Employment Equity and Affirmative Action are laws designed to help people from four designated groups increase their representation in the workforce , these four groups are: women, Aboriginal people, visible minorities and people with disabilities. These laws are in place to ensure a diverse workforce with people from different backgrounds and points of view. These laws were created not to give any of the designated groups an advantage in the hiring process, but to remove any systematic barriers to historically disadvantaged groups. These laws are not new and have changed constantly over many years and there have always been misconceptions about them. Employment equity and affirmative action are not forms of discrimination, but people often misinterpret them as reverse decimation when someone from the targeted group gets a job or promotion over them. Before we get to the ethical question, how these laws formed and evolved is important to understanding why employment equity and affirmative action do not constitute reverse discrimination. These laws were first implemented around the 1970s, both laws progressed through the program. in five hiring goals for visible minorities to help diversify the workforce. Any participating company can receive funding to reach the benchmark. The initiative eventually stopped receiving funding and was closed because the baseline goal was not reached. To address some of these diversity shortfalls, the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights began studying the extent to which minorities were being discriminated against and how close they were to achieving their goals in 2004. A few years later they published their findings that employment equity was not where they wanted it to be and published recommendations on how employers could engage in more diverse practices in