The other day I saw a sign in front of a house advertising the company that was putting the new coating on a house. The sign said “woman owned business”. That kind of sign irks me because I’d hope that a company can compete on the quality of its product, the price, and the service it provides. I don’t really care if a business is minority owned or woman owned; if two products or services were identical, maybe I’d go with a minority owned business, but why advertise this on a sign?
Years ago I read an article about a husband and wife company (the husband was African-American) who did work for the government. As a minority owned or woman owned business, they would have potentially been awarded more government contracts. The husband and wife would not shift ownership the 1 percent needed to qualify for either minority owned or woman owned. To me, that shows great ethics and I have a lot of respect for them.
While I’m ranting about this, it also reminds me of my #1 choice for colleges. I applied to Rice University and really wanted to go (not sure why now that I look back at it), but was denied admission because they “wanted more women in engineering”. There are a few ways to interpret this; the first is that they gave women a head start on whatever scale they used or that if women had equal qualifications as men, the women would get the spots. I have no problems with the latter interpretation, but I really suspect the former. I ended up going to Harvey Mudd College which, at the time, was rated as the top engineering school in the country. I’m pretty sure that they didn’t accept more women into the engineering program to even out the program as my class was 1/3 female.
I’m all about competing based on merits and if 2 companies or people have the same qualifications, use whatever method you want to decide who gets the job or position in college.