More on the APA-Report on CSW panel

In a previous post I mentioned the CSW (APA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession) panel Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy at the Pacific APA. Here is a brief report on that panel along with a set of weblinks that Ann Garry distributed. Many of these links you may have seen elsewhere (some of them were mentioned on the SWIP and FEAST lists) but it is nice to have them all in one place.

The four members of the panel spoke briefly. Ann Garry started off with an account of the resources that you will see below and the motivations that gave rise to them. They are the result of several months of discussions on a variety of listserves including SWIP land FEAST lists. Ann also mentioned one thread which focused on the percentage of women applicants for jobs this year. Several listserves members had done informal counts of women applicants in their departments. These numbers were disturbingly low (10-17%). Ann noted that she had been inspired to do a similar count after reading these reports. Her figures were higher. Having better information on the number of women applying for and getting jobs came up again in the discussion period (see below).

Alice MacLachlan was next with the story of how she came to set up the Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange after a FEAST meeting last year where she mentioned that such an exchange would be a good idea. The next thing she knew everyone was saying that they liked her idea and asking when she would have it up and running. The draft exchange is a google group and has quickly grown as a way of sharing information. It has several discussion threads, 97 members, a page for posting conference announcements, several syllabi, but only one online draft so far! There's a lot of interest in the idea but so far people have been reluctant to post drafts. Alice finished her talk by wondering why.

Lindsay Thompson from the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins gave an account of working with a committee appointed to do research of how to improve the retention of women faculty. They had collected data and had put together a report but the members of the committee came to think that the report was just going to join all the other reports up on some shelf. They came to believe that the way to truly change things for women in the academy was to work to change the culture by using various strategies to subvert the current ideology. So rather than employing institutional changes alone (policies that stopped the tenure clock and so on) they were working informally to make the institution friendlier for women. Lindsay offered to share strategies to any who were interested.

I was the last panelist and spoke about the Chicago panel, the difference in the way women's organizations in other disciplines had approached the status of women in their professions (sociology, history, and psychology had all infiltrated the political hierarchy of their professional organizations), the work of the CSW over the past several years, the question of data collection, and the more general question of what to do next. The discussion was then opened to everyone. Some of the interesting exchanges that I remember were questions about women applying for and getting jobs (as mentioned above). I noted that this was one of the key projects that the CSW had been working on. David Schrader, the Executive Director of the APA, was at the session and spoke to the issue. The APA had hoped to collect this data this year but the transition to a new computer system seems to have created problems about this. The good news is that the new system ought to make such data collection much simpler. The bad news is that we are still waiting. One of the reasons why this data collection is important is that there are still reports that it is women who are getting all the jobs. As Lindsay Thompson pointed out, data collection isn't the solution but it is an essential tool in the arsenal of strategies for changing ideology. David Schrader also pointed out that one of the reasons that the strategy of infiltrating the organization politically was difficult was because the APA is very much less centralized than other professional organizations. But he also noted that his could be positive as well because there were lots of ways in. He urged women to self-nominate or nominate each other for committees other than the CSW or the Committee on Inclusiveness, committees where they are well-represented.

Another question led to some discussion of the relationship between being a woman in philosophy and feminist philosophy. Since much of the available support for women in philosophy revolves around feminist philosophy, women who do not identify themselves as feminist philosophers sometimes feel that they have nowhere to turn. Somehow, I felt that this issue was never fully addressed. The conversation always turned back to feminist philosophy without addressing the question of women philosophers specifically and separately. I have posted on this issue previously here.

This last issue intersects with my personal. Coming out of graduate school in 1980 I saw myself as a philosopher of science and not as a feminist philosopher. When asked if I could teach feminist philosophy at a job interview, I politely replied that though I was prepared to teach in new areas, this was not my area of specialization or competence. At that time, I didn't feel an affinity for feminist thought and though I considered myself a feminist, I did not see that there was any connection between feminism and the philosophy that I did. By the end of the decade, I realized that many of the issues interesting to me in philosophy of science were the issues that feminist philosophers of science were working on, but I also was beginning to recognize that many of the choices that I had made and the insecurities that I felt as a philosopher were constrained and sometimes shaped by the fact that I was a woman. This was the beginning of the integration of my professional and personal life.

My overall assessment of the panel? I think that continuing to search for strategies to change the ideology of philosophy is a good idea and having conversations like these is one of the many steps that can be taken. But there was a lot of exhaustion and discouragement on the faces and in the voices of those who were there. I think the panelists were more upbeat than the audience, perhaps because we were each engaged in some sort of activity that we felt was contributing.


Resources:

Web resources or books about programs or containing data (most mentioned on SWIP-L or FEAST-L):

• Unlocking the Clubhouse (book about Carnegie Mellon’s program to attract women into computer science)
• Virginia Valian’s gender equity project: http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/genderequity/equitymaterials.html

Barnard study that Alison Wylie co-authored: Women, Work and the Academy Report on-line:

• UW website: http://faculty.washington.edu/aw26/WorkplaceEquity/BCRW-WomenWorkAcademy_08.pdf
• BCRW conference website (with podcast of panel: Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, Virginia Valian): http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/womenandwork/description.htm
• ADVANCE programs. No specific site chosen here, but “ADVANCE” programs are around the country for gender equity (science-focused).
• Collegium of Black Women Philosophers http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cbwp/
• New site started by Noelle McAfee on which data will be posted. http://philosophydata.wikispaces.com.

APA-Committee on the Status of Women (there are two different “resource” links on the site):

• http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women
• List compiled by APA-CSW from volunteered information about MA and PhD programs, numbers of women and feminist friendly faculty, etc. http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women/GradPrograms2007.pdf• Faculty Productivity Index (FISP) http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=10&secondary=91&bycat=Go
• Julie Van Camp’s list of % of women teaching in Philosophy Ph.D.-granting departments http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html
• Kathryn Norlock worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to come up with these figures: http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/governance/committees/women/Women%20in%20the%20Profession%20CSW.pdf
• Feminist Philosophy Draft Exchange (a Google group that can be joined): http://groups.google.com/group/feministdraftexchange?hl=en&lnk=srg
• Sally Haslanger’s website lists many links to feminist sites including blogs: http://web.mac.com/shaslang/Sally_Haslanger/Links,_etc..html
• Symposium on Gender, Race, and Philosophy http://web.mac.com/shaslang/SGRP/Welcome.html

Blogs:

• Feminist Philosophers: http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com
• Noelle McAfee’s blog: http://gonepublic.wordpress.com/
• Evelyn Brister’s blog: http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/
• e.g. on women’s stats: Using data from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d06/tables/xls/tabn258.xls

My Pacific APA

Last week the Pacific Division of the APA met. For a very brief, visual summary, see this post at Feminist Philosophers. I found the meeting truly interesting for a change. It wasn’t so much the sessions, though there were good sessions, but rather the professional dynamics that were visible in more informal interactions, though these “informal interactions” were fueled by the sessions. Here are my “highlights”, though some of them might be more appropriately referred to as “lowlights”. I acknowledge that this report on my Pacific APA may bear little or no resemblance to your APA!

• A P-SWIP/BayFAP reception where I had several fascinating conversations. One was about the question of wanting to live a life that addresses issues of social relevance and doing philosophy of science. Are these different impulses? If not, how do we integrate them and yet still do work that is judged to be good by the standards of the field. This conversation was followed by another about the ongoing and so little changed sexism that female graduate experience. The latter was particularly disconcerting to me. I left graduate school 28 years ago and the stories that I was hearing were too similar to my own experience. The reports that male graduate students (at least some) truly believe that female graduate students get all the jobs was particularly worrying.
  

• A Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science that had 55 articles only 5 of which were by female philosophers and two of those were co-authored with males. More disturbing is that there was only one article discussing feminist philosophy of science (by Cassandra Pinnick) and the theme of that article was that there was nothing of value that it had to offer and that feminist should stay out of science and stick to politics!

• A memorial session for Richard Rorty which reminded me of the startling experience of the meta-philosophical critique, a possibility that had not yet occurred to me when I read it as I finished graduate school and something that the experience above remind me is so sorely needed.

• A mini-conference on Making Philosophy of Science More Socially Relevant organized by Nancy Cartwright, Sophia Efstathiou, Helen Longino, Katie Plaisance. These sessions were an example of where one might go if one engages in such a critique and a hopeful sign that at least some philosophers are interested in integrating all the aspects of their lives as philosophers and participants in their social and political life.

• Blogging connects you to people! Several people came up to me and recognized my name from blogging both on Knowledge and Experience and here. I also got to know some of the bloggers who contribute regularly to the blogs that I read.
  

Update: Check out Philosophy's Sexism at the APA particularly the comments. I think these are discussions we need to be having. What are we ourselves doing to keep these sexist practices in place?

Women in Philosophy: What's Next?

The APA's Committee on the Status of Women is sponsoring a special session at the Pacific Division meeting next week in Pasadena (see the complete program here).

Thursday, March 20
1:00-4:00 p.m.

Topic: Strategizing Changes in the Culture and Ideology of Philosophy
Chair: Robin S. Dillon (Lehigh University)
Ann Garry (California State University–Los Angeles)
Alice MacLachlan (York University)
Lindsay Thompson (Johns Hopkins University)
Sharon Crasnow (Riverside Community College-Norco)

You will see that the program I have listed here is slightly different from that in the printed program given that two of the scheduled panelists will be unable to attend. The idea of the session is that it is a follow-up to the Central Division session of last year blogged about at Lemmings and at Knowledge and Experience. One of the key features of that Central Division session was a paper by Sally Haslanger, "Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)" that has since been widely distributed.

The Central Division session started off a lively discussion not only on those blogs but also on several feminist philosophy listserves including the SWIP-list and the FEAST-list. The upcoming session is designed as a way of keeping the conversation going by looking at what as happened since and discussing some concrete projects that address the low participation and limited persistence of women in philosophy. So Alice MacLachlan will discuss a Feminist Publishing Support group that she has set up online and Lindsay Thompson will discuss her participation in a university-wide initiative on the status of women.

The format will be a panel discussion rather than formal papers and the hope is that we will be doing some serious brainstorming. I will report back on the results after the session. Please join us if you are in Pasadena.