Via Leiter, and by way of my own following up on my earlier woolgathering on the under-representation of women in philosophy, this Chronicle piece by Regan Penaluna speculates that the all-male, very sexist canon in philosophy presents a significant barrier to entry for young women. (She also discusses aggressive argumentation, but I want to focus on this question.)
It’s not an exaggeration of fact. The canon is entirely male. Most of them were deeply sexist by today’s standards, if not their own. Plato suggests in Republic that the various talents and natures of humans are distributed, if not equally, without special regard to the sex of the person:
Then there is no way of life concerned with the management of the city that belongs to a woman because she’s a woman or to a man beacuse he’s a man, but the various natures are distributed in the same way in both creatures. Women share by nature in every way of life just as men do,
Go, Plato, go!
but in all of them women are weaker than men.
Awwww. But radical for his time, given the Athenian alternative was house-keeping and anonymity.
Some philosophers have suggested that English is a counterexample to her hypothesis, as it has a largely male canon and women are over-represented. I think this is a little too quick, if only because one thing that English departments seem to welcome are feminist critiques of literature, so even if the canon in the abstract were generally turning away young women, the way in which the canon is presented might well be more attractive.
Moreover, if we may permit anecdotes, young women often light up like Christmas trees when they hear Hilary Putnam or Shelly Kagan will grace their course’s syllabus, and then they are downcast when they learn that both philosophers are men. (Flipside: “I love L.A. Paul’s writing. He’s so smart!”) It does seem that the gender of writers is something noticed by the students, but I’d worry far more, in terms of its effect on female students, that they’d notice that the commonly-assigned contemporary metaphysics volume I just plucked from my shelf has one female writer out of eighteen than that Aristotle thought that women weren’t fully rational. I mean, Aristotle believed that memories were stored in the heart; he’s old, dead, Greek, and believed a lot of weird stuff that we don’t. Students get that.
That aside, I don’t find the canon hypothesis plausible largely because one of the sub-disciplines where women have been less abysmally represented is in the history of philosophy (the other one is ethics). We’d also expect to see similarity across the Anglophone philosophy world, and yet Australia seems to have a higher percentage of female majors and master’s level students. I suspect that whatever the explanation is, it’s not going to lie in terms of female interest or lack thereof in the subject matter. Along those lines, this Q&A with Nobel winner Carol W. Greider seems apropos, particularly this exchange:
Q. MANY REPORTERS HAVE ASKED WHY TELOMERES RESEARCH SEEMS TO ATTRACT SO MANY FEMALE INVESTIGATORS. WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER?
A. There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men. The derogatory term is the “old boys network.” It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.
The answer here isn’t “the shrinking telomeres are naturally attractive to women” or “women don’t like other areas of biology”, but “we had good mentors who actively promoted female researchers.” Likewise, the areas in which women have succeeded in greater numbers in philosophy tend to follow trailblazers, with it sometimes being assumed that a woman will of course write in history or ethics. I would be surprised if the lesson didn’t generalize.
That it’s probably not the canon shouldn’t make anyone feel proud; because this would be a much easier problem to solve if it turned out that the argument for pre-established harmony drove women away. (I mean, more than it does anyone else. Monads!)
10 comments
October 15, 2009 at 5:58 pm
kid bitzer
wait–you mean hilary and shelly aren’t…?
well, at least there’s always renée descartes.
October 15, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Jason B.
I’ve always lamented the dearth of material on the Cynics, and part of that is I so desperately want Hipparchia to be more significant. We hear plenty about Diogenes and a bit about Antisthenes and Bion and Crates, but we really only hear about Hipparchia as being Crates’ wife and that she lived as Crates’ equal.
I want more!
But, yeah. The canon is a flat-out sausage-fest.
October 15, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Sam-I-am
My thoughts on Monday regarding a different Nobel:
“There were no women economists at my undergraduate institution, and while I’m grateful for the men who supported my academic interests, it was the first female economist I ever saw that really expanded the horizons of what I saw myself as able to accomplish. And I never even met her! I just saw her inhabiting the halls of the faculty office building.
So this is an auspicious day, because of the power of a role model.”
The influences and events that change one’s course are small, but when they all tend in the same direction, you will find large differences both in aggregate and further down the road.
October 16, 2009 at 6:36 am
Charlieford
When I was doing philosophy (early to mid-eighties) there were quite a few female graduate students in the dept., despite it’s being all white male at the time. I don’t recall any discussions about the male-ness of the canon, but I may just have missed them, and this would have been an unrepresentative group who, if it’s true the all-male canon puts off, were for whatever reason not affected. (There was, however, lots of talk among men and women about the social construction of gender and the role philosophy had had in that, and a kind of excitement that one was getting inside the machine, as it were, and seeing how it had been put together, and how it might be changed.) Still, it would be nice to hear from more women philosophers about it: “How did you find a place for yourself in philosophy, which so full of sexist males?”
October 16, 2009 at 10:34 am
Barry
“.”.and yet Australia seems to have a higher percentage of female majors and master’s level students. ”
Australia also has no non-poisonous snakes, and no non-poisonous insects, and no non-poisonous plants and no non-poisonous birds….:)
October 16, 2009 at 10:40 am
Chris
@Barry: And the world’s only poisonous mammal, IIRC.
October 16, 2009 at 12:21 pm
kyllaros
The duck-billed platypus is poisonous.
October 16, 2009 at 2:17 pm
rea
The duck-billed platypus is poisonous.
“Only the male,” he pointed out, moving the thread back on topic. :)
October 16, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Charlieford
And I guess we should mention that their bills aren’t fanged. So it’s safe to kiss them, if you’re so moved.
By the way, are their other species of platypi that the duck-billed variety need distinguishing from?
October 22, 2009 at 1:57 pm
roger
English departments researched and expanded the canon from the past. In 1960, who’d heard of Aphra Behn?
John J. Corley’s book, The suspicion of virtue: women philosophers in Neo-Classical France, is a good start on recovering some of the background of women in philosophy in history. For instance, recovering Madame Deshoulieres might be a good thing.
Of course, philosophy has a problem with its history, in that there is an influential school in philosophy that think it is completely unimportant. But if you wanted to, you could introduce more women philosophers into the canon.