Memes

Not the guy you replied to, but I'll give you one: if you are male, it is (or at least was last federal election) impossible to be at the highest spot of any candidate list of the german green party. There was a hard rule that spot 1 had to be a woman and then it alternates. The alternation rule seems pretty alright, but blanket excluding someone from the #1 spot because of gender is pretty blatant sexism. It doesn't matter that women were in that position and worse in the pretty recent past, 2 wrongs don't make a right (also ironically this kind of ignores other gender identities entirely but they'd probably be given the woman treatment as they're clearly generally disadvantaged, which seems alright). Something like having at least 45% at #1 of both men and women and then keeping the alternating rule seems a lot more sensible, or even flat out forcing 50% and flipping the genders each election.

I can also spend a very long time talking about how affirmative action in general feels more like the lazy route to achieve a somewhat better state since socioeconomic factors play a huge role in education and those heavily correlate with ethnicity, but it's unfair to exclude people based on their skin color (almost like that's racism by definition), but whatever. I haven't seen any cases of it being actually abused, and overall just fast tracking more representation of all sorts of people into all kinds of jobs and social groups will likely help a lot against racism in the long run. It just feels like the inferior means to that end.

Germany has things like giving disabled people preference in job applications given otherwise equal qualifications which I think is great as they most likely have much fewer options overall, and I believe that might be considered affirmative action too? I'm not super familiar given that that's not a term here.