Affirmative Action encourages equity in the workplace through planning and implementation of guidelines and practices designed to end exclusion of women, people of color, people with disabilities, and veterans. Each year, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access prepares an Affirmative Action Plan to analyze the OSU workforce.
Oregon State University’s annual Affirmative Action Plan (AAP) (1) prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, color, disability, gender identity or expression, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, and mental or physical disability; and (2) establishes a commitment to employ women, people of color, persons with disabilities, and veterans.
OSU’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Access analyzes the OSU workforce each year to evaluate whether we are employing women and people of color (Hispanic/Latino, Black/African American, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander) at the expected rates given the demographics of the qualified labor pool. To do this, regular positions are clustered into job groups, then the demographics of each job group are compared to the demographics of the qualified labor pools from which we hire for that job group. When there is a significant gap between our employment rate for women or people of color and their availability in the qualified population, the university establishes a recruitment goal. This means that OSU commits to making extra efforts to recruit qualified members of the missing group to its applicant pools, and reviews each search to ensure fairness.
Additionally, the office evaluates the rates at which we hire and employ veterans and individuals with disabilities. In these cases benchmarks have been established that are common to all job groups. Where we fall short, additional recruitment methods are employed.
The most up to date plans are available below
Affirmative Action Plan Frequently Asked Questions
Race and ethnicity are indicators of complex social processes that stratify individuals and provide differential access to opportunities and resources (American Sociological Association). Veterans may also face challenges re-entering civilian life after they complete their military service and individuals with disabilities are employed at rates well under their availability. Collecting data about ethnicity, race, veteran status, and disability enables OSU and the federal government to track demographic changes, evaluate equity between groups, monitor progress in rectifying inequities, and meet civil rights commitments and obligations.
The U.S. Government considers race to be a group of socially-defined categories which are not based on any scientific, biological, or genetic criteria.
Race categories used by the federal government and U.S. society have changed a number of times to reflect changing social attitudes. For example, a person who was included in the Asian category (from the Indian sub-continent) in 1980 and 1990 might have been listed as Hindu in 1920-1940, Other race in 1950-1960, and White in 1970 (U.S. Census).
The U.S. Government considers ethnicity to be the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of birth of a person or a person 's parents or ancestors before their arrival in the U.S. (U.S. Census).
One of the oldest identity groups in the United States, Hispanic/Latino ethnicity has been tracked by the U.S. Government over the last 40+ years. This continues to be the only ethnicity explicitly tracked, and is now one of our most rapidly changing demographics. Defined as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race,” people who identify as Hispanic/Latino were unable to designate a race prior to this change, since ethnicity and race were grouped together.
This group is defined as “people having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.” The previous practice grouped all Asians and all Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders—comprising many different groups with different political, socio-economic, educational, and health concerns—into a single racial category. This practice misrepresented the civil rights, educational, and socio-economic circumstances of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, because their particular information was lost in the larger aggregate.
The definition for this group has been changed to clarify that it includes the original peoples of Central and South America.
Over the last three decades, the number of multi-racial families with children has more than quadrupled in the U.S. census. The old requirement—to select only one race—in effect required individuals to deny the rest of their heritage. The new system allows each individual to select all races that apply (from among the available options).
The Vietnam Era Veteran’s Readjustment Act (VEVRA) included a provision to “sunset” or discontinue the category of “Vietnam-era veteran.” When the VEVRA was originally enacted, Vietnam vets faced difficult circumstances including stereotyping and other forms of discrimination. Now, decades after the US final departure from Saigon, the Vietnam War is understood differently and military service in Vietnam is no longer stigmatized. As a consequence of this change, however, some veterans who performed non-combat service during the Vietnam era and once were considered Vietnam-era veterans are not included in the revised veteran categories.
In 2002, the Jobs for Veterans Act (JVA) confirmed the change to discontinue the separate Vietnam-era vet status, but added a new category—Armed Forces Service Medal Veteran—that would include many vets who had previously been identified as “Vietnam-era.” This category is defined as “any veteran who, while serving on active duty in the Armed Forces, participated in a United States military operation for which a service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.”
Since the Persian Gulf War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been a large upswing in the availability of recently-separated veterans entering (or re-entering) the workforce. Veterans are now asked to indicate their separation date if they have separated from active duty within the last three years; this allows the federal government (and OSU) to determine whether their re-entry into the workforce is occurring at the rate we would expect given their availability.