Black Women in White Male Industries Revise and Resubmit

You have chosen in this paper a topic that has both national and international significance. How indeed inclusive, fair, and just are so called "inclusion or set-aside" initiatives? How open and accessible are the programs to new immigrants and minorities? These are all very interesting questions that your paper raises.

But you don't fully address whether or not the rational approach considers such programs to be either fair, effective, and even legitimate. Are these programs acceptable or legitimate in the eyes of a policy analyst or maker who subscribes to the rational choice perspective? Why and why not? Your paper also seems to contain a few sentences at the end that are not properly paraphrased but yet are not under quotation marks. This needs to be paraphrased or removed or quoted to avoid plagiarism.

Please find below your Paper 1 Grade and your reviewed paper with my track changes and comments, including some of corrections or suggestions mentioned above. You can make these corrections to improve your score

Paper 1 Grade (Tentative, Revise and Resubmit)

Criterion

Points

Score

Brief Introduction and Outline

10

7

Discusses themes in the readings

10

8

Draws from and summarizes key readings-at least 3 different readings and authors

25

19

Initiates and sustains a central thesis and argument

20

15

Scholarly and organized writing with sources and citations

15

13

Conclusion

10

8

References

5

5

Grammar, Punctuation, and Style

5

5

Total

80

Black Women in White Male Dominant Industries:

Are Set-Aside and Inclusion Programs Really Assisting?

Introduction

When you spend your whole life being marginalized and excluded, you can develop what they call a chip on your shoulder. Resentment. Frustration. I will not say that this has happened to me -- but neither will I say, that it has not. Taking a hard look at oneself is as difficult and challenging as it is to look really at others -- without prejudice, bias, or judgment. As part of the new orientation towards social justice, the so-called social policymaking warriors like to think that they are taking the side of the marginalized, the forgotten, the repressed and oppressed, minorities. Individuals like myself who have tried to look for equality -- only to find that principles and ideals are fine to talk about, but in the real world, human beings act for motives separate and distinct from the ideals that we all presumably share. I seek to represent the so-called "beneficiaries" of the public policies that pertain to diversity and inclusion. Basically, inclusion and set aside initiatives are not independent of, or different from, affirmative action. Within the construction sector, for instance, such programs form part of positive actions. Hence, this paper aims to explore the topic of inclusion and set-aside initiatives for Black females, with a goal to gauge how successful they have been in achieving their purpose. To this end, the paper provides the background, the rationale behind inclusion and set-aside initiatives, and the initiatives' advantages...

When I immigrated to the United States six years ago, I wanted to make my way in a career that black women normally did not go into. I did not want to cook, cater, clean, care for children -- in short, I did not want to take part in those activities that my ancestors had taken part in as slaves in the States, or anywhere else in this world. I set about researching which field was "no-black-woman-land" and I found it -- the Oil and Gas industry. It was here that I wanted to go. I knew there would be obstacles, but I also knew that there were programs that had been developed to help minorities, women, the disadvantaged and small business enterprises so as to help create opportunities for those not fortunate enough to be part of the power structure, the elite, the privileged. However, what I soon found was that these so-called programs for the disadvantaged were quite restrictive. For instance, a black company was required to own assets (refineries, etc.), and white women were considered disadvantaged -- because of something as natural as their sex. I found that black women had to compete with black men for the same contracts while white women did not have to compete against white males. In this industry, the blacks are set against one another -- as though there was some underlying desire on the part of the Establishment to see them run one another out. All the while the white woman is considered our equal, even though she had access we didn't have, be it white money or fronting for her white husband. What I found was a complex web of racialization, racism, white privilege and the "frontier myth and the romanticized cowboy hero" (Miller, 2004, p. 47). A black woman in the Oil and Gas industry was a like an alien walking on earth, speaking and talking like a human being -- but obviously from some other galaxy. I was tolerated -- as much as I had to be -- but I was never accepted on the same level as the white woman or the white man. I ended up asking myself the question: "What policies are underpinning these programs, and who are the policymakers that came up with these policies, and why? Are these set-aside and inclusion programs really assisting?"
I am reminded of the study by Williams, Kilanski and Muller (2014). They wanted to know why the diversity programs initiated by the U.S. oil and gas companies in the 1980s failed to address issues of inequality within the sector. They interviewed women about their workplace experiences and found that in spite of the objectives of these programs, they only ended up reinforcing gender/racial stereotypes and solidifying male dominance. I read their interviews with considerable attention, identifying with the experiences of the women -- affirming that what they said was true: my life was a perfect illustration of that fact. What I could not help but wonder was why something like the color of one's skin or the sex of one's anatomy could be viewed as a such a factor, such a variable in that person's ability to lead, to climb, to provide, to be.

Rational policymaking and social issue

The document presents the synthesis of knowledge on the rational policymaking theory, based on the reading and my experience of discrimination within the oil and…