DISCRIMINATION

Discrimination against Women and Minorities

Discrimination against Women and Minorities

Introduction

Discrimination is one of the most urgent problems of modern Russian society. It represents a restriction of certain rights on the basis of characteristics that are objectively not affecting its ability to enforce these rights. In domestic humanitarian studies as potentially discriminatory features are more likely to investigate racial and ethnic origin, gender, religious beliefs. Accordingly, the most fully described gender, racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. Considerably less attention is paid to other forms of discrimination, particularly discrimination based on age, although, according to sociologists, the prevalence of age discrimination is not inferior to the above, both in Russia and in Western Europe and the U.S., showing up in various spheres of human interaction - family, professional, educational, health and social services, etc. The phenomenon of age discrimination came to the attention of sociologists and psychologists recently - in 1950-60-xx GG In 1969 an American sociologist R. N. Butler proposed to describe the concept of age discrimination to use ageism, by analogy with racism and sexism. Since age discrimination is actively studied in Western sociology and social psychology in the context of the age interaction. Domestic researchers have paid attention to the phenomenon of age discrimination only in recent years, despite the fact that in Soviet and Russian social psychology has accumulated rich empirical material describing the phenomenology of the age relations. However, in the way of summarizing this material there are a number of significant challenges. The first difficulty is that researchers have different meanings to the concept of age (level of mental development, personal maturity, life experience, at least - in place of the individual age-hierarchical structure of a community), which often makes their results comparable (McDonald et al, 1993).

Most Americans over the past several decades have consistently supported the idea of social, racial and gender equality. That support has been reflected in actions taken by the federal government to boost income levels of minorities and remove racial barriers as part of an effort to close longstanding gaps between whites and minorities. In recent years, however, the decades-old social compact under which the majority of Americans backed and accepted proactive government measures to increase minority participation in the economy and society overall has frayed considerably. The main focus of debate today is government-run affirmative-action programs, which are defined as "active efforts to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women." Government agencies implement affirmative action through programs or policies designed to aid the advancement of women and minorities. One such policy, followed by several agencies, requires that a certain percentage of contracts be given to minorities and women. Examples of affirmative action are also found in the private sector, such as in many universities' efforts to aggressively recruit minority applicants (Pruthi, 2000).

Race-based affirmative-action programs have borne the brunt of more criticism and generated more impassioned defense in recent years than gender- based programs. Women who benefit from such policies are likely to be affected ...