Physicists love spontaneous symmetry breaking. It’s a great way to reconcile the messiness of reality with our belief in simple and beautiful underlying mechanisms. We posit that the true fundamental dynamics of the world has some symmetry — X can be exchanged with Y, and all relevant processes are unchanged — but the actual state of the world does not respect that symmetry, which leaves it hidden (or “nonlinearly realized,” if you want to sound all sciencey). Deep down, a (left-handed) electron is completely interchangeable with an electron neutrino; but in the world as we find it, this symmetry is broken, and we end up with an electron that is charged and massive, a neutrino that is neutral and nearly massless. The Higgs boson that the Large Hadron Collider is looking for would be the telltale sign of the mechanism behind this symmetry breaking.
For reasons which escape me, this concept has not been borrowed (as far as I can tell) by social scientists and pundits more generally.* Which is too bad, as it explains a great deal. For example, appealing to the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking would have been really helpful to Whoopi Goldberg on The View recently, as she patiently tried to explain to a distraught Elisabeth Hasselbeck why it’s just not the same when black people use the word “nigger” as when white people do. (From Sociological Images, via The Edge of the American West.)
Which is not to say that it’s always okay, or that there is no thoughtful critique of the re-appropriation of derogatory language by targeted groups, etc. Just that “If it’s wrong when white people say it, it should be wrong when black people say it too! It’s just not fair!” is far too simple-minded to carry any weight.
Let’s imagine that, in our view of a happy future utopia, all races find themselves in situations of perfect equality of opportunity and dignity. Everyone enters society with equal status, and people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (The “symmetric vacuum.”) In such a world, arguments like “If you can do it, why shouldn’t I be able to?” would be perfectly legitimate. But even if we want that to be the world — even if we believe that the grand unified theory of social ethics involves a symmetry of rights and obligations under the interchange of various racial categories — it’s not the world in which we live. In the real world, different races don’t go through life with the same masses and charges (if you will). There really are such things as discrimination, legacies of poverty and exclusion, and so on. We can argue about the best way to deal with those features of reality, but pretending that they don’t exist isn’t a very useful strategy.
As Whoopi explains, many blacks have chosen to re-appropriate the n-word as part of a conscious strategy of fighting back against a power dynamic that uses language to keep them at the bottom. Again, one can argue about the effectiveness of that strategy, and the circumstances under which it is appropriate, and whether Jesse Jackson should really have used that term in referring to Barack Obama. But it doesn’t follow that “if it’s fair for you, it should be fair for me.” Here is a guy who sadly doesn’t get it; a white high-school teacher who is genuinely puzzled about why he got in trouble for calling one of his black students “nigga.”
I was contemplating writing this post for a long time, with the relevant symmetry being men/women and the social milieu being the scientific community. Too many physicists reason along the following lines: “Men and women should be treated equally. Therefore, any time we privilege one over the other, as in making a special effort to encourage women in science, we are making a mistake.” That would be a reasonable argument, if the symmetry weren’t dramatically broken by the state in which we find ourselves. Which happily is not a stable vacuum! (Note that the underlying assumption is not that different genders or races are necessarily equivalent when it comes to innate abilities; that is largely beside the point, and obsession about those questions gets to be a little creepy. But they should certainly have equal opportunities — and right now, they don’t.) Treating one group differently than the other isn’t what we ultimately want to be doing — it’s not part of the happy utopia — but it might be the best response to the current state of unequal treatment overall.
But Whoopi’s little teaching moment was too good to pass up. If the discussion of race and gender in the rest of the MSM rose to that level of sophistication, we’d all be better off.
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*I’ve been searching for an excuse to mention Kieran Healy’s Standard Model of Sociophysics. I’m not sure if this is it, but I’ll take it.
I think one of the clearest example of this kind of social symmetry breaking is the fact that poverty is a risk factor for obesity.
It is obvious to many that poor people can eat as healthily as rich people, but somehow chose to eat less healthily. So the naive conclusion is that “poor people must be less health conscious” than rich people. Which is of course nonsense, but is the kind of ‘thinking-in-a-vacuum’ that can get you into wrong conclusions like these. The truth is a lot more complicated, with stress factors, depression, food availability (e.g. rich neighbourhoods have more gourmet stalls, poor ones have McD).
But you won’t believe how many well-to-do people think that the problem of obese poor people is simply that “poor people made stupid choices and hence they have nothing but themselves to blame”.
I am not sure where you have grown up, what economic class or division but it seems plainly apparent to me that you have a view of the use of this word that buys into the irrelevant chatter from the edge of the relevant world. I hear it everyday, every hour on my street and have had many a conversation with those who use the word in it’s modern hip-hop sense and have to say that to think that those who use this word do so as a show of protest againest language that has kept them down is absurd. I know of no one whom puposely uses the word to conduct such an agenda, at least not any of the people who live the “thug life” day to day. It has been made popular with the use of a morally corrupt defintion feed through several pipelines of mass produced records and media, mostly through the advent of “thug life”, and that is what it carries through in it’s use, a “thug life”. The irony is that the derogetory term has been turned into yet another one, upholding morally bankrupt action and belief in a world of social conviction bent on crime, sexism, and violence. It is very easy for the people outside of the areas and conditions that this word originated in to say this or that on the right and wrongs of its use. That misses the entire point of why it should be frowned upon, no matter whom uses it!!!!!!! I live in an area where people are shot and robbed daily, and I hold no respect for anyone who can defend the use of this word without, it seems, the slightest clue as to its use or origin outside of fity cent and snoop! It wouldn’t matter what race I was, if I called all women “bitch” it would not be the pinicale of social mannerism, it would be derogetory and ignorant, and that doesn’t mean that if women start calling themselves “bitches” that it makes the word any different or any less derogetory. People should be aware of the full context of this re-establishment of a racist and derogatory term before they come out and defend its use by this race or that one. All it does is divide us further and highlight differences that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If we believe ourselves so advanced, so morally upright then why do we still insist on defending those who only continue to hold back the progress of not just one race or another but the entire culture. I love your blog, but this article has left me wanting of a more intelligent discussion on an issue that affects me everyday of my life.
Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard, got in trouble a few years back by saying that of the three principal explanations for the low proportion of women in doctorate-level math & sciences, discrimination was probably the least important.
I agree.
One reason to be skeptical of using “discrimination” as an explanation is that it so often fails on closer examination, at least in the US & similar societies. For example, a decade ago it was popular to accuse banks & mortgage lenders of discrimination because they turned down black & Hispanic mortgage applicants more often than white applicants. This claim was repeated long after careful observers had noted that white applicants were turned down more often than Asian applicants. Where discrimination is involved, the truth is no defense.
Additionally, it was pointed out that the mortgage default rate was higher for blacks than for whites. This suggests that more high-risk loans were made to blacks than to whites – the very opposite of discrimination.
(What a difference a decade makes. Back then banks were accused of discrimination because they didn’t lend to high-risk applicants. Now they are accused of “predatory” lending because they did. The term “predatory” is, to put it mildly, not well defined.)
Numerous other examples can be found in labor markets. For example, it is often claimed that women make 77% as men for the same work. Actually, no.
The basis for this claim is that the median income for women who work full time is about 77% of the median income of men who work full time. But, on average, male full-time workers put in more overtime; are more likely to work outside, exposed to the weather; have fewer career interruptions; have more experience; work in more dangerous occupations; and are more likely to work in math-intensive fields. Controlling for these kinds of variables, the disparity evaporates.
Another example comes from academia. Some years ago the University of Florida was presented by the faculty union with a discrimination claim on behalf of female faculty members. The union claimed that women were underpaid some $39 million annually.
Dr. Lawrence Kenney, a professor in the economics department with a background in both labor & educational economics, conducted his own study. He controlled for variables that the union-bought study did not take into account, such as the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals. When such variables were taken into account, the alleged disparities effectively vanished.
This pattern should be enough to make anyone skeptical of discrimination as explanation for the low proportion of women in math & science. This skepticism is only enhanced by various signs of the times: Scholarships for women in “non-traditional” fields; affirmative action; the fanatical persecution of President Summers; and other, smaller examples.
As for the other explanations, I have already sketched some of the reasons for thinking that the occupational choices made by female scholars play a major role.
So, what about cognitive differences between the sexes? Well, I am not an expert in the field, but I did this article interesting.
How about politics? An unphysical degree of freedom like “how well is the surge in Iraq working”, set to different values in the Obama gauge, the McCain gauge, and the Bush gauge.
🙂
In the interest of sexual equality, we must a) install urinals in all ladies restrooms, or, b) eliminate sexually separated restrooms. /snark
Why not b? Or a combination of a and b? One room for everyone, all facilities, including urinals (if you can’t survive without them), in cubicles. It drives me nuts to stand in a queue for the ladies’ room whilst knowing there are probably several loos going unused in the men’s. And if I haven’t seen anyone go in after a couple of minutes, I sometimes use the mens’ 🙂
Or just build bigger women’s restrooms. I don’t think same-sex bathrooms would ever fly (although, I have no clue why they gender-specify single-occupancy bathrooms… ). Biologically, though, women take longer to use the restroom (even if you subtract makeup fixing, etc), so larger restrooms for women would allow us the same opportunity to use the restroom without wasting so much time. Am I right?