The Need for Affirmative Action

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The Need for Affirmative Action

As discussed in Section , women are often judged as less qualified than men when their performance is identical. For example, in one controlled study, department chairs were given nearly identical curricula vitae of supposed male and female applicants and asked to recommend their faculty rank. They chose assistant professor if they thought the applicant was a woman and associate professor if they thought it was a man [Fidell 1975]. The following examples show how these contradictions are rationalized:

A man is described as `serving on two departmental committees and even on one institutional committee,' while a woman with the identical experience is noted as `serving on two departmental committees but only on one institutional committee [Sandler 1986, page 6,].
A woman who has published only three articles is denied tenure. (`Yes, the articles are high-quality, but she should have published more than that in 5 years.') Later, a man in the same department is awarded tenure. (`Well, he's a slow starter, but he shows a lot of promise.') [Lattin 1984, page 227,].

These studies contradict the assumption that, without affirmative action, all decisions are purely merit-based. In fact, few would dispute that ``before affirmative action programs were developed, women were routinely turned down for many faculty and most administrative positions, regardless of their credentials'' [Lattin 1984, page 228,]. For example, ``Gerty Cori, the first American woman Nobel Prize winner (for medicine or physiology in 1947) ... was not promoted to full professor until the year she won the prize'' [Hunt 1991]. See also [Gornick 1990] and [Selvin 1991, page 28,]. Clearly, something is wrong with the way people make decisions, and they must bend over backwards to make sure they consider each candidate equally.

College admissions were also frequently discriminatory before affirmative action:

The admissions policy of the University of North Carolina, for example, was openly discriminatory [until the early seventies]: `Admission of women on the freshman level will be restricted to those who are especially well qualified'.... The American Council on Education reported that freshmen who entered four-year colleges in 1968 had widely divergent high school grades: more than 40 percent of the girls had averages of B+ or better but only 18 percent of the boys could boast the same.
The attitude of some male alumni certainly indicates that they would find nothing at all strange in having disparate admission standards: In congressional testimony in 1970, Ann Sutherland Harris reported the following: `At Yale, when the new women undergraduates protested the quota on women and made the modest demand for fifty more women undergraduates the coming year at an alumni dinner, an alumnus was cheered when he said: ``We're all for women, but we can't deny a Yale education to a man.''' And when Harris was questioned by Congressman William D. Hathaway of Maine on school admissions policies, the same bias become apparent: `Mr. Hathaway: If you take the college administration and they have so many kids that they can take into school and they know that 90 percent of the men, for example, in our society have to get a job, and, say, only 50 percent of the women are going to get it, and they have a limited number they will take in, aren't they warranted in taking nine out of ten men and fewer girls?' [Abramson 1975, page 74,]

With attitudes like this, clearly some sort of program is needed.

Next: Distrust of Qualifications Up: The Perception of Previous: The Perception of

Ellen Spertus
Sat Jan 28 18:40:31 EST 1995