The Poor Keep Getting Poorer: What The Unemployment Rate Isn’t Telling You
Even as unemployment reaches a 17-year low, America’s wealth gap continues to increase. According to the Federal Reserve, the top 1 percent of Americans hold 38.6 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Conversely, the racial wealth gap for low-income families appears to have shrunk since the recession. However, this is not due to an improvement in the income of African American or Hispanic families, it comes down to the fact that the wealth of low-income white families has diminished by half since the recession.
“The median white family is worth nearly ten times as much as the median black family and about 8 times as much as the median Hispanic family,” CNN Money’s Lydia DePillis stated.
In other news, Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global director of diversity, has argued that underrepresented people in the workplace need affirmation that the bias against them is real. In her controversial Harvard Business Review essay, Ms. Williams criticized the social media conglomerate, writing “Basically they’re saying, ‘if only there were more of you, we could tell you why there are so few of you.”
Ms. Williams also called for more individual and anecdotal assessments, confirming that “algorithms and statistics do not capture what it feels like to be the only black or Hispanic team member.”
“We must talk openly with people, one-on-one, to learn about their experiences with bias, and share our own stories to build trust and make the topic safe for discussion,” Ms. Williams concluded.
Source: CNN Money
Photo: Pexels
