In the past I’ve mentioned that sometimes I encounter one sentence in an article which I simply cannot move past. Although I found Jessica Guynn and Jayme Fraser’s piece at USA Today on I guess racial inequities in businesses interesting I simply could not get past this sentence:
One sobering data point: The overwhelming majority of executives are white, while only 1 in 443 Black or Hispanic employees have an executive job.
Do you see why I have a problem with that sentence? Or should I spell it out? I’ll give one example. It should be obvious that there are 500 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Roughly 158 million people are employed in the U. S. It’s a matter of simple mathematics that 1 in 316,000 workers is a Fortune 500 CEO. Is that something about which we should be upset? Is it “sobering”?
My economics professor had a bounty where students could get a credit for finding a statistically flawed arguments in a newspaper article.
That was like shooting ducks in a barrel…
Of course every “executive job” doesn’t equate to Fortune 500 CEO.
So, if, in order to polish their chimera of diversity , corporations find it necessary to expand their pool of Vice Presidents, etc., they can do so practically endlessly, without appointing one Black CEO.
But yes, raw numbers to percentages. Apples to oranges.
Guynn is a blank slate ideologue. She is beyond reason.