Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ora!ambar
From: gazit@cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Affirmative action
Message-ID: <665946738@lear.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 91 17:32:11 GMT
References: <513Go7_c@cs.psu.edu> <49558@ricerca.UUCP>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: The Piranha Club
Lines: 35
Approved: ambar@ora.com

In article <49558@ricerca.UUCP> jan@orc.olivetti.com writes:

>"Remedying past discrimination" does not mean punishment.  

Now let's have an exercise in reality.

Open any issue of "Communication of the ACM" that you like, and look
at the ads from universities in the US.  *Every* single one of them
mentions that it is "an Affirmative Action Employer."

Did all of them discriminate in the past?

For how long *every* woman will have this "head start", regardless of
her background?

Do you think that most feminists have any intention to give up this
Holy Pork Barrel?

>prejudices and diversify the field of people already at the company and
>making the environment into which the new person must fit, there was
>still a STRONG tendency to hire more of whatever one already had.

Take a look in the engineering departments 30 years ago and today.
Instead of "white" departments, you find a large number of asians and
immigrants.  The best way to get hired is to be *QUALIFIED*, and if
white women can't advance as fast as asians and immigrants then maybe
affirmative action is just not the right action...

P.S. Thank you very much for telling us (men) that discrimination
against us "does not mean punishment."

Hillel                                                 gazit@cs.duke.edu

"...13 of 17 valedictorians in Boston high schools last spring were immigrants
or children of immigrants." --  US. News & World Report, May 14, 1990