Affirmative action for women results in belief that women are inferior workers? (and not just at the employer implementing affirmative action)

by philg

The idea that affirmative action leads to a perception that the favored group is inferior is an old and obvious one. If the standards for admitting members of Group X are lower then other students within a college will notice that people who belong to Group X are less qualified. If hiring standards are lowered for Group Y then coworkers will come to see Group Y workers as less capable.

Is it possible that running affirmative action at Company A could cause people at Company B, which hires people without discrimination, to believe that a favored-by-Company-A group is inferior?

One of the folks with whom I talked at NBAA was a charter company CEO. Based on the people he evaluates as pilot candidates for his firm (roughly 100 pilots), he believes that women are inferior as pilots to men.

It is possible that he is a straight-up sexist, but certainly there have been plenty of accomplished women pilots. How could he ignore Hanna Reitsch, for example, a leading test pilot throughout Nazi Germany’s rapid period of innovation?

[Wikipedia notes that Reitsch was not necessarily a proponent of gender equality:

she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which “would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved.”

Despite noting her support for Hitler until the end of the war, e.g., “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side,” her accomplishments as an aviator were sufficient that “In 1961, United States President John F. Kennedy invited her to the White House.”]

Is there a way for his belief to be a rational conclusion from facts? How about affirmative action by airlines? Airlines are much more interested in hiring women than they are in hiring men. Consequently they are willing to hire women with the bare minimum qualifications. Occasionally these inexperienced female pilots will flunk out of simulator training or the initial operating experience in the real airplanes that is required by the FAA. However, as most pilots would prefer a job at an airline (better pay, union protection, stronger financials), this would tend to leave only the dregs of the female pilot workforce available to be hired by charter companies.

I’m wondering if this phenomenon is likely to be true elsewhere in the American workforce. The best employers, such as Google and Facebook, are desperate to increase the percentage of women so as to burnish their reputations. This leaves a skewed population for other employers to interview.

 

11 thoughts on “Affirmative action for women results in belief that women are inferior workers? (and not just at the employer implementing affirmative action)”

  1. Probably the most important impact of affirmative action in any form is an across the board lowering of standards. This has been empirically demonstrated in fire and police departments, for example. Worse white males get hired, too.

  2. As far as cream skimming, we see this in university admissions for African-Americans. Blacks whose scores (absent affirmative action) would be good enough to get them into 2nd tier schools end up at 1st tier universities, so the 2nd tier schools end up with 3rd tier students, the 3rd tier schools end up with 4th tier students, etc. By the time you get to the lower tiers, the students are not really good enough to cut the mustard. For example, 19% of blacks who start law school never graduate (vs 8% of white) and 22% of blacks (vs 5% of whites) who finish law school never pass the bar exam, meaning that their time in law school (and someone’s money) was completely wasted. And these students are disproportionately enrolled in the lower tier schools.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/weekinreview/for-blacks-in-law-school-can-less-be-more.html?_r=0

  3. This is definitely something that is a taboo subject in the diversity meetings I have been to. My experience from science:

    For women scientists, sometime towards the end of their doctoral studies, they tend to realize the profession is not geared to their social goals of family and male companionship. The breaks women receive and focus of recruiters on women has now put them into a situation opposed to their goals. Many other scientists have realized this over time and tend not to push them too hard in the first place. It is just easier.

    However, this applies mostly to American born females. Females born in asia seem capable of achieving their social goals while pursuing graduate school or at least don’t complain about their sacrifices. Advisors do not seem to give them as many breaks.

  4. Based on the job applications I saw during my career (at a Fortune 100 company, so not just seeing the dregs), there is a shortage of qualified applicants that extends way down into the lower tiers. In other words, competent lower tier applicants could do these jobs, but the applicant pool doesn’t contain enough to clear the demand. The company had to hire and then train people on basic skills like writing a letter or report, conducting a meeting, managing an expense account, or basic mechanical skills like reading a manual to operate instruments and tools.

    Entry jobs like burger flipping and retail sales are offered by companies that purport to be restaurants or shops when their real day to day effort is training cohort after cohort of almost helpless new hires.

    It’s scary that all these unmoored people are driving cars and voting, much less handling critical operations and processing credit transactions.

  7. @The Other Donald
    Given that IQs seem to be rising generationally(Flynn effect), how do you explain the dearth of qualified people? Are today’s jobs significantly more complex than those of old? Nobody is born knowing how to conduct business meetings or manage an expense account. Could it be that organizations’ lack of focus on employee training is responsible for this shortfall? (Also, if what you’re saying is true, affirmative action wouldn’t be needed because any quality applicant would be a boon)

  8. superMike: Are IQs still rising? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression cites about 10 years of research concluding that the Flynn effect is behind us. Here’s a disturbing bit: “Furthermore, during the last century there is a negative correlation between fertility and intelligence although there is not yet any conclusive evidence of the association between the two. They estimate that there has been a dysgenic decline in the world’s genotypic IQ (masked by the Flynn effect for the phenotype) of 0.86 IQ points per decade for the years 1950–2000.”

  9. The Flynn effect is BS in the first place. Various measures like reaction time are highly correlated to IQ and show a long decline since Victorian times.

    I think the entire Flynn effect is just the effects of cultural urbanization. Some smart guy who’s been in a farming village his whole life is not going to take your stupid little test very seriously. Whereas school drilled kids will jump to attention for these pointless and abstract questions about shapes and patterns.

  10. For performance related jobs, i.e. some tech and law firms, I would imagine young women are at a disadvantage. Employers think they are likely to quit after a large investment in training and they are something of a protected class. Hard to fire an incompetent woman if she gets pregnant. Men are much easier to get rid of if they don’t produce.

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