And you are here why?

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic as a piece up on the racial composition of the US workforce , and it is one of the more depressing articles that I have read in the recent past.  As he puts it The numbers reveal a workforce stratified, if not calcified, by race, with whites seeing higher wages and lower unemployment, while blacks and Hispanics constantly stuck behind them.  The following two charts pretty succinctly summarize  everything  wrong with our workforce today. First, what employees make, broken down by race Its really pretty straight forward: White > Black > Hispanic , as well as Men > Women Add to this the next chart showing who works more often, once again broken out by race - but this time, over the last 40  years The bottom line? The unambiguous take-aways? It pays, and has always  paid to be White in this country. Quite literally. Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman If you're a hispanic man, you have ...

The point behind the title isn't So what? , but more of a Why do I say that? And the answer is - because thats what the data are showing. Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic summarizes a couple of annual report s releases by the National Center for Education Statistics to come up with the following chart The key points from the above? Starting 1995, more women have graduated w/ Bachelor's degrees than men.  Or, to cast this slightly differently, this has been going on for the last 17 years (and counting) The trend lines have been dominated by women since 1975, i.e., At best , the increase in the percentage of men getting degrees is the same as for women (and its usually worse!) The bottom line here is that at some point in the future, a significant majority of the - educated - workforce will be women.  I suspect this may finally take care of the gender pay gap (23%!).