Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusiveness

The term “affirmative action” was first mentioned in the United States when President John F. Kennedy signed the Executive Order No. 10925 on March 6, 1961, (Wikipedia); this was then used to refer to initiatives that aimed to attain equality and prevent discrimination when hiring employees, regardless of national origin, culture, religion and gender. Affirmative action is known to be a set of policies that consider gender, race, culture, religion, and national origin for an underprivileged or underrepresented population to obtain equal rights and benefits, thereby contradicting the outcomes of discrimination that have been passed down from every generation . Such policies emphasize a wide range of aspects, from health programs and social services to education and employment opportunities.

Diversity refers to human qualities that are different from our own and those of groups to which we belong, but are manifested in other individuals and groups. Over the past years, the American workforce for instance has always been commonly seen as a white male environment. This has however steadily changed because of different historical events over time. Americans however continue to evolve and strive towards a discrimination-free work environment. Even though there are many other laws in place which help promote diversity, there is no guarantee for equality in the workplace. The responsibility falls on each and every employee to protect and respect one another.

Inclusion as an organisational effort and practice, can be described as a process by which different groups of individual with various diverse backgrounds are culturally and or socially accepted as well as being treated equally. Such self-evident differences include nationality, age, race and ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender, socioeconomic status e.t.c. These differences extends to inherent characteristics such as educational background, training, industrial experience, organisational tenure, personality e.t.c.

Affirmative action define an employer's standard for proactively recruiting, hiring and minority groups such as women, veterans, disabled individual e.t.c. It is therefore “deemed a moral and social obligation to amend historical wrongs and eliminate the present effects of past discrimination” (as quoted in Herring, et. al, 2012 pg. 641). This includes the numerical measures with the intent of increasing the representation of those minority groups. Its focus therefore was and has been on increasing the representation of minority groups in the workforce to reflect their availability in the labor market, hence it is surmised that creating such an initiative would rectify the social injustices experienced by the nation's minority population.

Diversity defines goals and initiatives which are devised to measure acceptance of minorities by embracing cultural differences within the workplace. Barak (2000) clarifies that these are twofold, in