The Equal Employment Opportunity Act - 1119 Words

The Equal Employment Opportunity Act or, EEO Act of 1972, established a goal to make racial, ethnic, and gender minorities on the same level of white males in employment (â€Å"Equal Employment†). This was because of the dominance that white males held in the workplace and the struggle for minorities to get and keep a job, sometimes due to discrimination. Through this act, Affirmative Action was established to ensure that a certain amount of minorities were able to get a quality education and to get jobs in places that they would have struggled to be employed at before. Affirmative Action has helped minorities get the education and jobs that they need. Overall, this system has made up for some of the past discrimination that has affected these†¦show more content†¦Discriminating against people for their sex and race was already illegal. People began to realize that simply preventing further discrimination did not make up for the past discrimination that people in mino rity groups went through. Due to the previous discrimination, members of the minority did not have the experience, status, or contacts to perform as well as those who were not (Gorman 1143). The reason Affirmative Action was created is because people that had been discriminated against needed a chance to â€Å"catch up† to the group that did not suffer (â€Å"Affirmative Action† Gale). Some statistics from the 1960’s to the late 1990’s represent the discrimination that blacks went through during that time. In 1963, 50% of white families said they would move if a black family moved in next door to them (Brill 44). Additionally, 40% of black teens believed that in order to get a job they needed to be better qualified than whites (171). Black professional graduates were half as likely to earn more than $60,000 a year. Black workers only made 76.5% of what white workers made (131). Lastly, in 1997, 53% of black men from the ages to 25 to 34 were unemployed or did not earn enough to lift a family of four from the poverty line (Eisaguirre 19). These statistics show why Affirmative Action was necessary. Blacks had a tough time getting jobs and