One of the biggest misrepresentations of recent times is that
affirmative action is synonymous with lowered standards for favored
groups.
While some affirmative action programs do involve a
deliberate lowering of test scores required for entrance, many
programs do not. The goal of many affirmative action programs is to
ensure that all applicants are considered in an unbiased manner.
As discussed in Section 
, women are often judged as less
qualified than men when their performance is identical. For example,
in one controlled study, department chairs were given nearly identical
curricula vitae of supposed male and female applicants and asked to
recommend their faculty rank. They chose assistant professor if they
thought the applicant was a woman and associate professor if they
thought it was a man [Fidell 1975]. The following examples show how
these contradictions are rationalized:
College admissions were also frequently discriminatory before affirmative action:
The admissions policy of the University of North Carolina, for example, was openly discriminatory [until the early seventies]: `Admission of women on the freshman level will be restricted to those who are especially well qualified'.... The American Council on Education reported that freshmen who entered four-year colleges in 1968 had widely divergent high school grades: more than 40 percent of the girls had averages of B+ or better but only 18 percent of the boys could boast the same.With attitudes like this, clearly some sort of program is needed.The attitude of some male alumni certainly indicates that they would find nothing at all strange in having disparate admission standards: In congressional testimony in 1970, Ann Sutherland Harris reported the following: `At Yale, when the new women undergraduates protested the quota on women and made the modest demand for fifty more women undergraduates the coming year at an alumni dinner, an alumnus was cheered when he said: ``We're all for women, but we can't deny a Yale education to a man.''' And when Harris was questioned by Congressman William D. Hathaway of Maine on school admissions policies, the same bias become apparent: `Mr. Hathaway: If you take the college administration and they have so many kids that they can take into school and they know that 90 percent of the men, for example, in our society have to get a job, and, say, only 50 percent of the women are going to get it, and they have a limited number they will take in, aren't they warranted in taking nine out of ten men and fewer girls?' [Abramson 1975, page 74,]
As mentioned earlier, many people consciously or unconsciously have lower expectations of women. This is exacerbated by affirmative action. If it is suspected (even falsely) that women can get jobs or university positions with lower qualifications, people will be suspicious of their skills. Walter Williams, a black economist opposed to affirmative action, writes about this phenomenon:
Today's quota policies raise real doubts in the eyes of many whites who wonder whether some blacks have earned their status, or whether they had it handed to them. Like sickle cell anemia, this `How do you know?' problem has become a sort of black man's disease.It's not exclusively a black man's disease, however. Women and others who have been given special treatment also are victimized by it. Recently, I had the occasion to take a short commuter flight. Upon boarding the aircraft, I saw a woman sitting in the right hand side of the pilot's compartment. There I was, faced with the `How do you know' problem, with pretty high stakes in the balance.
The recent press coverage of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas
shows how unreasonable people can be about quota programs. Newspaper
after newspaper reported that, because Holy Cross College and Yale Law
School had aggressive minority quotas when Thomas was admitted, he
necessarily ``benefitted from minority preference admissions
policies''. The implicit
assumption is that, if a quota system was in effect, none of the
admitted blacks were qualified. While some of the blacks may have
been unqualified, it would be ridiculous to assert that none were,
and, specifically, that Thomas was unqualified. Additionally, as just
discussed, Yale's pre-quota admissions did not even purport to be
purely merit based.
When women suspect (even falsely) that they have gained something through affirmative action, their self-confidence often suffers. One female MIT student wrote:
As a freshman I was told I got into MIT because I was female. When I was a sophomore, people told me I would get into 6-A [the industry co-op program] easier because I was female. When I applied for permanent jobs, I was told companies would hire me just because I was female [Anu 1990].As noted in [Anu 1990], hearing such statements repeatedly can harm a woman's self-esteem and cause her to question her ability.
No feminist I have spoken with has favored admitting less-qualified women to university positions. It is easy to see that, in addition to breeding the distrust described above, admitting unqualified women would, in general, be harmful to the people one wants to help: If a woman is admitted to a school for which she is not qualified, she will probably be less happy and successful than if she attends an institute for which she is qualified.
Another point of confusion in the affirmative action debate is how
much weight to put on objective test scores.
While many people assume that someone with lower SAT, LSAT, etc.,
scores is less qualified, this is not necessarily the case:
The SAT is marketed as a predictor of first-year college grades. Yet women, who earn higher first-year grades than men, score lower on the SAT math and verbal section....For example, statistical analysis done at MIT shows that although male undergraduates have higher average board scores than female undergraduates, women graduate at a higher rate than men and receive grades that are just as high, even when adjusted for major.Moreover, women perform as well as, if not better than, men on New York State's Regents exams for algebra, geometry and trigonometry. Yet women consistently score lower than men on the SAT math section. The manufacturers have no explanation why women score lower than men on the SAT verbal section. It is well known that females perform better than males in high school English classes [Horner et al 1990].
While there is a need for affirmative action programs, they have large negative effects that must be considered. Even if a program does not entail lower standards for women, doubts are cast on a woman's qualifications in a society that already mistrusts them. Programs with lower qualifications may be a tactical mistake (in addition to being unjust) because people may be put in situations for which they are not qualified, giving them less overall success and self-confidence than they would have had otherwise. These negative effects should be weighed when considering implementing an affirmative action program.
As phrased in [Ernest 1976, page 607,]:
We strongly support such affirmative action to ensure that all potential female candidates are considered. Such increased recruitment efforts can only enlarge the list of qualified candidates and thus result in the raising of standards. To immediately dispose of a red herring, let us state emphatically that none of us believe a less qualified [scientist] should be hired, just because she is female.