Excellent News. This entire idea of affirmative action gets my goat anyway. There should be equality of opportunity, not of the role itself. This screws up all kinds of social conditions and gives rise to others. If there are less than ideal number of females, cockroaches, males, Hindu's, wiccans applying, first find out if this matters. Really really matters. If it does, then help them in improving their chances of application, dont put aside seats and stuff like that. I quote:
The Swedish government has announced that from August 1st it will no longer be permitted to favour prospective university students by virtue of their gender.
In a communication to parliament, the government stated that university admissions regulations will be changed to reflect only academic merits.
The Minister for Higher Education and Research, Tobias Krantz, underlined the importance of the principle that all individuals be treated equally regardless of their gender.
To exclude motivated and higher qualified women in the university admissions process is naive, Krantz said.
The background to the decision lies in cases such as one involving a group of students at Lund University who were awarded compensation in February for having been denied places to study psychology due to their gender.
The university settled out of court with the 24 women, who were each awarded 35,000 kronor ($5,000) in damages.
In a similar case, the Svea Court of Appeal ruled in December that it was illegal for the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala to prioritize men for its veterinary education programme.
And in India, they reserved 33% of the seats for women. And yes, I do not agree that that should have happened. A principle is a principle. The way to fix this is to get women to have their rights, make the family laws more gender friendly, make sexual discrimination more difficult, etc. etc. etc.
2 comments:
well, lets check the facts... even swedish political parties has 40% women quote..
Sure they do, but that, Yuva, does not justify the basic assumption that a state knows best how to allocate resources. Why 40%? why not 50%? or 80%? The assumption is that having more women makes political parties better? Why? a gender blind merit based policy will have 100% good candidates, but a gender reserved policy runs the risk (not the certainty!) of having less than efficient members who are kept out just because of an arbit level.
This kind of broad blunt public policy responses are rarely checked for effectiveness. Or whether we need it in the first place.
Post a Comment