Affirmative action needed for gender gap problem

TO THE EDITOR:

In recent years, the strive for equality has been a guise from which special interests worked to promote their own agendas and positions, bolstering their respective demographic while knowingly ignoring others.

What’s the fastest way to raise one’s position in society? Bring everyone else down while you pick yourself up. Since its inception, affirmative action has needed to be dynamic. Upon achieving any goals, it would intrinsically need to be realigned. Policy focuses so much on minorities and women, it ignores Caucasian males.

Society just assumes life is handed to them on a silver platter. Great focus on the “disadvantaged” labels by race or gender.

Meanwhile, forcing white males to sit on their laurels, to just assume they wouldn’t fall while we ignore them and relocate aid, created stagnation and digression.

Equality is about taking on the causes, not bolstering specific groups and ignoring others.

That’s political maneuvering, not progressive thinking. Yet this affirmative action happened, has merit, and needs to be dynamic. Even if policies here don’t currently consider gender, we’ve done an amazing job of raising women to strive for their rightful success. We stopped doing this for males, and our children suffer. If equality is the goal, rework policies to look at one’s entire situation instead of just race or gender, or it’s time to help the boys with policies in place, if at least to fix the problem that we caused. Otherwise, this affirmative action is a broken contradiction.



Austin Ivey
Graduate Student
School of Dentistry