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Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity

This entry outlines the history of affirmative action policy in the United States and discusses its current institutional design and enforcement, as well as its interaction with U.S. antidiscrimination policy. While some such policies have also been implemented in other countries, the United States has the earliest and most extensive version, particularly with regard to women as opposed to ethnic and racial minorities, and as such provides an important case study of how such policies might affect women's relative standing to men.

In the United States, equal opportunity implies equal treatment under a selection mechanism, and also implies attempts to equalize qualifications relevant to selection prior to entering the selection process. Thus, antidiscrimination policies can be seen as ways to ensure equal treatment.

Affirmative action is a step beyond ensuring equal treatment through antidiscrimination policy measures. It is an activist approach to trying to increase the representation of historically underrepresented groups, whether in the workforce, in particular occupations, in higher paid, more prestigious positions, in the political system, or in higher education. As such, it is a more controversial policy than antidiscrimination policy, but it also holds the promise of enacting more radical change in society toward the ultimate goal of equalizing both opportunity and outcome for members of different groups.

History

Starting in June 1941 with Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, a series of executive orders barred discrimination by federal contractors on the bases of race, creed, color, and national origin. In March 1961, John Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 required federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” It specified further: “Such action shall include, but not be limited to, the following: employment, upgrading, demotion or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship.” It created the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and granted it the authority to impose sanctions, including contract termination, on noncompliers. This order is the foundation for affirmative action as we understand it through the present, and is also the origin of the term.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), which enforces the federal laws prohibiting job discrimination. These include the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, Title I and Title V of the Americans with Disability Act of 1990, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246 of September 1965 strengthened enforcement by outlining in greater detail the procedures for determining compliance, the sanctions for noncompliance, and by establishing that the Department of Labor and the EEOC would coordinate in sharing relevant data and in enforcement of these laws.

Johnson's Executive Order 11375 in 1967 took the key step of extending affirmative action on the basis of sex. However, effective regulations enforcing this expansion did not reach full stride until after the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which strengthened enforcement of Title VII, giving the EEOC authority to litigate, and expanded its reach to educational institutions and government bodies (federal, state, and local) as well as to employers with as few as 15 employees (before it had been 25).

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