Question

In 2009 there were only five African Americans who were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, or 1 percent of the total number of Fortune 500 CEOs. Given that African Americans make up more than 11 percent of the U.S. population, what does this tell you?

Answer 1

Answer:

The fact that only 1% of the top managers of the most important companies in the world are African-American, when the total African-American population in the United States reaches 11% of the population, speaks clearly of a situation of inherent inequality between African Americans and the rest of the ethnic groups that make up the country in terms of access to jobs.

This may be caused by the structural difference in opportunities that these people have compared to white people, due to, among other things, the differences in levels of education and income of their families, which conditions them not to reach a university level at great scale, as can be achieved by members of other ethnic groups such as whites or Asian Americans.

This leads to African Americans, due to the lack of possibilities of being university students, accessing lower-skilled jobs, and therefore cannot obtain the income that allows their children to go to university, creating a chain of disadvantage based in a structural racial inequality that the United States suffers as a nation.