What Does Affirmative Action Do?

Abstract

The authors use data from a survey of employers to investigate how Affirmative Action in recruiting and hiring influences hiring practices, personnel policies, and ultimately employment outcomes. They find that Affirmative Action increases the number of recruitment and screening practices used by employers, raises employers' willingness to hire stigmatized applicants, increases the number of minority or female applicants as well as employees, and increases employers' tendencies to provide training and formally evaluate employees. When Affirmative Action is used in recruiting, it generally does not lead to lower credentials or performance of women and minorities hired. When it is also used in hiring, it yields minority employees whose credentials are somewhat weaker, though performance generally is not. Overall, the more intensive search, evaluation, and training that accompany Affirmative Action appear to offset any tendencies of the policy to lead to hiring of less-qualified or less-productive women and minorities.Affirmative Action remains a highly con-I. troversial issue in the United States. Recent court decisions (such as Adarand v. Pena, U.S. Supreme Court) and state-level referenda (such as Proposition 209 in California) are likely to influence the use of Affirmative Action in employment and education, and other actions by courts and legislatures are pending.' Yet the effects of

The Role of Rookie Female Directors in a Post‐Quota Period: Gender Inequalities within French Boards

“…The regulation may produce a (psychological) reaction inside the boardroom, undermining statistical or taste‐based discrimination. This possibility would echo the findings by Holzer and Neumark (), who observed, using a U.S. survey of employers, an increase in training effort toward women and minorities in workplaces practicing Affirmative Action plans in hiring: while the regulation acted as a constraint on the hiring practices of employers, the latter have reacted by enhancing investments in minorities’ human capital. In our setting, it would lead companies to move on, giving up discriminatory practices based on gender stereotypes.…”

The Stigma of Affirmative Action: A Stereotyping-Based Theory and Meta-Analytic Test of the Consequences for Performance

“…To level the playing field, organizations around the globe have implemented affirmative action plans (AAPs), which are policies designed to improve work outcomes for underrepresented groups by providing them with extra help in the employment process (Jain, Sloane, & Horwitz, 2003;Yang, D'Souza, Bapat, & Colarelli, 2006). AAPs increase the number of women and ethnic minorities in managerial positions (Holzer & Neumark, 2000;Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006;Leonard, 1984), and thus help promote organizational diversity and redress societal injustice. 1 Nevertheless, AAPs are not without drawbacks.…”

Antiegalitarians for affirmative action? When social dominance orientation is positively related to support for egalitarian social policies

“…Given that affirmative action policies are thought to attenuate social hierarchies (Chow, Lowery, & Knowles, ) and were designed to increase the representation of minority groups in organizations (Holzer & Neumark, ), it is not surprising that past research has found a negative relationship between SDO and affirmative action policy support across a wide range of samples (e.g., Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, ; Sidanius & Pratto, ; Federico & Sidanius, ). In other words, both theoretically and empirically, antiegalitarians tend to oppose affirmative action policies to a greater extent than egalitarians.…”