Via Leiter, an article on why philosophy lags behind the other humanities’ disciplines in gender parity. Overall, the discipline is about 75% male, and so it’s quite possible to be the only woman in one’s cohort (or one’s program) or department. This gives philosophy a reputation as a bit of a boys’ club, and it’s not one that’s entirely undeserved. Let me riff.
Mention that philosophy is more like math and physics in terms of gender distribution, and a certain sort of philosopher will puff up with pride, metaphysical thumbs tucked behind metaphorical suspenders. We’re not soft, and womanish, after all, like English or those boylovers in Athens, comparative literature. Our discipline is tough, with rigor and verbal sparring. Our aim is to make the speaker cry! It’s no wonder some women can’t hack it; some men can’t either! Perhaps the male brain is just naturally more suited to this tough discipline; women are best off flower-arranging or using their natural female gifts to think about people. Maybe they just don’t like philosophy, because as Adeimantus noted, if you continue with it beyond early adulthood, at worst you end up a crank, and at best you end up useless. We see these sorts of explanations offered in the article as reasons that women are underrepresented in philosophy.
If women do decide to pursue a Ph.D., they’re better off in feminist philosophy, or ethics, or aesthetics, or maybe ancient philosophy (well, someone has to learn ancient Greek…), or one of the soft-and-less-prestigious subdisciplines.
To my mind, we have to be careful to distinguish rigor and aggressive argument from institutional culture. Women flourish in law and linguistics and many of the hard sciences, and I wouldn’t want to have to defend the claim that there are no aggressive arguments in plush cuddly courtrooms or no technical prowess required in linguistics, because it is hard to defend false claims. Kieran’s old but excellent post puts it well:
[…]the key problem with stereotypes is that they are too flexible. Aren’t women also supposed to be endless talkers, complainers, nit-pickers and more detail-oriented than men? Sounds like a perfect background for philosophy to me.
I think the stereotype that contemporary analytic philosophy is just too tough for most women has more to do with how philosophers would like to see themselves rather than anything particular about women’s aptitude. Really, you should just read Kieran’s whole post. Assuming that the gender distribution can be explained easily as due to women’s choices (made of course in a vacuum) strikes me as far too quick; at least, I know which way I’d bet.
(Moreover, three generations ago I’m sure the same argument could be made about why women simply didn’t choose to become English professors or lawyers or biologists.)
Part of the problem with nailing down the cause of the unequal distribution is that these days overt discrimination is relatively rare, though you get the odd old jerk now and then. Female philosophers of a certain age can tell you stories that would curl your hair (or uncurl it, depending on your hair.) Philosophy, however, does strike me as having an institutional culture that skews masculine, and one that could make it hard for a woman to flourish, but the culture itself is hard to root out.
An example: I know a couple of groups of philosophers, at different institutions, get together to play basketball. And in at least some of these cases, philosophers being philosophers, talk turns to philosophy and someone will suggest a reading group, or co-authoring a paper, or just getting together to talk over a paper over a beer. Simple networking. Nothing bad.
Now imagine you’re a short petite klutzy woman who was invited to play, but chose not to, because in a department full of men twice your size you’re not quite comfortable with a full-contact sport. You haven’t done anything wrong — this wasn’t a required activity — but now you just haven’t heard about the reading group. They didn’t mean to exclude you, and you didn’t mean to ignore them, but now they’ve got a little network and you’re on the outside. It’s nothing you can complain about, because there’s truly nothing wrong with playing basketball with fellow philosophers.
Add to this small subtle slights (having objections to arguments ignored until someone male re-presents them is classic) as well as typical institutional sexism (“we don’t need a maternity policy because for some reason, with our faculty having stay-at-home-wives, it’s always just worked out when we play it by ear”), and philosophy looks less and less attractive. I think the sociologist-types call it a tipping point problem or something like that; once there’s enough women in the profession, many of these problems tend to solve themselves because the culture changes, plus there are successful female role models. It’s hard to know what to do to get to that point, but I think we move in the wrong direction when we suggest that it’s merely a problem of individual interest in pursuing philosophy.
I’d recommend Sally Haslanger’s paper on women in the profession. In closing, I note without much comment that philosophy has even fewer minorities than it has women; it’s a very pale male profession, and it’s hard to believe that everyone else is just naturally less inclined to philosophize.
The Edge of the American West 
36 comments
October 7, 2009 at 4:52 am
Jason B.
Thoughtful and amusing post. I especially liked “metaphysical thumbs tucked behind metaphorical suspenders.”
October 7, 2009 at 7:28 am
matt w
Excellent post. Slightly OT rant follows.
If women do decide to pursue a Ph.D., they’re better off in feminist philosophy
The men who think thus probably also think that feminist philosophy isn’t real philosophy. I believe that I’ve sometimes seen top journal’s terrible record of publishing women explained away by saying, “Well, those journals don’t publish that much ethics and hardly any feminist philosophy, and those are subfields in which women publish disproportionately.” As if that were an excuse rather than part of the problem.
IIRC a further iteration is “Those journals don’t get many submissions in feminist philosophy,” but I think it’s pretty clear that that’s a kind of pre-screening. If you have to publish something, and you have written a paper in feminist philosophy, it’s probably not worth your time to send it to a top n journal that’s never published any feminist philosophy. To check this I looked up the journal that published Sally Haslanger’s paper on social construction, which wound up on the list of best philosophy papers of the year. This paper was done in the idiom of the kind of philosophy of language that regularly appears in top philosophical journals (and IIRC it doesn’t do that much specific analysis of feminist issues — it gives a framework in which one might construct a feminist critique of the notion that crop-tops are cute on seventh-grade girls, but does not actually give that critique). It appeared in Philosophical Issues, which I think is invitation-only (if it isn’t, it doesn’t wind up on people’s top-ten lists, though it’s a supplement to Nous, which does).
Anyway, I think Brian Weatherson has pointed out that a comparison between linguistics and philosophy pretty much proves that the problem is down to the sociology of the disciplines rather than anything about the content. Many contemporary philosophers of language and semanticists in linguistics departments basically do the same thing (I suppose the linguists may need to know more different languages), but there are a lot more (senior, at least) women doing semantics in linguistics departments than in philosophy departments. In fact phil of language is one of the more male-dominated subfields.
Another potential problem — I don’t know quite how off-putting it is, not having experienced it from the inside — is all-male reading lists, helped along by mostly male anthologies. (In the interests of disclosure, perhaps I should say that my department has a really crap gender ratio.)
October 7, 2009 at 7:45 am
Sean Carroll
Love the post title.
In physics and related fields, the number of women is embarrassingly tiny, but at least the number of degrees awarded to women is growing fairly steadily. Is the same true in philosophy?
October 7, 2009 at 8:13 am
Vance
Ugh. My own field is trending the wrong way. I hope it’s the outlier.
October 7, 2009 at 8:31 am
dana
The men who think thus probably also think that feminist philosophy isn’t real philosophy. I believe that I’ve sometimes seen top journal’s terrible record of publishing women explained away by saying, “Well, those journals don’t publish that much ethics and hardly any feminist philosophy, and those are subfields in which women publish disproportionately.” As if that were an excuse rather than part of the problem.
Yeah. Ethics and history of philosophy apparently have the perception of being soft options, and feminist philosophy is somewhere below applied ethics in terms of whether it’s considered intellectually challenging.
But I do want to stress that it’s not just the predominance of a certain kind of analytic practice that’s driving away women; the 25% figure is rough, and includes all subdisciplines, and not everywhere is Rutgers.. Feminist philosophy is overwhelmingly female-dominated, but I don’t think that’s true of either ethics or history of philosophy.
October 7, 2009 at 9:22 am
North
I know a couple of groups of philosophers, at different institutions, get together to play basketball. And in at least some of these cases, philosophers being philosophers, talk turns to philosophy and someone will suggest a reading group, or co-authoring a paper, or just getting together to talk over a paper over a beer. Simple networking. Nothing bad.
I’m not sure the choice of activities is always completely innocent, though it may be. I know a social science department where male grad students and junior faculty had a poker group, with similar results. They hadn’t invited any women – on the assumption that women wouldn’t want to go sit in a bar and play poker – but when a woman found out and wanted to join, they disbanded the group rather than opening it up. (This was in 2005 or 2006, maybe 2007.) It was a big ugly scene in the department, from what I heard, at least from the perspective of the female grad students.
I like your point that you don’t need discriminatory intent, but I think sometimes nominally open but unwelcoming groups can actually mask something worse – maybe just total discomfort with women, but maybe a desire to exclude.
October 7, 2009 at 9:47 am
Izabella Laba
It’s just about the same in mathematics and I wrote about it a couple of times. The worst thing about the basketball network is that it’s actually a double bind. Suppose for a moment that you could join it (let’s say that you’re 6’2”, or let’s substitute some other activity where women are not automatically disadvantaged). What then? You become one of their social acquaintances and your male colleagues start treating you like they would the women they know in their personal lives. And you have already mentioned how almost everyone has a stay-home wife.
We don’t have anything “obviously feminine” like feminist philosophy, but women do often tend to clump together. Some areas of research have a disproportionally large number of women (like, say, 10%). Some have none.
October 7, 2009 at 10:06 am
dana
I don’t know quite how off-putting it is, not having experienced it from the inside
I’m in a similarly bad position to answer this, because I obviously wasn’t put-off by all-male curricula, or come to think of it, all male professors as an undergrad, but I will point out that including female writers in the curriculum is very, very hard if one is teaching survey courses in the history of philosophy. The canon is very, very male. Incorporating female writers, when they exist, into the canon means that something generally considered important would get minimized. (It’s easier in a more in-depth course.)
October 7, 2009 at 10:27 am
ben
Whenever he composes a critical review for J. Phil, I am told, he gets a tremendous erection.
October 7, 2009 at 10:28 am
ben
Incorporating female writers, when they exist, into the canon means that something generally considered important would get minimized. (It’s easier in a more in-depth course.)
Secondary sources?
October 7, 2009 at 10:49 am
Fats Durston
Chuckled aloud at some of the asides.
Now imagine you’re a short petite klutzy woman who was invited to play, but chose not to, because in a department full of men twice your size you’re not quite comfortable with a full-contact sport.
My wife is a short, klutzy woman (I’m an average-height, klutzy man) who ended up playing basketball with the male grad students in our history department. She also joined two poker “clubs” (grad and faculty in different places) where I did not, though certainly the institutional sexism of male faculty-with-wives (and the social exclusionism of those wives) affected her career.
October 7, 2009 at 10:58 am
matt w
Point definitely taken about the history of philosophy courses; the philosophy history canon is just unusually circumscribed and set in stone. I was thinking of epistemology and phil. of language, where it’s a lot more feasible.
I definitely didn’t mean the subfield argument to explain the overall gender problem; it was more about how the evaluation of subfields isn’t entirely ungendered, and how this really affects the prestige of feminist philosophy.
October 7, 2009 at 11:33 am
dana
Fats, let me be clear that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with joining in a basketball game or poker (I would myself play basketball, badly), or that all men play basketball or poker —
— Just that what’s frustrating about the gender disparity is that something that looks like a small thing — whether to play poker or basketball for fun — can end up excluding women even if no one at all thought of it as a way to network, or even if some men don’t take part in it. Something that’s more likely to draw in men than women is going to subtly reinforce the existing dynamic, even if it would be relatively innocuous in a discipline that was closer to gender parity.
Secondary sources?
I really want primary sources contemporaneous with the philosophers for the ideal survey class. So, we can learn about objections to Descartes via the princesses, but I run out of steam after that (or before that.)
October 7, 2009 at 11:34 am
Chris
maybe just total discomfort with women, but maybe a desire to exclude.
Don’t those kind of go together? A social gathering works better if its members are comfortable, and excluding (i.e. providing a refuge from) people and things that make them uncomfortable is a necessary precondition for that. (Although we’ve moved a little away from the basketball analogy, where it was the hypothetical woman who was uncomfortable with the basketball game, not vice versa. Does this matter?)
Intuitively, I feel that there is a difference between not organizing a barbecue for your social circle of vegans and not inviting women to your social circle of men uncomfortable around women, but you can’t really draw a clear line between discomfort and exclusivity.
ISTM that most people who exclude, say, minorities, do so because they are uncomfortable with, or actually afraid of, them. IMO there’s no reason the same couldn’t be true of (at least some) exclusion of women. If that’s what’s really going on, then a cross-group social event (assuming anyone tried to organize it in the first place) would be pretty blighted, wouldn’t it?
I think the real problem is mixing the professional and social contexts — when something happens in an off the job setting that somehow has professional consequences. Obviously showing actual favoritism to your social circle is professional misconduct if you’re in a supervisory capacity, but few people would be comfortable extending that rule to peer collaboration.
October 7, 2009 at 12:05 pm
JPool
There was some of this in my program too, more than I was expecting, but it was largely counter-balanced by other social circuits and programming that was more gender-balanced.
Still, I feel like there really ought to be work-shops or other sorts of direction for grad students that makes it clear that, professionally speaking, this is a dumb thing to do. In history, inevitably there will be powerful women in your field. Some of your female colleagues will do as well or better than you do. You want to know how to network with them as well. Of course, if you have a field that’s already dramatically gender-skewed, it makes this kind of self-interest less obvious.
October 7, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Anderson
I guess I’m insufficiently up on contemporary philosophy. I think Susan Hurley and Christine Krongaard could kick any guy’s ass in a philosophical bar fight.
… Bad place to go O/T, but I see that Neiman’s Moral Clarity is paperback now. Anyone care for that? I hope my fear that the book will turn out to be fluff has nothing to do with the author’s gender.
October 7, 2009 at 1:29 pm
karakapend
Speaking from my own experience, I went into undergrad intending to be a philosophy major, but was really put off by the department, which was entirely an entirely male faculty and, at that time, an entirely male student body. I ended up doing communication theory and women’s studies, and taking phi courses on the side to satisfy my own desire to learn. But when it came to grad school, philosophy was the only thing I wanted to study, period.
I ended up in an applied ethics course, which had a great gender balance of three men to four women, and was in itself a great terminal course. And going into doctoral work, philosophy is the only thing I want to do. So I see both sides of it. Philosophy is the work that gets me up in the morning, it’s what I am as much as what I want to do. But this:
Philosophy, however, does strike me as having an institutional culture that skews masculine
is still entirely true for me, and it’s with some resignation that I sign myself over to a discipline where I’ll always be fighting, in some way, for my voice to be heard, to be taken seriously. Granted, there are many professions where that is true, but this is mine. Maybe I can do something to make it less hard for another woman to get a seat at the table, in the future.
October 7, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Anderson
… Korsgaard, natch.
October 7, 2009 at 2:52 pm
teofilo
I suppose the linguists may need to know more different languages
Not really, no. Linguistic semanticists may use more languages in their work than philosophers, but they don’t necessarily have to know them any better. And yeah, as far as I can tell a lot of the stuff people in the two fields do is virtually identical. The big difference, of course, being that linguistics is quite gender-balanced at all levels in a way that philosophy is not. Just sticking to semantics, most (maybe all?) of the semanticists in my undergrad department were female; certainly all the semantics courses I took were taught by women, although a lot of the stuff we read in them was written by philosophers of language, who were pretty much all men.
October 7, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Fats Durston
Just that what’s frustrating about the gender disparity is that something that looks like a small thing — whether to play poker or basketball for fun — can end up excluding women even if no one at all thought of it as a way to network,
I understood your point–I’m not sure why I felt the need to share my experience, probably the short, klutzy parallels. The same sort of subtle expectations about work that wives are “supposed” to do have similar impact on time to network, etc.
October 7, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Witt
small subtle slights (having objections to arguments ignored until someone male re-presents them is classic)
I am not familiar with working in an academic environment, but I suspect it’s not that different from the rest of the world. If so, having your conversational points or objections ignored until (or unless!) a man re-presents them can have significant consequences. Who is perceived as being “prepared” for the meeting, who is perceived as having come up with “the solution,” who is perceived to have made that great point the other day — without active intervention, these are all credited to the person who spoke second and more dominantly, not the person who originally pointed them out.*
It isn’t just about the subtleties of one interpersonal interaction. It’s about how things get encoded as “true” memories in the minds of your colleagues and supervisors. Any given point in any given meeting is not that important. The cumulative effect is striking, and all the more so when someone is trying to advocate for you (say, that you should become the chairperson or should be the group’s delegate to some event) and the “true” narrative that everyone else has in their heads is: “Oh, she’s pleasant…I don’t really know much about her.” Because they’ve successfully transferred all of your contributions to the person who lifted them up.
*I’ve seen this happen so many times in a same-gender context (generally race, but sometimes class) that I’ve lost count. I don’t think the phenomenon is limited to sexism, in other words.
October 8, 2009 at 5:32 am
dana
I don’t think the phenomenon is limited to sexism, in other words.
No — in fact, I suspect that when I’ve had this problem, the thinking’s been not “she’s female, and therefore can be ignored” but “she’s probably an undergraduate, so she’s probably confused about this very basic point rather than what she asked about.”
I think the real problem is mixing the professional and social contexts — when something happens in an off the job setting that somehow has professional consequences. Obviously showing actual favoritism to your social circle is professional misconduct if you’re in a supervisory capacity, but few people would be comfortable extending that rule to peer collaboration.
This is true. Many jobs require networking, and many people become friends with their co-workers, but it does strike me that the professional and social boundaries in the academy are blurred. And no one would think that a sensible remedy to this problem would be to ban peer collaboration or basketball games among friends. (Or women’s groups, for that matter.)
October 8, 2009 at 7:28 am
matt w
Anderson — sadly, Susan Hurley died, too young, in 2007.
Anyway, nobody denies that there are first-rate women philosophers, and women philosophers who can do as well in the bar-fight kind of discussion as any man; the problem is the way the numbers skew. Some women, like karakapend, are going to make it through a female-unfriendly culture, but more may be driven out.
[teo, you’re right about the other languages; what I was specifically thinking of was some discussion of indexicals in which the linguists’ papers always begin with a discussion of a certain phenomenon in Amharic, but I don’t know that any of those linguists study Amharic themselves. Anyway, that makes the point even stronger: same content, different departments, radically different gender distributions.]
October 8, 2009 at 8:17 am
Anderson
Anderson — sadly, Susan Hurley died, too young, in 2007.
Whoa. You practice law a few years, you lose all touch with things. Thanks.
… This makes it somewhat more deplorable that Natural Reasons is $70 in paperback.
October 8, 2009 at 11:02 am
Kieran
As Witt and Dana point out, there is a sharp distinction to be made — irritatingly missing in the NYT piece and elsewhere — between having a disciplinary culture that values robust argument, and having standards for robustness applied even-handedly to different sorts of people.
October 8, 2009 at 11:25 am
teofilo
what I was specifically thinking of was some discussion of indexicals in which the linguists’ papers always begin with a discussion of a certain phenomenon in Amharic, but I don’t know that any of those linguists study Amharic themselves
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I was thinking of too. In a context like that, it’s very unlikely that a given semanticist discussing Amharic data in a paper has personally studied Amharic beyond analyzing that specific data. Obviously someone had to study Amharic to collect the data in the first place, but once they do and publish the data lots of other people will use it in their own analyses without devoting any more attention to the language. Which does indeed mean that linguistic semanticists are generally doing the exact same kind of research as philosophers of language.
October 8, 2009 at 11:39 am
Rebecca Clayton
I’ve read that young women are more likely than young men to consider job availability and future income in their career decisions. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this observation, but it’s been posited as the reason behind the higher proportion of women in engineering than in mathematics and physics.
I’ve encountered much more hostility and resistance in the purely academic field of evolutionary biology (my dissertation research) than in the booming, practical field of molecular genetics, where I ended up when I got really discouraged with academe and just went out and “got a job.” The molecular genetics labs needed warm bodies, and hired me on my tangential computational biology experience. The “boys” I went to grad school with snubbed me for selling out, but I got publications in Science, Nature, and PNAS while they did endless post-docs.
Add a touch of sexism to limited job opportunities, and you have a double barrier to gender equity. What do you think?
October 8, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Prosehack65
One of the best rhetoric and composition profsI had in grad school was a BA in Humanities, MA in philosophy, PhD in Rhetoric (specializing in feminist theory). Talk about a wide ranging intellect!
Her experience was not only as a woman but as a young–and young-appearing–woman, at that. Emotionally and intellectually, she stood head and shoulders above most of the men who smiled and “dear”ed here; while she never backed down, I never saw her take anyone down as she was most certainly capable of doing.
Mostly, her attitude/lack of bitterness stood in contrast to some of the feminist profs I had encountered previously and taught me as much about being professional as her classroom instruction taught me about rhetoric.
October 8, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Prosehack65
Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to add–the comment by Witt, et al…is well-documented in Deborah Tannen’s Talking From 9 to 5_.
October 8, 2009 at 2:28 pm
matt w
teo — well, the difference I was thinking of is that the philosophers don’t seem to cite the Amharic stuff at all, but even that may be changing. It’s not much of a difference.
October 8, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Neddy Merrill
young women are more likely than young men to consider job availability and future income in their career decisions
This is really interesting, and I’d love to know if it’s true. At my institution our female students are better than our male students, but our female students are more likely to list this as their first choice while our male students think of it as a backup. The abilities and the aspirations don’t match, in other words. The rough-and-ready explanation is a confidence/self-assessment gap.
This won’t be a good historical explanation, but certainly getting a PhD in philosophy is a batshit insane thing to do that is made somewhat more likely if you think, against all evidence, that you are awesome. And women are less likely to do that, perhaps.
October 8, 2009 at 3:59 pm
dana
I’ve read that young women are more likely than young men to consider job availability and future income in their career decisions. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this observation, but it’s been posited as the reason behind the higher proportion of women in engineering than in mathematics and physics.
The problem is, of course, that if that’s the explanation for not pursuing a degree in math, and instead pursuing engineering, we should expect it to hold even more strongly in a field such as English, which is predominantly female even if the rewards are lower.
But I had heard that explanation, too.
October 8, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Richard Zach
Rebecca, Dana: there are fewer women in engineering than in physics and mathematics (6 vs 10 and 11% senior faculty, 18 vs 23 and 32% junior faculty, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12062)
October 9, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Richard Zach
…and the same holds for BA and PhD degrees: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2009/10/women-in-academic-pipeline.html
October 11, 2009 at 2:05 am
Belle Waring
hi Richard!
October 13, 2009 at 7:40 am
Neil the Ethical Werewolf
There was a female philosophy grad student I met once, after being told by an amazing number of people that she was really annoying. And when I met her, yeah, she was annoying. Rolling her eyes when I said counterintuitive things, for example. She did a whole bunch of stuff like that, because I say lots of counterintuitive things. But I usually don’t get that dismissive a response.
She knew a lot about the area she was working on, and it seemed that she was unusually bright. And I got to thinking that if a dude had her mannerisms, they’d go slightly less remarked, and the intelligence would stick in people’s memories a bit more.