Especially if you live in a bigger city, you might have been been hearing a lot about the “sharing economy” — the all-encompassing name given to the economic system propped up by a set of services that are popping up for people to share and monetize their private assets, from their apartments with Airbnb to their cars with Lyft. There is a ton of excitement about it out of the Silicon Valley, and “sharing economy” evangelizers appear to see this as a disruption of current economies and cash flows — a democratization, a decentralization of wealth and power. But is that really the case? And where do structural factors like race and gender fit in?