It is certainly a difficult subject. I understand the good intentions of affirmative action, but I think they cause more harm than good in the long run. To be passed up for a position due to your gender or race, or for a company to hire someone with lower technical qualifications than they'd normally accept due to gender or race, creates a lot of resentment and cultural issues. This isn't just negative opinions at the microscale; it creates a large-scale perception that certain companies or industries are giving preferential treatment, even at the expense of their own productivity and cohesion. Already I see a lot of people complaining about this on various websites, though it's probably overexaggerated a bit given that diversity quotas aren't that popular with US companies relative to many European countries (yet).

Even worse, it also might encourage more division and more prejudice towards those minority groups. If a company gives preferential treatment to hiring women, then what are many coworkers going to inevitably think when a woman makes a mistake or something? "You only got hired here because you're a woman." And in that case, they actually have some empirical backing for that assumption. I don't belong to a minority group, but I feel like the anxiety of other people wondering or believing I only (or primarily) got into a certain place because of my gender or race, and not my qualifications, would be very uncomfortable and demotivating. Some people may already think that even when it's plainly not true, but a lot more people will think it if it starts becoming more true more often. Not to mention, on top of that, fear that maybe I'm not that great and my gender/race really was a major factor in my hiring decision. Talk about imposter syndrome.

Also, just on a more general ethical note: People in certain groups have indeed been treated very unfairly for centuries, but flipping the table feels kind of "eye for an eye".

Of course unconscious biases are a major problem and will probably be impossible to get rid of or ignore during a hiring process, but I think blind hiring procedures (no name, gender, age, etc. listed on resume or during the first stages of initial online interviews) are an all around better option. I think if organizations work hard enough, they can eliminate a lot of these issues in the pipeline. If, hypothetically, an equal number of male and female candidates make it through the blind stages, but many more men make it through the following stages, they can look at it and quickly determine if they have a problem that needs addressing.

> It is a tricky and difficult subject, I would not be quick to dismiss either argument.

It's especially tricky because the pro-affirmative-action perspective relies on affirmative action actually working. To the extent that it works, the original case for the special treatment weakens. To the extent that it doesn't work, then affirmative action is some sort of token sacrifice, not a way to actually help people. There's an inherent tension in there that most affirmative action proponents aren't really comfortable with.