Suggesting the playing is level is stupid. But suggesting that it tilts towards white men is also stupid. If anything as someone who hired thousands of people through the companies I ran, it tilts against white men more often than in favor of them and it is not directly due to race.
Several observations from a long career.
1. No one owes you a job. Sadly, people who grow up without struggling expect they don't have to struggle to succeed. That means they are simply less competitive. A woman, minority, or immigrant may legitimately or not think they have to "prove" themselves... white men don't. It makes women, minorities, and immigrants better hires. Until white men realizes no one cares if they are white or men, they will be facing an uphill battle in the job market as they enter it unprepared to compete.
2. Almost no one cares about your background, where you went to school, your GPA, etc unless it is your first job. After that first job, what matters is what you have done. If you have not done anything worthy, if you don't make a difference in your workplace, then you are just a "place marker" filling a job until a better candidate comes along. Each year we would rank people... in broad terms those rankings translated into "move this person out", "keep this person in place", or do whatever it takes to keep this person... the latter category was rarely dominated by white males...
3. Being valuable to an employer is largely a function of work habits and not education, race, or gender. I remember having a white male come up to me and ask why I hadn't promoted him to senior analyst. I told him until he cured his "back" problem, I couldn't promote him. He was puzzled and said there was nothing wrong with his back. I responded, I was not talking about his back, I was referring to his problem of getting "back" to work on Mondays after he partied to hard on the week-ends. In contrast, one of his peers, went from analyst to Director (one level below VP) in less than two years (she worked her butt off and she became invaluable). I wanted to make sure we put "golden handcuffs" on her so she couldn't leave. If the guy left, he was replaceable.
All this noise about race and preference simply no longer passes the smell test based on numerous studies. Once you adjust for non racial and gender factors, minorities and women have slight edge in getting hired. Those studies comport with my experience. This has not always been true, but it is increasingly the case.
Finally, I am seeing a disturbing trend among white males. They seem to gravitate to bureaucratic jobs rather than ones that combine risk and opportunity. A bureaucratic job is one where you largely push paper around, lord over a few subordinates, and put in the time until you move into a bureaucratic job higher up the ladder. Eventually, the Peter principle kicks in... and you spend the rest of your life wondering how you got "stuck" in a dead end job.
In contrast, statistics show minorities and women are increasingly becoming the risk takers. If they find they can't get ahead at work, they go off and start their own businesses. This is demonstrated in the increasing number of women and minorities starting businesses today. Frankly, if I were a "young white male" (I am an old retired white male now), I would be feel intense pressure to compete. If they don't wake up soon, the world will pass them by. My wife is an Asian woman, who started a business five years ago and it is now as busy as she can handle. She never worries about competing with a "white male" owned company, they are not the kind of competition she worries about with her largely minority dominated workers. Everyone who works for her including her feel they have to prove themselves every time they do a job. That makes all the difference...
