Do you harbor the suspicion that all the chatter about the supposed national imperative of getting more women into STEM fields is much ado about nothing? If so, you aren’t alone. In this essay, John Rosenberg shows that all the studies and conferences on this pseudo-issue are just busy-work for people who know that America is full of suckers for lamentations over “statistical disparities.”

If the firms and institutions in the U.S. that employ people in STEM fields find themselves short of good prospects, they will take direct action to solve the problem, perhaps identifying sharp kids in high school and encouraging them to go into science rather than, oh, law school. We do not need top-down initiatives aiming at preconceived statistics for “representation” among various population groups.

Since the baseball season is again upon us, let’s use a baseball analogy. What if the Major League Baseball’s central office issued a report finding that whites are statistically underrepresented among left-handed relief pitchers, decrying the imbalance and calling for a program to train more white lefties to be relievers. Would you take that seriously? You shouldn’t. If any individual team thinks that it needs better left-handed relievers, it will go out and find some — and race won’t matter at all.