Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Affirmative action in the United States
Summary
Affirmative action in the United States consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to historically excluded groups, specifically racial minorities or women. The programs tended to focus on access to education and employment. The impetus toward affirmative action was redressing the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Further impetus is a desire to ensure public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
Executive Order 10925 in March 1961 required government 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" but affirmative action eventually evolved into a complex system of group preferences which would face many legal challenges. Affirmative action included the use of racial quotas until the Supreme Court ruled that quotas were unconstitutional in 1978. Affirmative action currently tends to emphasize not specific quotas but rather "targeted goals" to address past discrimination in a particular institution or in broader society through "good-faith efforts ... to identify, select, and train potentially qualified minorities and women." For example, many higher education institutions have voluntarily adopted policies which seek to increase recruitment of racial minorities. Outreach campaigns, targeted recruitment, employee and management development, and employee support programs are examples of affirmative action in employment. Nine states in the United States have banned race-based affirmative action: California (1996), Washington (1998, rescinded 2022), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), Oklahoma (2012), and Idaho (2020). Florida's ban was via an executive order and New Hampshire and Idaho's bans were passed by the legislature.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.