Affirmative Action Purpose & Programs

Affirmative action seeks to create more opportunities for women and minorities by giving them special consideration in decisions involving hiring, firing, promotion, college admissions, and government contracts. In all of these areas, women and minorities traditionally have been underrepresented. Companies government agencies, and universities use recruitment, set-asides, and preferences to achieve these goals.

Affirmative action arose out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act ended legal segregation and state-sanctioned discrimination, but bias continued to limit opportunities for minorities and women. Clearly, more

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an-American state trooper for every white state trooper hired, until African-Americans numbered 25 percent of the force, or roughly equivalent to the proportion of African-Americans in Alabama as a whole (Gunther, 1991). Similar programs desegregated numerous workplaces, while many employers instituted voluntary affirmative action policies. In addition, federal and state governments enacted more laws to expand affirmative action even further. No legislation had more impact than the Civil Rights Act of 1972, which greatly expanded the reach of the federal government. The employment policies of state and local governments came under federal purview. More importantly, the law put the federal government on the victimsÆ side by giving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the power to file lawsuits on the behalf of individual plaintiffs (McWhirter, 1996). By the mid-1970s, race and gender had become a factor in hiring and college admittance decisionsùa positive factor. Then came Bakke, a Supreme Court decision more notable for the controversy it generated (considerable) than the changes it spawned (minimal). The Bakke case challenged an affirmative action program for admission to the University of California at
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