Class discussion

The other day in one of my economics classes we had an interesting conversation about gender, and racial prejudice.  In many cases students believed that these issues were things that went on in my generation (60's generation) but have since disappeared due to a more educated society.

Here are a couple of statistics that I took from an article written by Paul Thomas.

Drawing on the report Closing the Race Gap by the nonprofit advocacy group Young Invincibles, Forbes’ Susan Adams explains: “African-Americans college students are about as likely to get hired as whites who have dropped out of high school.” Therefore, inequities of opportunity based on race, like class, trump effort.
 

Via Demos, Bruenig also notes: “Black families with college degrees have a mean wealth of $162.8k, which is effectively the same as the mean wealth of white families with less than a high school education.”

Just to add to this in our class we looked at the top 500 companies in the world and they have 25 women.  Which makes you wonder why women are not better represented.  You look at leadership positions in high school and women are at least equally represented.  When you exam GPA's women do at least as good as men, so why the difference when it comes to running the top companies in the world?

If the playing field is level, as people claim it is,  how do these inequities happen?  If the playing field is not level, why are we made to believe that they are?  I am very curious to hear what people have to say about this issue.  Should this be a topic that we discuss in our classrooms?