Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, feminist, gender, labor/business, politics
Abstract
Enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the courts demonstrates both the strength of law regarding the workplace and its limitations. The EEOC’s 1973 settlement with AT&T over sex discrimination practices made civil rights law a real force in the eyes of corporate leaders and lawyers: if the world’s largest private employer had to comply, how could any other firm resist? Personnel procedures and principles developed since the 1920s to rationalize hiring and promotion for white males were then applied to equalizing opportunity for others at entry levels. Sexual harassment cases improved women’s working conditions, but, again, with limitations.
Legal pressures to integrate women into workplaces over a half century have had substantial but limited success. Initial progress, moreover, revealed potent barriers that laws could not address. Personnel systems were ineffective at management levels, where “objective” criteria for rank carried little weight. Leaders and top managers who required integration among their employees failed to see any place for women among their own ranks. Likewise, affirmative action often assisted women’s entry into corporations, but it helped little for promotion. This paper will explain the powers and limitations of equal opportunity laws and affirmative action—effective beneath glass ceilings, but powerless to penetrate them. The evolution of cultural and political factors significantly affected both the powers and the limitations of the law, as well.
Business archives, personnel trade journals, business journals, court decisions, and government publications provide the evidence for this argument.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Download
The Powers and Limitations of Equal Opportunity Laws
Enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the courts demonstrates both the strength of law regarding the workplace and its limitations. The EEOC’s 1973 settlement with AT&T over sex discrimination practices made civil rights law a real force in the eyes of corporate leaders and lawyers: if the world’s largest private employer had to comply, how could any other firm resist? Personnel procedures and principles developed since the 1920s to rationalize hiring and promotion for white males were then applied to equalizing opportunity for others at entry levels. Sexual harassment cases improved women’s working conditions, but, again, with limitations.
Legal pressures to integrate women into workplaces over a half century have had substantial but limited success. Initial progress, moreover, revealed potent barriers that laws could not address. Personnel systems were ineffective at management levels, where “objective” criteria for rank carried little weight. Leaders and top managers who required integration among their employees failed to see any place for women among their own ranks. Likewise, affirmative action often assisted women’s entry into corporations, but it helped little for promotion. This paper will explain the powers and limitations of equal opportunity laws and affirmative action—effective beneath glass ceilings, but powerless to penetrate them. The evolution of cultural and political factors significantly affected both the powers and the limitations of the law, as well.
Business archives, personnel trade journals, business journals, court decisions, and government publications provide the evidence for this argument.