Man I read this Vox article today and there’s just so much going on I feel like I have to say something about it.
- It claims “white women benefit most from affirmative action.” Its evidence for this is:
- Kimberle Crenshaw said “the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women”
- “A 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that white women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector.”
- The wording of this sentence is somewhere between misleading and wrong: in fact what the report said is that there were 57,250 more women employed in managerial jobs in 1993 than in 1975, and similarly for the other groups. So this is actually slightly better evidence than I originally thought.
- But still, there is no attempt to look at percentages? Like, 40% of California residents are white women, while 7% are black. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that white women gained five times as many jobs as African-Americans?
- Also of course there is a lot that happened between 1975 and 1993 and we can’t really say with any confidence that affirmative action caused anything here.
- The percentage of women physicians has gone from 8% to 25% since 1970. The article does not mention what has happened to the percentage of black physicians over time. It also does not give any evidence that this is due to affirmative action rather than medical schools and jobs just not actively discriminating against women. I mean, maybe it is, but the article gives no evidence for that.
- It then proposes this “paradox”: that white women benefit the most from affirmative action, but still oppose it. It then gives the examples of several white women who have been plaintiffs in affirmative action cases over admission to college and law school.
- Like. Maybe this is because white women don’t generally receive affirmative action in college and law school admissions?
- I understand that white women do benefit from affirmative action in contexts like tech hiring! But undergrad admissions is really not one of those contexts.
- It dismisses the mismatch hypothesis in a sentence with “Study after study shows there’s simply no evidence for the claim.”
- Linking to two sociology studies.
- The studies don’t look particularly bad (though admittedly my prior for sociology papers being good is lower than that for economics), and I’d like to read them when I don’t have finals. But I could just as easily link you two studies that do find evidence of mismatch. This is the problem with saying things are debunked based on two studies.
- It admits that the percentage of black students enrolled at UC Berkeley has gone down from 8% to 4% since admissions went race-blind. But it says this is not because of “underqualified students of color” but rather because 58% of black students reject Berkeley’s offer of admission.
- Okay, the 58% number is for black students from 2006-2010, and I only found Berkeley’s yield rate for 2012. But in 2012 it was 37%!
- That means if the yield rate for 2006-2010 was similar, black students were more likely to accept Berkeley’s offer of admission than students of other races.