Thesis (LL.M. (Labour Law)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / The aim of this research is to determine the laws that regulate affirmative action in the workplace and the impact Covid-19 has on affirmative action. This research focuses on the history of affirmative action in South Africa and the United States of America. Both countries have a similar history of discrimination and racial segregation. The United States of America is one of the most progressive countries on the issue of affirmative action. The comparison of South Africa with the United States of America will enhance the applicability and effectiveness of affirmative action. Past discrimination is a huge contributing factor to the imbalances and inequalities experienced in the workplace. A measure in a form of affirmative action was established to redress past injustices, however, there are many controversies around the topic and its effectiveness. The Covid-19 pandemic has made matters worse in that many people have been laid off, resulting in the retrenchments and the regress of affirmative action and its purpose. The findings of this research conclude that Covid-19 has negatively affected the process of affirmative action. As such, employers during this trying time prefer only individuals who are fully qualified and experienced as the employees have been reduced. As long as affirmative action applies to individuals or a group of individuals with certain skin colour or sex regardless of their past privileges this racial tension might never be relieved. In order to effectively implement affirmative action, South Africa has to focus on the institutions that cause the problem rather than dealing with the final results

This dissertation examines racial inequality and affirmative action in Malaysia and South Africa, two countries with a politically dominant but economically disadvantaged majority group - the Bumiputera in Malaysia, and blacks in post-Apartheid South Africa. We aim to contribute comparative perspectives and current empirical research on affirmative action regimes and dimensions of inequality directly pertinent to affirmative action, chiefly, racial representation and earnings inequality among tertiary educated workers and in upper-level occupations. We discuss theoretical approaches to inequality and affirmative action, with attention to particular circumstances of majority-favoring regimes, then survey, compare and contrast affirmative action programs and their political economic context in Malaysia and South Africa. In the empirical portions, we outline patterns and evaluate determinants of racial inequality, focusing on the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. On Malaysia, we find that Bumiputera access to tertiary education has rapidly increased, but also observe disproportionate difficulties among Bumiputera degree-holders in participating in labor markets and in attaining upper-level occupations. Bumiputera representation at managerial and professional levels has remained static and dependent on the public sector. Econometric results indicate that quality of tertiary education impacts on the prospect of attaining upper-level jobs, and that Bumiputera are more adversely affected. Lack of data restricts our assessment of racial earnings inequality to a deduction that Bumiputera young graduates have experienced relatively greater decline in their earnings capacity. On South Africa, we find that blacks have steadily increased access to tertiary education, although disparities in quality of institutions and in student performance persist, which disproportionately and negatively affect black graduates. We observe that black representation has increased in upper-level, especially professional, occupations, largely in the public sector. We find that white-black earnings disparity declined substantially among degree-qualified workers, while not diminishing or not showing clear patterns among other educational and occupational groups. We conclude by considering, within the constraints of each country's political economic context, implications that arise from our findings. Most saliently, while affirmative action raises quantitative attainment of tertiary education and representation in upper-level occupations for the beneficiary group, inadequate attention to qualitative development of institutions and progressive distribution of benefits may attenuate progress toward the ultimate objective of cultivating broad-based, self-reliant professionals and managers.

Thesis advisor: M. Utku Ünver / Thesis advisor: Tayfun Sönmez / This thesis is a collection of three essays in market design concerning designs of matching markets with aggregate constraints, affirmative action schemes, and investigating boundaries of simultaneous efficiency-stability relaxation for one-to-one matching mechanisms.In Chapter 1, I establish and propose a possible solution for a college housing crisis, a severe ongoing problem taking place in many countries. Every year many colleges provide housing for admitted students. However, there is no college admissions process that considers applicants’ housing needs, which often results in college housing shortages. In this chapter, I formally introduce housing quotas to the college admissions problem and solve it for centralized admissions with common dormitories. The proposed setting is inspired by college admissions where applicants apply directly to college departments, and colleges are endowed with common residence halls. Such setting has many real-life applications: hospital/residents matching in Japan (Kamada and Kojima, 2011, 2012, 2015), college admissions with scholarships in Hungary (Biró, 2012), etc. A simple example shows that there may not be a stable allocation for the proposed setting. Therefore, I construct two mechanisms that always produce some weakened versions of a stable matching: a Take-House-from-Applicant-stable and incentive compatible cumulative offer mechanism that respects improvements, and a Not-Compromised-Request-from-One-Agent-stable (stronger version of stability) cutoff minimising mechanism. Finally, I propose an integer programming solution for detecting a blocking-undominated Not-Compromised-Request-from-One-Agent-stable matching. Building on these results, I argue that presented procedures could serve as a helpful tool for solving the college housing crisis. In Chapter 2, I propose a number of solutions to resource allocation problems in an affirmative action agenda. Quotas are introduced as a way to promote members of minority groups. In addition, reserves may overlap: any candidate can belong to many minority groups, or, in other words, have more than one trait. Moreover, once selected, each candidate fills one reserve position for each of her traits, rather than just one position for one of her traits. This makes the entire decision process more transparent for applicants and allows them to potentially utilize all their traits. I extend the approach of Sönmez and Yenmez (2019) who proposed a paired-admissions choice correspondence that works under no more than two traits. In turn, I allow for any number of traits focusing on extracting the best possible agents, such that the chosen set is non-wasteful, the most diverse, and eliminates collective justified envy. Two new, lower- and upper-dominant choice rules and a class of sum-minimizing choice correspondences are introduced and characterized. In Chapter 3, I implement optimization techniques for detecting the efficient trade off between ex-post Pareto efficiency (for one side of a two-sided matching market) and ex-ante stability for small one-to-one matching markets. Neat example (Roth, 1982) proves that there is no matching mechanism that achieves both efficiency (for one side of the one-to-one matching market) and stability. As representative mechanisms I choose deferred-acceptance for stability, and top trading cycles for Pareto efficiency (both of them are strategy-proof for one side of the market). I compare performances of a randomized matching mechanism that simultaneously relaxes efficiency and stability, and a convex combination of two representative mechanisms. Results show that the constructed mechanism significantly improves efficiency and stability in comparison to mentioned convex combination of the benchmark mechanisms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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I make two arguments in this dissertation. First, I argue that institutions and the people who managed them mattered in the fight for racial justice. At the University of Michigan, activists and state actors successfully pushed administrators to create new policies to increase minorities' access to the University, but it was University presidents, admissions officers, housing officials, deans and faculty members who had to put the ideal of racial justice into practice. These institutional managers, many of whom had never participated in a civil rights protest, had to rethink admissions and recruiting policies, craft new curriculum and counseling services and create new programs to address racial tension. In short, this is the story of what happened when institutional managers at the University of Michigan put the civil rights movement through the meat grinder of implementation. The second argument concerns the origins of the concepts and practices of diversity. Scholars have shown that activists, politicians and federal bureaucrats were responsible for the origins of affirmative action. In other words, institutions that implemented race-conscious admissions or hiring practices reacted to both the activists who insisted that institutions had a social responsibility to use affirmative action to address the racial inequities in American society, and to the state actors who enforced this ideal. If activists and state actors invented affirmative action, I argue that institutional managers created the concept of diversity. At the University of Michigan, the concept of diversity emerged out of a long struggle to implement race-conscious policies and carry out the ideal that the University had a social responsibility to address racial inequity in the state of Michigan. / History

There have been numerous legal challenges to affirmative action programs in education. Two legal decisions that have directly affected race-targeted financial aid programs in Virginia schools are the court ruling in <u>Podberesky v. Kirwan</u>, (1994) and the Virginia statute: Participation in or Eligibility for Certain State-Supported Financial Aid Programs (VA Code Ann. s. 23.7.1:02, 1993). In this study the impact of the court ruling and state statute was examined at three public institutions in Virginia to determine (a) how knowledgeable the participants from each institution were about the court and legislative decisions, and (b) how the participants from each institution were applying the state law and ruling to their scholarship, grant and fellowship programs. In-depth information was gathered through interviews with administrators and faculty from each institution. One interview instrument was developed and tested in a pilot study. Construct validity of data was reasonably ensured by tape-recording interviews and allowing each respondent to review their interview transcript for accuracy. Single-case and stacked matrices were used to organize and analyze data within and between institutions. The degree of knowledge about the court and legislative decisions varied within and across institutions. Overall, respondents in all three schools were more familiar with the court ruling than the statute. The main effects of the court ruling and state statute were: (a) a decrease in the number or race-based awards, (b) the exclusion of race-specific language in donor scholarship and fellowship agreements, and (c) an increased awareness about issues surrounding race-targeted financial aid awards. Both race-targeted and single-race awards, funded by private and public dollars, were still being distributed at all three institutions. Most respondents felt that neither the statute or court ruling would affect future recruiting efforts of minority students. All three institutions were still very committed to increasing diversity on campus. / Ph. D.

No / Based on research conducted during a large-scale European Commission project on international perspectives on positive/affirmative action measures, the authors provide a comparative analysis of the legal context and perceptions of the impact of positive action in the United Kingdom and the United States. The study adopted participatory methods including consensus workshops, interviews, and legal analysis to obtain data from those individuals responsible for designing and implementing positive action measures. Findings are discussed, conclusions drawn, and wide-ranging recommendations are made at governmental and organizational levels. The authors conclude by suggesting possible implications for policy and argue for widespread awareness-raising campaigns of both the need for positive action measures for disadvantaged groups and the benefits of such measures for wider society. They also recommend the adoption of a more coherent and collaborative approach to the utilization and evaluation of the effectiveness of positive or affirmative action.

No / Based on research conducted during a large-scale European Commission project on international perspectives on positive/affirmative action measures, the authors provide a comparative analysis of the legal context and perceptions of the impact of positive action in the United Kingdom and the United States. The study adopted participatory methods including consensus workshops, interviews, and legal analysis to obtain data from those individuals responsible for designing and implementing positive action measures. Findings are discussed, conclusions drawn, and wide-ranging recommendations are made at governmental and organizational levels. The authors conclude by suggesting possible implications for policy and argue for widespread awareness-raising campaigns of both the need for positive action measures for disadvantaged groups and the benefits of such measures for wider society. They also recommend the adoption of a more coherent and collaborative approach to the utilization and evaluation of the effectiveness of positive or affirmative action.

Yes / The central aim of this chapter is to describe the policy and practice of affirmative action measures. It synthesizes findings from published studies and highlights the rationale, drivers, benefits, beneficiaries, effectiveness, and impacts of affirmative action policies and practices in different countries. The chapter will discuss the possible lessons from these studies and highlight the link between affirmative action policies and practices and contributions to achieving target 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the probability that race was a factor in the admissions process at Virginia Tech. The study was conducted in three parts. In the first part, logistic regression was used to develop a probability of admission model for eight demographically distinct groups for the years 1994-1998 using information that was presented to the university by all first-time freshman applicants considering grade point average (GPA), scholastic aptitude tests (SAT), high school rank (HSR), requested major (RM), gender and race. The eight demographic groups were: African American men (BM), African American women (BF), Asian American men (AM), Asian American women (AF), Hispanic American men (HM), Hispanic American women (HF), white American men (WM), and white American women (WF). The Bonferroni correction and the Wald tests were carried out to determine significance in the observed differences. Significant differences were found. The two African American groups and the white female group were found to have significantly higher probabilities of getting accepted than other groups while the two Asian groups were found to have the least probability of getting accepted. The null hypothesis that there was no difference between the groups with regard to probability of getting accepted was thus rejected. GPA was found to be the most important admission criteria followed by SAT scores. The admissions criteria were found to be important for all applicants regardless of group membership. Between group differences detected in the study was mainly the result of differences in cut-off points. The second part of the study involved evaluating the reasons that were given for rejection of admission in 1998. A stratified sample of 400 was randomly selected. The chi-square test was used to determine if there were differences between the eight groups with regard to reasons given for rejection. The frequency with which the reasons were given was also examined. It was found that there were no differences between the groups and, therefore, the null hypothesis was confirmed. GPA related reasons were the most cited for rejection followed by SAT scores. This was consistent with the finding in the first part of this study that GPA and SAT were the most important admission criteria In the third part of the study, the director of admissions and the deputy director of admissions for freshman admissions were interviewed. It was determined from them that affirmative action did not influence the university's admissions decisions but that race was "one of the many factors considered during the admissions process." Based upon the finding in the first part of this study that the two African American groups consistently had the highest probabilities of acceptance in the five years under study, it was concluded that the use of race was intended to benefit applicants from the two groups. This conclusion was further based on the information collected from the interview with the admissions officers which suggested that Affirmative action in the state of Virginia applied only to African Americans and also that there were targeted goals in the state intended to increase the number of African Americans in the state's public higher education institutions. The admissions officers could, however, not provide any references to support this information. Consultations with a professor at the university and the university's vice president for multicultural affairs suggested that there was no state mandate or requirement that public institutions in the state adopt targeted goals as a means of increasing the number of African Americans in the state's public higher education institutions. They also doubted that affirmative action could be applied to one ethnic group only. It was concluded, however, that since the admissions officers made these assertions during the interview, these perceived state requirements may have led them to deliberately seek to increase the number of African American students accepted by the university and that these deliberate efforts may have been behind the high probabilities of the acceptance of students from the two African American groups. The fact that the admissions officers may have deliberately sought to increase the number of African Americans on the campus to satisfy perceived state mandates or requirements and the finding in the first part of this study that the two African American groups consistently had the highest probabilities of getting accepted by the university in the five years under study suggested that admission to the university was not race blind. It was also concluded that since external pressure may have been the cause of the high probabilities for the African American groups, admission to the university was not entirely the prerogative of the university. / Master of Arts