By Thomas Sowell
Monday, October 05, 2015
One of the many painful signs of the mindlessness of our
times was a recent section of the Wall
Street Journal, built around the theme “What’s Holding Women Back in the Workplace?”
Whenever some group is not equally represented in some
institution or activity, the automatic response in some quarters is to assume
that someone has prevented equality of outcomes.
This preconception of equal outcomes requires not one
speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary. Even in
activities where individual performances are what determine outcomes, and those
performances are easily measured objectively, there is seldom anything
resembling equal representation.
For twelve consecutive years — from 2001 through 2012 —
each home-run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two
American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S.
National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the seventh consecutive year in which the
U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Indian.
We all know about the large over-representation of blacks
among professional basketball players, and especially among the star players.
The best-selling brands of beer in America were created by people of German
ancestry, who also created China’s famed Tsingtao beer. Of the 100 top-ranked
marathon runners in the world in 2012, 68 were Kenyans. The list could go on
and on. Although blacks are over-represented among professional football
players, even the most avid National Football League fan is unlikely to be able
to recall seeing even one black player who kicked a punt or a point after
touchdown.
Should there be an article titled: “What’s Holding Black
Kickers Back in the NFL?” Could it be that blacks are more interested in
playing positions where there is more action and — not incidentally — more
money?
Should there be an article titled: “What’s Holding Back
Whites in the National Basketball Association?” Or an article titled: “What’s
Holding Back Non-Indian Kids from Winning the Spelling Bee?” Lawsuits claiming
discrimination have been won on the basis of statistical disparities far
smaller than these.
Among the many reasons for gross disparities in many
fields, and at different income levels, is that human beings differ in what
they want to do, quite aside from any differences in what they are capable of
doing, or what others permit them to do. Observers cannot just grab a statistic
and run with it, though that is what is done too often in the media — and even
in courts of law.
Particular opportunities are seized by some groups and
used to rise from poverty to prosperity. But, for other groups, those same
opportunities might as well not exist, because other groups are oriented in
different directions, and those opportunities might not even catch their
attention.
As regards statistical disparities in the representation
of women in various occupations or at different income levels, a number of
outstanding female scholars, including Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard,
have shown many ways in which women’s circumstances and priorities differ from
those of men.
Men, for example, don’t get pregnant. And where children
are raised by a single parent, that parent is a mother far more often than a
father. You cannot work the 60-hour weeks that are needed to reach the top in
some fields when you have children to raise.
But we seldom hear about such facts, while we constantly
hear charlatans loudly proclaiming numerical “gender gaps” in employment or
pay, and suing for discrimination.
Charlatans are only half the story. The other half
includes people who are gullible enough to be led around like sheep by those
exploiting the prevailing political correctness dispensed in our schools,
colleges, and the media.
Moreover, the sheep in both high and low positions often
also implicitly believe that the cause of statistical disparities must have
originated wherever the statistics were collected, and therefore must be the
fault of the employer — even though the factors behind those disparities may
have originated far from the employer and long before the people involved
reached the employer.
So long as there is widespread gullibility, there will be
charlatans ready to exploit it for their own benefit, either politically or
financially.
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