A) Given the debates about Affirmative Action over the last several years, do yo

Question

A) Given the debates about Affirmative Action over the last several years, do you believe that Affirmative Action is reverse discrimination or is Affirmative Action reversing discrimination? Explain. B) Women are underrepresented on boards of directors is an understatement. In the United States, only 16 percent of board members among the Fortune 500 are women. Among the 100 largest companies in Great Britain, women hold approximately 12 percent of board seats, a representation that has changed little over the past 5 years. In the European Union (EU) more generally, only 9.7 percent of the directors of the 300 largest companies are women. In China and India, the figure is roughly half that. In response to such underrepresentation, many countries have enacted laws and guidelines. French law stipulates that corporate boards must be 20 percent female by 2014. A 2011 official British government report recommended that women make up at least 25 percent of the boards of the largest British companies. Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, and Italy have similar “pink quotas” in place, and Sweden is recommending 50 percent representation. Do you agree with the quotas established in many EU countries? Why or why not? Chapter 3 C) In your experience, what attributes to job satisfaction? As discussed in your text, do you agree with "Happy workers means happy profits?" Discuss

Explanation / Answer

Affirmative action is basically favoring of the disadvantaged population group who have suffered or do suffer from any form of discrimination within a culture.

In US, affirmative action has evolved primarily through the executive and judicial government branches, rather than through the Congress of the legislative branch. Now, there are two forms of affirmative action, namely, weak affirmative action that seeks to promote equal opportunity by using race or minority as a tie-breaker between two equally qualified candidates to create an equal opportunity to compete but not ensuing equal results. Another form of affirmative action is strong affirmative action, where preferential treatment based on the applicant’s race or gender ignores the possibility to the applicant being less qualified that his/her non-minority counterpart. In my view, strong affirmative action is equivalent to reverse discrimination.

Affirmative action is intended to counter past discrimination, and affirmative action allows creation of role models from the minority, which encourages other minority status people to put in efforts to reach that level. But if we use affirmative action to compensate for the wrongs that have been done to the minority groups, then we will be supporting the philosophy that two wrongs make a right, which is not the right way to go in my opinion.

Hence, affirmative action should not mean racial preferences, which in real world, affirmative action is usually. Any form of preferential hiring to level the playing field will be unjust and will support reverse discrimination. And this form of prevalent strong affirmative action is actually creating bigger gap between the races, instead of creating positive diversity. Hence, in my view, weak affirmative action should be the way to go, where merit should be the basis of choice, where minority should be given first opportunity provided they hold equal qualification to their counterparts. Also, lack of means should be the deciding factor for affirmative action rather than race or gender, to ensure long term positive results on the economy and prevent affirmative action from becoming reverse discrimination.

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