We should work toward broad based economic policies by consistently emphasizing broad-based, race-neutral policies- for example, public investment, national health reform, an enlarged earned income tax credit, child support assurance, and other policies benefiting families with young children. Widely supported programs that promote the interests of both lower- and middle-income Americans-and that deliver substantial benefits to minorities on the basis of their economic condition- will do more to reduce minority poverty than narrowly based, and poorly funded, measures for minority groups or the poor alone. These efforts can also be designed to coincide with intermediate institutions and thereby to contribute to the overall process of civil reconstruction and renewal.

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Affirmative Action: History and Rationale

Neither this review nor the current debate over affirmative action occur in a historical vacuum. This and the following two sections provide the context for this review, and, indeed, for federal affirmative action programs. First, we examine the history of the creation of modern affirmative action programs. Then, in section 3, we review the general evidence on the effectiveness of affirmative action. Finally, section 4 examines the extent to which discrimination and exclusion persist today, suggesting that it is too soon to abandon the affirmative action tool.

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Background

The current scope of affirmative action programs is best understood as an outgrowth and continuation of our national effort to remedy subjugation of racial and ethnic minorities and of women -- subjugation in place at our nation's founding and still the law of the land within the lifetime of "baby-boomers." Some affirmative action efforts began before the great burst of civil rights statutes in the 1950s and 1960s. But affirmative efforts did not truly take hold until it became clear that anti-discrimination statutes alone were not enough to break long-standing patterns of discrimination.

For much of this century, racial and ethnic minorities and women have confronted legal and social exclusion. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were segregated into low wage jobs, usually agricultural. Asian Americans, who were forbidden by law from owning land, worked fields to which they could not hold title. Women were barred by laws in many states from entering entire occupations, such as mining, fire fighting, bar tending, law, and medicine.

The first significant wave of progress in enhancing employment opportunities for African Americans and women came during the labor shortages of World War II and immediately afterwards, before the use of affirmative action. Nonetheless, racial separation continued, and African Americans were still segregated for the most part into low wage jobs into the 1960s. For Hispanic Americans, employment opportunity remained seriously restricted into the 1970s. Whole industries and categories of employment were, in effect, all-white, all-male. In thousands of towns and cities, police departments and fire departments remained all white and male; Women and minorities were forbidden to even apply. In grocery and department stores, clerks were white and janitors and elevator operators were black. Generations of African Americans swept the floors in factories while denied the opportunity to become higher paid operatives on the machines. In businesses such as the canning industry, Asian Americans were not only precluded from becoming managers, but were housed in physically segregated living quarters. Stereotypical assumptions that women would be only part-time or temporary workers resulted in their exclusion from a full range of job opportunities. Newspaper job listings were segregated by gender. Women also confronted other barriers to full inclusion: lower pay and fewer benefits than men, even when performing similar jobs; losing their jobs if they married or became pregnant; and sexual harassment on the job.

African Americans, even if they were college-educated, worked as bellboys, porters and domestics, unless they could manage to get a scarce teaching position in the all-black school -- which was usually the only alternative to preaching, or perhaps working in the post office. In higher education most African Americans attended predominantly black colleges, many established by states as segregated institutions. Most concentrated on teacher training to the exclusion of professional education. Students who were interested in business had to take business education instead of administration. A few went to predominantly white institutions, in which by 1954, about one percent of entering freshman were black.

Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans, were legally barred from attending some public schools. And women were systematically excluded from some private and state funded colleges, universities, and professional schools well into the 1970s. In general, it is clear that separation of the races and relegation of women to the sidelines remained the norm for most of this century.

The civil rights movement had its dramatic victories -- Brown v. Board of Education and the other cases striking down segregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- which helped advance the Constitution's promise of equal opportunity to all minorities and women. Even after passage of the civil rights laws beginning in the 1960s, however, the road to equal opportunity for minorities and women was difficult, and programs often very slow.

These judicial and legislative victories were not enough to overcome long-entrenched discrimination, for several reasons. In part, these measures frequently focused only on issues of formal rights (such as the right to vote) that were particularly susceptible to judicial or statutory resolution. In part, the difficulty was that formal litigation-related strategies are inevitably resource-intensive and often dependent upon clear "smoking gun" evidence of overt bias or bigotry, whereas prejudice can take on myriad subtle, yet effective, forms. Thus, private and public institutions alike too often seemed impervious to the winds of change, remaining all-white or all-male long after court decisions or statutes formally ended discrimination.

As a result, both the courts and Republican and Democratic administrations turned to race- and gender-conscious remedies as a way to end entrenched discrimination. These remedies were developed after periods of experimentation had shown that other means too often failed to correct the problems. Here are some typical examples:

In July 1970, a federal district court enjoined the State of Alabama from continuing to discriminate against blacks in the hiring of state troopers. The court found that "in the thirty-seven year history of the patrol there has never been a black trooper." The order included detailed, non-numerical provisions for assuring an end to discrimination, such as stringent controls on the civil service certification procedure and an extensive program of recruitment of minority job applicants. ; Eighteen months later, not a single black had been hired as a state trooper or into a civilian position connected with the troopers. The district court then entered a further order requiring the hiring of one qualified black trooper or support person applicant for each white hired until 25 percent of the force was comprised of blacks. By the time the case reached the Court of Appeals in 1974, 25 black troopers and 80 black support personnel had been hired. (4) The US Supreme Court ultimately affirmed the orders.

In 1979, women represented only 4 percent of the entry-level officers in the San Francisco police department. By 1985, under an affirmative action plan ordered in a case in which the US Department of Justice sued the City for discrimination, the number of women in the entry class had risen to 175, or 14.5 percent.

Similarly, a federal district court review of the San Francisco Fire Department in 1987 led to a consent decree which increased the number of blacks in officer positions from 7 to 31, Hispanics from 12 to 55, and Asians from 0 to 10; women were admitted as firefighters for the very first time.

In 1975, a federal district court found that Local 28 of the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association had discriminated against non-white workers in recruitment, training and admission to the union. The court found that the union had: (1) adopted discriminatory admission criteria, (2) restricted the size of its membership to deny access to minorities, (3) selectively organized shops with few minority workers and (4) discriminated in favor of white applicants seeking to transfer from sister locals. The court found that the record was replete with instances of bad faith efforts to prevent or delay the admission of minorities. The court established a 29 percent membership goal, reflecting the percentage of minorities in the relevant labor pool. The Supreme Court affirmed the relief.

Prior to 1974, Kaiser Aluminum hired only persons with prior craft experience as craft workers at its Gramercy, Louisiana plant. Because blacks traditionally had been excluded from the craft unions, only 5 of 273 skilled craft workers at the plant were black. In response, Kaiser together with the union, established its own training program to fill craft jobs with the proviso that 50 percent of new trainees were to be black until the percentage of black craft workers in the plant matched the percentage of blacks in the local labor pool. The Supreme Court held this program to be lawful.

On March 23, 1973, the Nixon administration's Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Service Commission issued a joint memorandum titled "State and Local Employment Practices Guide." The guide points out that the Nixon Administration... since September of 1969, recognized that goals and timetables... are a proper means for helping to implement the nation's commitment to equal employment opportunity." The memorandum stressed that strict quotas are unacceptable but that goals and timetables' are entirely different and reasonable tools. (Attorney General John Mitchell led the legal defense of the distinction between goals and quotas). In July of 1986, Justice O'Connor referred to this document, and the merits of fair and effective affirmative action goals, in the concurring portion of her opinion in Local 28, Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC. In doing so, she joined the Court majority's support for numerical guidelines in affirmative action programs.

Fair Employment -- The Executive Order

The longest-standing federal affirmative action program has its roots in World War II. The Executive Order barring discrimination in the federal government and by war industries was issued by President Franklin Roosevelt. The action was taken to forestall a planned march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph, the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Roosevelt's order barred discrimination against blacks by defense contractors, and established the first Fair Employment Practices Committee. However, federal compliance programs were routinely understaffed, under-funded and lacked enforcement authority.

After World War II, gains that had been made by women and blacks receded as returning GIs reclaimed their jobs. By 1960, the 10 million workers on the payrolls of the 100 largest defense contractors included few blacks. The $7.5 billion in federal grants-in-aid to the states and cities for highway, school, airport, school and public housing construction went almost exclusively to whites. The US Employment Service, which provided funds for state-operated employment bureaus, encouraged skilled blacks to register for unskilled jobs, accepted requests from white employers and made no efforts to get employers to accept African American workers. The President's Committee on Government Contracts, chaired by Vice-president Nixon in 1959, blamed "the indifference of employers to establishing a positive policy of nondiscrimination," stated that such indifference was more prevalent than over discrimination, and called for remedial steps.

In response to the civil rights movement, President John F. Kennedy created a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity in 1961 and issued Executive Order 10925, which used the term "affirmative action" to refer to measures designed to achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. In 1968, gender was added to the protected categories.

In the Johnson Administration, the Labor Department Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) started pre-award compliance for federal contracts over $1 million. The Office began with construction contractors, who were required to set goals and timetables under a regulation issued to implement the Order in 1968. However, under pressure from unions and the General Accounting Office, which found the process too vague, OFCCP discontinued the effort.

But in the most far-reaching federal expansion of affirmative action, the "goals and timetables" plan was revived by President Nixon and Labor Secretary George Shultz in 1969. In issuing the so-called "Philadelphia Order," Assistant Secretary Arthur Fletcher said:

Equal employment opportunity in these [construction] trades in the Philadelphia area is still far from a reality. The unions in these trades still have only about 1.6 percent minority group membership and they continue to engage in practices, including the granting of referral priorities to union members and to persons who have work experience under union contracts, which result in few Negroes being referred for employment. We find, therefore, that special measures are required to provide equal employment opportunity in these seven trades. (5)

President Nixon later remembered, "A good job is as basic and important a civil right as a good education . . . I felt that the plan Shultz devised, which would require such [affirmative] action by law, was both necessary and right. We would not impose quotas, but would require federal contractors to show affirmative action' to meet the goals of increasing minority employment." (6)

Order No. 4 in 1970 extended the plan to non-construction federal contractors.

Fair Employment -- Enforcement of Title VII

In July, 1963, in the midst of the civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television to propose a civil rights bill. The measure proposed outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, permitting a cutoff of federal funds from discriminating institutions, and expanding the equal employment opportunity committee he had established. After President Kennedy's assassination, Title VII was enacted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, seeking to end discrimination by large private employers whether or not they had government contracts. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, established by the Act, is charged with enforcing the anti-discrimination laws through prevention of employment discrimination and resolution of complaints. The Act is designed to make employees whole for illegal discrimination and to encourage employers to end discrimination. Title VII was substantially strengthened in 1972 amendments, signed by President Nixon. As Supreme Court holdings concluded, the legislative history to the 1972 amendments made clear that Congress approved of race- and gender-conscious remedies that had been developed by the courts in enforcing the 1964 Act.

Court-ordered affirmative action to remedy violations of Title VII developed on a parallel track with the Executive Order program, as another remedial effort to stop existing discrimination and prevent its recurrence. The Supreme Court's most comprehensive review of affirmative action has occurred in the employment area.

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Education

Discrimination in education was the target of the original breakthrough civil rights cases. Indeed, because education is the gateway to opportunity, education has consistently been a central focus of civil rights efforts. But for nearly two decades following the original court decisions, educational institutions -- particularly colleges and graduate schools -- remained predominantly white and male. In 1955, only 4.9 percent of college students ages 18-24 were black. This figure rose to 6.5 percent during the next five years, but by 1965 had slumped back to 4.9 percent. Only in the wake of affirmative action measures in the late 1960s and early 1970s did the percentage of black college students begin to climb steadily (in 1970, 7.8 percent of college students were black; in 1980, 9.1 percent; and in 1990, 11.3 percent).

The 1978 Bakke case set the parameters of educational affirmative action. (7) The University of California at Davis medical school had reserved 16 available places for qualified minorities . In a splintered decision, with Justice Powell casting the deciding vote, the Supreme Court essentially decided that setting aside a specific number of places in the absence of proof of past discrimination was illegal, but that minority status could be used as a factor in admissions . The desire to obtain a "diverse" student body was found to be a compelling goal in the educational context in Justice Powell's controlling opinion.

Increased educational opportunity has, in fact, revolutionized education, although some gaps persist. While the enrollment of women in higher education has risen steadily, with women now earning nearly fifty percent of all bachelor's and masters degrees, they earn only one third of doctorate and first professional degrees, and continue to lag in math, engineering, and the physical sciences at both the undergraduate and the doctoral levels.

Through the availability of student aid programs and aggressive recruitment and retention programs, the college-going rate for blacks and whites who graduated from high school was about equal by 1977. Since 1977, however, the proportion of black 18-24 year old high school graduates enrolled in college has not kept pace with that of white students. While the percentage of black students who have graduated from high school has increased approximately 20 percent in the past 25 years, the portion of black high school student graduates attending college is now 25 percent less than that of white students. (8)

The story is similar for the Hispanic enrollment rate. In 1976, the college-going rate for 16-24 year old Hispanics who had recently graduated from high school (53 percent) actually exceeded the white rate (49 percent). Since then, the Hispanic college-going rate has stagnated while the white rate has increased significantly. By 1994, the white college-going rate had risen to 64 percent, whereas the Hispanic rate had fallen to 49 percent. (9)

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Justifications for Affirmative Action

THE CONTINUING NEED TO COMBAT DISCRIMINATION AND PROMOTE INCLUSION

Affirmative action was established as part of society's efforts to address continuing problems of discrimination; the empirical evidence presented in the preceding chapter indicates that it has had some positive impact on remedying the effects of discrimination. Whether such discrimination lingers today is a central element of an analysis of affirmative action. The conclusion is clear: discrimination and exclusion remain all too common.

Evidence of Continuing Discrimination

There has been undeniable progress in many areas. Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that the problems affirmative action seeks to address -- widespread discrimination and exclusion and their ripple effects -- continue to exist.

Minorities and women remain economically disadvantaged: the black unemployment rate remains over twice the white unemployment rate; 97 percent of senior managers in Fortune 1000 corporations are white males; (28) in 1992, 33.3 percent of blacks and 29.3 percent of Hispanics lived in poverty, compared to 11.6 percent of whites. (29) In 1993, Hispanic men were half as likely as white men to be managers or professionals; (30) only 0.4 percent of senior management positions in Fortune 1000 industrial and Fortune 500 service industries are Hispanic. (31)

Blatant discrimination is a continuing problem in the labor market. Perhaps the most convincing evidence comes from "audit" studies, in which white and minority (or male and female) job seekers are given similar resumes and sent to the same set of firms to apply for a job. These studies often find that employers are less likely to interview or offer a job to minority applicants and to female applicants. (32)

Less direct evidence on discrimination comes from comparisons of earnings of blacks and whites, or males and females. (33) Even after adjusting for characteristics that affect earnings (such as years of education and work experience), these studies typically find that blacks and women are paid less than their white male counterparts. The average income for Hispanic women with college degrees is less than the average for white men with high school degrees. (34)

Last year alone, the Federal government received over 90,000 complaints of employment discrimination. Moreover 64,423 complaints were filed with state and local Fair Employment Practices Commissions, bringing the total last year to over 154,000. Thousands of other individuals filed complaints alleging racially motivated violence and discrimination in housing, voting, and public accommodations, to name just a few.

Results from Random Testing

The marked differences in economic status between blacks and whites, and between men and women, clearly have social and economic causes in addition to discrimination. One respected method to isolate the prevalence of discrimination is to use random testing, in which individuals compete for the same job, apartment, or other goal. For example, the Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington, Inc., conducted a series of tests between 1990 and 1992. The tests revealed that blacks were treated significantly worse than equally qualified whites 24 percent of the time and Latinos were treated worse than whites 22 percent of the time. Some examples document the disparities:

Two pairs of male testers visited the offices of a nationally-franchised employment agency on two different days. The black tester in each pair received no job referrals. In contrast, the white testers who appeared minutes later were interviewed by the agency, coached on interviewing techniques, and referred to and offered jobs as switchboard operators.

A black female tester applied for employment at a major hotel chain in Virginia where she was told that she would be called if they wished to pursue her application. Although she never received a call, her equally qualified white counterpart appeared a few minutes later, was told about a vacancy for a front desk clerk, later interviewed, and offered the job.

A black male tester asked about an ad for a sales position at a Maryland car dealership. He was told that the way to enter the business would be to start by washing cars. However, his white counterpart, with identical credentials, was immediately interviewed for the sales job.

A suburban Maryland company advertised for a typist/receptionist. When a black tester applied for the position, she was interviewed but heard nothing further. When an identically qualified white tester was interviewed, the employer offered her a better position that paid more than the receptionist job and that provided tuition assistance. Follow up calls by the black tester elicited no response even though the white tester refused the offer.

A GAO audit study uncovered significant discrimination against Hispanic testers. Hispanic testers received 25 percent fewer job interviews, and 34 percent fewer job offers than other testers. In one glaring example of discrimination, a Hispanic tester was told that a "counter help" job at a lunch service company had been filled. Two hours later, an Anglo tester was offered the job. (35)

The Urban Institute's Employment and Housing Discrimination Studies (1991) matched equally qualified white and black testers who applied for the same jobs or visited the same real estate agents. Twenty percent of the time, white applicants advanced further in the hiring process than equally qualified blacks. In one in eight tests, the white received a job offer when the black did not. In housing, both black and Hispanic testers faced discrimination in about half their dealings with rental agents.

Similarly, researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research sent comparably matched resumes of men and women to restaurants in Philadelphia. In high priced eateries, men were more than twice as likely to receive an interview and five times as likely to receive a job offer than the women testers. (36)

The Justice Department has conducted similar testing to uncover housing discrimination. Those tests also have revealed that whites are more likely than blacks to be shown apartment units, while blacks with equal credentials are told nothing is available. ; Since the testing began, the Justice Department has brought over 20 federal suits resulting in settlements totaling more than $1.5 million. A particularly graphic case of discrimination occurred during a fair housing test performed by the Civil Rights Division in Wisconsin, which sought to establish whether discrimination existed against the relatively large East-Asian population there. When the Asian tester approached the apartment building, the rental agent stood between the tester and the door to the rental office and refused to allow the tester to enter the building. The tester was told that there were no apartments available and there would not be any available for two months. When the white tester approached two hours later, the individual was immediately shown an apartment and was told he could move in that same day.

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Exclusion from Mainstream Opportunities: Continuing Disparities in Economic Status

Apart from the remediation of and bulwark against discrimination, a second justification offered for continuing affirmative action in education, employment and contracting is the need to repair the mechanisms for including all Americans in the economic mainstream. There is ample evidence to conclude that the problems to which affirmative action was initially addressed remain serious, both for members of disadvantaged groups and for America as a whole.

A recent study by the Glass Ceiling Commission, a body established under President Bush and legislatively sponsored by Senator Dole, (37) recently reported that:

- White males continue to hold 97 percent of senior management positions in Fortune 1000 industrial and Fortune 500 service industries. Only 0.6 percent of senior management are African American, 0.3 percent are Asian and 0.4 percent are Hispanic.

- African Americans hold only 2.5 percent of top jobs in the private sector and African American men with professional degrees earn only 79 percent of the amount earned by their white counterparts. Comparably situated African American women earn only 60 percent of the amount earned by white males.

- Women hold 3 to 5 percent of senior level management positions -- there are only two women CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies.

- The fears and prejudices of lower-rung white male executives were listed as a principal barrier to the advancement of women and minorities. The report also found that, across the board, men advance more rapidly than women.

The unemployment rate for African Americans was more than twice that of whites in 1994. The median income for black males working full-time, full year in 1992 was 30 percent less than white males. Hispanics fared only modestly better in each category. In 1993, black and Hispanic men were half as likely as white men to be managers or professionals. (38)

In 1992, over 50 percent of African American children under 6 and 44 percent of Hispanic children lived under the poverty level, while only 14.4 percent of white children did so. The overall poverty rates were 33.3 percent for African Americans, 29.3 percent for Hispanics and 11.6 percent for whites.

Black employment remains fragile -- in an economic downturn, black unemployment leads the downward spiral. For example, in the 1981-82 recession, black employment dropped by 9.1 percent while white employment fell by 1.6 percent. Hispanic unemployment is also much more cyclical than unemployment for white Americans. (39) Hispanic family income remains much lower, and increases at a slower rate, than white family income. (40)

Unequal access to education plays an important role in creating and perpetuating economic disparities. In 1993, less than 3 percent of college graduates were unemployed; but whereas 22.6 percent of whites had college degrees, only 12.2 percent of African Americans and 9.0 percent of Hispanics did.

The 1990 census reflected that 2.4 percent of the nation's businesses are owned by blacks. Almost 85 percent of those black owned businesses have no employees. (41)

Even within educational categories, the economic status of minorities and women fall short. The average woman with a masters degree earns the same amount as the average man with an associate degree. (42) While college educated black women have reached earnings parity with college educated white women, college educated black men earn 76 percent of the earnings of their white male counterparts. (43) Hispanic women earn less than 65 percent of the income earned by white men with the same educational level. Hispanic men earn 81 percent of the wages earned by white men at the same educational level. The average income for Hispanic women with college degrees is less than the average for white men with high school degrees. (44)

A study of the graduating classes of the University of Michigan Law School from 1972-1975 revealed significant wage differentials between men and women lawyers after 15 years of practice. While women earned 93.5 percent of male salaries during the first year after school, that number dropped to 61 percent after 15 years of practice. Controlling for grades, hours of work, family responsibilities, labor market experience, and choice of careers (large firms versus small firms, academia, public interest, etc.), men are left with an unexplained 13 percent earnings advantage over women. (45)

Positive Aspects of Affirmative Action Now that we have given a brief overview of the history of affirmative action, we will discuss the positive aspects. As you already know affirmative action was implemented with the idea and hope that America would finally become truly equal. The tension of the 1960s civil rights movement had made it very clear, that the nations minority and female population were not receiving equal social and economic opportunity. The implementation of affirmative action was America's first honest attempt at solving a problem, it had previously chose to ignore.