Are white women the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action?

You hear that a lot, but is it true?

You could argue that most of women’s sports is affirmative action.

But overall, probably not very much in 2023, certainly not in college admissions outside of the occasional MIT, although there are still advantages granted to women in things like government contracting.

Most of the Great Awokening feminist agitation is over very high-end jobs like theoretical physicist or film director or tech founder. In reality, most of the pleasant midrange white collar jobs were equally open to women by 1982 when I joined the corporate world.

But the important point is that America after the turning point year of 1969 really did socially construct a female workforce that is more ambitious, credentialed, and, to a reasonable extent, competent. Thus, affirmative action for women isn’t that much of an issue anymore for all but the most masculine jobs.

With blacks, the affirmative action era from 1969 on saw a rapid rise in black competence in the 1970s, especially in the formerly Jim Crow city of Atlanta. But then a plateau was reached, so affirmative action couldn’t be quietly phased out without black employment in the better jobs plummeting.