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That's No White Male, That's My Husband!

Ellen Ladowsky explains why women will deliver the death blow to affirmative action.

THE DIMINISHING RETURNS of affirmative action are particularly felt by young women entering the work force. By now the formal and informal barriers that once kept women out of many fields have come down. The white female college graduate is likely to face the same employment problems that have confronted her male classmates for the past decade: a limited number of slots, competition for promotions, and the denial of jobs because of "set-asides" for minority applicants.

Even in the instances when women are still hired to meet a quota, it is not always to redress perceived discrimination--quite the opposite. It can be a way of circumventing requirements for a minority candidate. A philosophy professor at a small, elite college told me that it is common practice for academic departments to hire women to meet affirmative action guidelines because, "We have trouble finding qualified minority candidates but it is easy to find a qualified woman."...

Woman's advancement in the workplace, then, seems indisputable. Yet should affirmative action get all the credit? Some researchers say no. "My own sense of the data," says Frederick R. Lynch, "is that primarily it's cultural change and enforcement of non-discrimination, not necessarily preferential treatment."

The final undoing of affirmative action in women's minds, however, may not stem from consideration of their own careers. Women know the men who have been victims of affirmative action's reverse discrimination or men who consider themselves to be victims. They are their husbands, brothers, or sons. Non-working women--or women temporarily out of the workforce to raise children--count on their husbands' salaries and promotions to support their families. "The angriest people [I interviewed] were the wives of men who had suffered reverse discrimination," says Lynch.

This "stand by your man" factor may turn out to be the force that causes female voters to reject affirmative action-first in California, and then across the nation.

~ Spring 1995

On the Backs of Women

Rael Jean Isaac shows how high-living union officials exploit women.

WHEN NEW YORK power broker Charles Hughes traveled abroad, he took along his nearest and dearest. His entourage for a jaunt to Egypt, Prague, London, and Paris numbered fourteen family members. Hughes also threw...

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