Some useful tips from Feminist Philosophers

Here are some concrete suggestions for taking steps to promote, support, and increase women in philosophy! Thanks to Jenny Saul at Feminist Philosophers!

AAP - Women in Philosophy

Why is it that the Australian Association of Philosophy (AAP) has prepared a report, "Improving the Participation of Women in the Philosophy Profession", and there is no comparable report from the APA? All I can say is that it makes me very sad that this is something that Australian Philosophers - and not just women philosophers, by the way - thought was worth spending energy and time on. In the U.S., the Committee on the Status of Women continues to try to call the issue to the attention of the APA, seemingly with little effect.

The report is available here and I found it through a post at Feminist Philosophers.

Reading the executive summary of the report I have noticed several things that suggest further lines of inquiry for those of us interested in this issue in the U.S. First, the executive summary indicates that women are disproportionately represented in part-time, non-secure, and casual teaching positions in Australian. This is something that I have suspected is true in the states as well I do not have the data to back it up. The study notes that there effects of women being in these positions which keep them from other positions. The lack of security impacts the ability to do research as does the heavy teaching load associated with such positions, for example. Second, women now appear to be hired proportionately to their numbers, though they continue to be under-represented in the academy (23% to our 21% - so the proportion is roughly similar). The very preliminary work that Miriam Solomon and John Clarke have done on this issue would seem to conform to the Australian finding. Third, Australia seems to have data on female participation in philosophy classes at the undergraduate level which shows that while 55% of undergraduate philosophy students are female it falls each year till 4th year female participation is 47%. (First year doctorate research is 39%, by the way.) The numbers that I was able to find are philosophy female baccalaureate degrees - 30.8% in 2008. While it is not clear that these are figures that it is appropriate to compare it would seem that are starting out behind Australia in the number of women that are studying philosophy to begin with! I would be curious to explore this further.

I have yet to dig into this report more completely and other projects will probably prevent me from doing so right now. The current and forthcoming issues of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Feminism have articles on these issues - analysis in the current issue and suggestions for strategies forthcoming in the fall. While I think it is great that the Committee on the Status of Women continues to support these inquiries, why is it that it appears that only women in the profession seem to think this is an issue? Surely it is a concern for the profession as a whole, as our Australian counterparts have clearly seen!

The new issue of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy has been posted online. This issue includes the study by Miriam Solomon that I mention in the previous post. It also includes the papers from the Central Division 2007 session sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women, except for Sally Haslanger's article which was published in Hypatia (Sally Haslanger. “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone).” Hypatia 23 (2008): 210-23). There is also an additional article by Kathryn Norlock. I was a participant on that panel and so my article is there.

Kathryn Norlock makes some interesting points in her article, which is an extended argument for collecting data on women in philosophy. Most particularly I was chastened when she notes that one reason that we might think that we shouldn't collect the data is that "Women do enough service already. Women in academia are already well aware that we have limited time and resources. Every pursuit is a diversion from other pursuits, and when women in philosophy make it our task to do the work of disciplinary demography, a service which, in other fields, would be accomplished by a national organization, we succeed in adding to the service labors which women already over-perform."

This point hit home. In addition to this article, I will have another in a collection of papers from a second, follow-up panel. This will appear in the fall issue of the newsletter. I have spent quite a bit of time on the issue over the course the last several years, so much so that when I was lamenting my inability to focus on my primary research project, science and values, my partner pointed out that I had spent so much time on women in philosophy that it was no wonder that I hadn't done anything else!

Take a look at the articles if you have not already. Obviously I think this is worth continuing to worry about.

More on women in philosophy

Sally Haslanger has posted data on women in philosophy at the "top 20" schools in the 2009 Leiter Report. It is posted here but I have copied it below since it seems that some people have had trouble accessing the information.

School	Rank	%women of tenured	%women of full-time	%women of all faculty
NYU	1	5	17	14
Rutgers	2	10	10	19
Princeton	3	7	21	18
Pittsburgh	4	5	8	10
U. Michigan	5	18	18	16
Harvard	6	36	30	21
MIT	6	20	17	25
Yale	8	36	39	33
UCLA	9	25	21	26
UC Berkeley	9	23	27	20
Stanford	9	24	26	21
UNC Chapel Hill	9	22	19	16
Columbia	13	28	35	33
U. Arizona	13	25	24	23
CUNY Grad Ctr	15	22	22	22
Notre Dame	15	12	15	17
Brown	17	25	27	25
Cornell	17	31	25	29
USC	17	17	14	21
UTexas Austin	20	11	14	10
Total (top 10)		18	20	19
Total (top 20)		19	21	20

Julie van Camp has been keeping track of the percentage of women in tenure-track positions at 98 institutions for quite some time (at least since 2004), though her information hasn't been updated since last year (4/14/2008). She notes the following for the "top 54" Leiter ranked institutions:

"Percentage of women on tenured/tenure-track appointments at Top-54 Doctoral Programs in Gourmet Report: 19.61%
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Average percentage of women at the Top 54 doctoral programs: 19.85%

Median percentage of women at Top-54 Doctoral Programs: 20%

Data taken from Departments' own faculty listings on the Web, as linked above, as of 4/14/2008"

The complete information is available at http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html

Though there is much to be said about this state of affairs the one thing that I would like to point out is that things aren't changing much.

The percentage of philosophy PhDs that are women is roughly 27% and has been right around 27% for at least the last 10 years. The Committee on the Status of Women is working on getting data about the what percentage of women are hired for the jobs advertised in JFP (Jobs for Philosophers) and that ought to be available for the 2007-2008 job search soon. Preliminary information indicates that it is most definitely not the case that the women are getting all the jobs, contrary to rumor.

The APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy will be publishing two issues that address this problem based on two CSW sponsored APA panels: the Central in 2007 and the Pacific in 2008. Watch for them.

New blog, new philosophy search engine, and a new post of women in the profession

Several interesting things have been happening online over the last week. First, there is a new philosophy of science group blog: It's Only a Theory. Posts so far have mostly been about the nature of scientific theories and specifically about the semantic view of theories. The blog seems to be an offshoot of a discussion from the HOPOS list that was started by Gabriele Contessa and then moved over to the blog. I think it is a great idea and I look forward to the extension of the discussion into other areas of philosophy of science.

The next exciting development is the launch of an online research engine for philosophy papers. We have David Bourget and David Chalmers of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University to thank for this development. I am thrilled. I particularly like the feature that allows one to browse the latest philosophy journals. Particularly for someone who is not at an institution with deep journal resources this is a wonderful feature. One might quibble with the categories that they are using, but first, they are very self-aware about their choices and acknowledge that other interests might produce a different categorization, and second, they are open to suggestions and this feature is likely to rapidly evolve. It also has this wonderful, self-correcting feature that allows one to upload papers that the search engine might have missed or works in progress. I will post some thoughts on this in relation to feminist philosophy in another post (soon).

Finally, at Lemmings, Brit Brogaard raises the question of why there are so few female speakers at conferences (Female speakers: a rarity). There is one comment that reinforces one of her hypotheses: there just aren't that many women in the conference field (in this case, philosophy of mind). A quick reminder about the numbers of women in philosophy (check out Knowledge and Experience for the a good account of current numbers - left hand column of the blog) also helps with part of the explanation. There is more to fill out however. The lower numbers of women means that it is less likely that there are going to be women organizing the conferences, it means that the men organizing the conferences are going to be less likely to think of women to invite, and so on. The aggregation of these small effects perpetuates the absence of women on these programs and their inclusion in the subsequent published volumes and so on. But wait! Here are some conferences that don't seem to have that problem. Check out the webpages for FEAST, SAF (Society for Analytical Feminism), and the interdisciplinary group FEMMSS. One might argue that the problem is that women are only liberally included (in fact, they dominate) when the topics are explicitly feminist. That, in itself, does not seem all that surprising but when you put together that information with the point that women seem to be so poorly represented in other venues, I think it is clear that there is a problem.

Update: I just noticed that I had missed another reference to women and conferences at Feminist Philosophers.

A Psychotherapist's Observation

I was in San Francisco over the weekend and while wandering around the de Young Museum looking at American art, S and I ran into some people that he knew. One of these was a psychotherapist from a mid-western urban center. Her patients were almost entirely from one of the major universities located where she lived. We chatted a bit in that way that one does when you are trying to get to know another person a little and very quickly. In the course of that discussion, I told her that I was a philosopher. "Many of my patients are graduate students and the women in philosophy and the sciences are really struggling." She told me that she had one woman patient who had recently just given up and quit, finding the environment in her graduate program too inhospitable, particularly after two of her female friends quit. "What is it about women and philosophy?" she asked me. I pointed out that it could simply be that there were fewer women in the field that made it harder for women to enter it, but of course this isn't a very good explanation because many of the fields where women are now 50% were fields where men once were the majority. Then I offered some of the other explanations that are sometimes offered. That there is the emphasis on the mind in philosophy and the association of women with the body is possible explanation of why there are fewer women. I didn't get very far with this line of thought because we were joined by another couple and dropped the conversation. This was just as well I think because I didn't really have a good, coherent explanation, though I would have been interested in exploring it with her.

Here was someone outside of the profession commenting on a feature of it that so many of us have noticed from the inside. I felt something almost like relief that this psychotherapist was providing independent confirmation. No, we are not imagining it. Other people have noticed as well. I would have loved to have known more about her patient, the other women who had left the program, and so on. Was there something in particular about this program or is it a more general feature of philosophy that was the problem? I am not committed to any particular explanation but rather suspect that there are a variety of expanatory factors that all contribute to varying degrees in specific causes but that they may be all causally relevant in a variety of ways that are difficult to sort out. Investigating by asking people why they leave instead of just guessing (and by "asking" I mean asking through good quantitative methodology) seems like an essential first step to understanding what is and is not causally relevant.

I hesitated to post this story because some of the comments about philosophers and the APA more specifically have been focused on how unpleasant the profession is for women and the psychotherapist's experience would seem to support that. I am wondering how useful it is to dwell on the negative. Here is another confirmation that it is bad for women in the profession (at least in this one urban university's philosophy graduate program). What are we to make of it? Reporting that the profession is particularly difficult for women is important for audiences that do not know this, but most of the readers of this blog are aware of it already, so this story has limited usefulness beyond reinforcing what we already believe. But noting that the story is true and that its truth is not particularly helpful in moving us to action is itself worth pointing out. It is important to be clear about, acknowledge, and document the fact that there are not many women in the field, but this is just the beginning. From here we need to move to the next step. How do we re-create philosophy as a profession that doesn't drive women into therapy but rather is part of a fulfilling life? We don't really need more evidence that this is not where philosophy is at the moment but rather ideas and plans about how to be different. Still, I would have liked to have finished that conversation.

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

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.

Feminist philosophers and women philosophers

There is an interesting discussion unfolding on the SWIP list over the last couple of days. It began with some questions about both the validity and the usefulness of the Leiter rankings for women and/or feminists going into philosophy. It was suggested that an alternative ranking system for feminist-friendly programs might be appropriate. By the way, there is a listing of feminist-friendly programs at the CSW website linked through the APA website, here. You'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page. Note this information is not a ranking. These are programs that are self-reported as feminist-friendly and the information here is of the sort that can help people make judgments for themselves. Anyway, as the discussion on the SWIP list has progressed a number of questions have been raised, among them the question of the connection between being a woman philosopher and being a feminist philosopher.

There is certainly some reason to think that there would be an overlap between these two. At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to think that they are not equivalent. Most particularly, it seems reasonable to think that there is no requirement for women to focus on gender issues purely because they are women. There are many women philosophers who have no interest in feminist philosophy, even though they might count themselves to be feminists. And then there are women philosophers who are antagonistic to both feminist philosophy and feminism. Being a woman philosopher does not ensure any particular attitude towards feminism or feminist philosophy.

There are a number of things that could be said about this and I am not really sure what I think about it at the moment. I began my career having no interest in feminist philosophy, though I was sympathetic to feminism. It wasn't until the early 90s, 10 years out of graduate school, that I started working on issues in feminist philosophy of science. Before that I was occasionally asked if I could teach feminist philosophy, I suppose because I was a woman. I refused to do so, because I thought it was a weird question and resented the assumption, but over the years it became clearer to me that as a woman doing philosophy, I was finding it increasingly difficult to separate my intellectual from my pragmatic struggles (what sort of jobs I had, how I was perceived by my peers, how I perceived myself, my abilities, what problems I felt capable of tackling). It is this latter set of concerns that makes me sometimes wonder whether it really is possible to completely separate feminist philosophy from being a woman doing philosophy, no matter what you are working on. I wonder this even though I know that the "proper" attitude to have is that these two issues are distinct. Still, I think I am puzzled about this because it brings me face-to-face with the question of how integral gender is to any and all human activities. I am not really sure what it means to claim that gender issues are or are not relevant in a particular case, because I am not entirely sure how I would know. I think I feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are are more salient in some cases and for some issues than for others. But whatever the salience of gender to the issues that we are working on, isn't what we want is that our gender is not a roadblock to our interests and our pursuit of those interests. Isn't this the underlying problem in the discussion about the low numbers of women in philosophy, the low number of female applicants for jobs in philosophy, and most importantly, because it suggests that women are being discouraged or even driven out of the field, the decline in the number of women who are in the profession after receiving their PhDs?

I am not sure of the answers and I think it is worth questioning some of the assumptions, but I am very happy that this discussion is taking place.

Has the Time Finally Come?

Over the last several weeks and perhaps more gradually over the last year or so there seems to have been an increasing awareness of the many ways in which women are less incorporated into the world of academic philosophy than men are. During my life as a philosopher I have found a sense of being excluded puzzling and difficult in a variety of ways, but I have found it equally disturbing that there really just hasn't been terribly much awareness of this fact.

But now we are have a moment when the discussion is being fed by an excellent series of posts by Evelyn Brister at Knowledge and Experience , picked up at Feminist Philosophers, and continued on the SWIP-list. These online discussions are echoes of others earlier this year. The issues seem to be gaining some traction. So much so that now, people are beginning to talk about how to do something to at least keep the conversation going, but maybe more importantly to begin to do something to change the circumstances.

So what to do? Here are some suggestions:

• I am very pro more data collection. I have been thinking for some time that what we need is collection of both quantitative and qualitative data about women in philosophy AND women who leave philosophy. There has been at least one SWIP post in the latest discussion that has looked at this question.
• Also along the lines of data collection, Sally Haslanger has been looking at women philosophers and journals. We need more of this as well. She has some resources available here.

Those are more old ideas, that is ideas that aren't really mine but I am adding here because I think they are good ones. This final one is a newish idea and perhaps some people will not like it because it sounds a little "old-fashioned", a bit like consciousness raising or something along those lines. But here goes anyway.

• I think that it is worthwhile for those of us who have persisted in philosophy to think hard about the ways in which gender has played a role in our lives as philosophers. I am saying this based on my own shifting understanding of these issues. Throughout my career many of the choices that I have made as well as many of the forces that shaped my choices turn out to have been influenced by my gender in a variety of ways that I was not aware of at the time. But more to the point, I worked very hard not to see them as being related to my gender at all. In the end I think that I did myself a disservice because of this but more importantly I think that failing to discuss how this happens harms others because they are apt to repeat more head-in-the-sand approach. I think it is important not just to think about it but to talk about it, not to bemoan the hard time that women philosophers have but to understand what needs to be changed and why.
  

So there are some suggestions for action. I am optimistic. I think we may be on the verge of some new ways of thinking about women in philosophy.

Update: I've just come across a book that seems to be doing the sort of thing that I am talking about above. It is not specifically by or about philosophers but more generally about women in the academy. See Mama, PhD.

What do the Numbers Mean?

Over at Knowledge and Experience Evelyn Brister is posting a series on women in philosophy. What is really interesting is that for PhDs in philosophy, slightly under 30% are women and undergraduate women philosophy majors appear to be a very similar percentage. This would suggest that it isn't exactly a pipeline problem in philosophy but something more systemic. A commenter at Knowledge and Experience notes this.

There are plenty of questions that are suggested by these numbers. One is why is the percentage of undergraduate philosophy BAs lower than in so many other fields (57.5 % of all undergraduate degrees were earned by women in 2005)? But it is really interesting that the pipeline doesn't appear to be leaking much between undergraduate majors and PhDs. I want to know more. I want to know why and how the women that go into philosophy manage to stay in philosophy through graduate school and what happens to drive them out of philosophy once they leave graduate school.

We know that women leave academia at greater rates than men, but is this worse in philosophy? A quick look at 2005 figures from the Digest of Education Statistics shows 45% of the PhDs awarded in all fields are given to women and 39% of full-time employees at degree granting institutions are women. This suggests a 6% loss of ground for women from graduate school to the academy. In philosophy, the average is about 27% of PhDs are women and the percentage of full-time women philosophers in the degree granting institutions appears to be around 21%. This is also a 6% loss so perhaps the issue here is less philosopher per se but rather the academy. The low philosophy figures show that there is still an issue for philosophy nonetheless. At any rate, there is a lot to find out.

I posted a comment at Knowledge and Experience and Evelyn responded asking if the paper I gave at the Committee for the Status of Women 2007 Central Division session on this issue is on the web. I post it here: "What do the Numbers Mean?"

More: There is a new post in this discussion at Knowledge and Experience.

Mothering and Philosophy

Noelle McAfee has a post at Gone Public on Women,Children, and Philosophy. She speculates that there are fewer women with children in philosophy, perhaps because philosophy is modeled more closely after the sciences than the humanities. Is the question whether women in philosophy have fewer children than other women with academic careers or is it that they have fewer children than women in general? If we are going to draw a conclusion about women in philosophy we need to see if it is true that women in philosophy have fewer children than women in the academy more broadly. I do not think we have evidence for that claim at this time. I am not even sure that we have anything that would qualify as anecdotal evidence. What we do have evidence for is that women in the academy are less likely to have children than women more generally and that having children is correlated with less professional success, if we equate success with academic rank. The primary source for this is research done by Mason and Goulden (references below).

I was the guest editor for the most recent edition (Fall 2007) of the APA Newsletter of Feminism and Philosophy in which several women philosophers share their thoughts on combining philosophy and family. I was motivated to put together this collection of papers because I am fascinated by the ways that philosophy and the other parts of life intertwine. This is a different sort of enterprise than searching for generalizations however. I think that one of the things that these papers show is the great difficulty of generalizing. Mothering and philosophy may not go together particularly well, but this is probably primarily because mothering and any demanding career is challenging. But I would love to investigate this in more detail. I have been dying to do exactly this sort of research about women philosophers particularly. Any ideas on how to start?

Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden. “Do Babies Matter (Part II)? Academe 90.6 (Nov. 2004a): 10-15.

Mason and Goulden. “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women.” Academe 2002.

Mason and Goulden. “Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy.” Annals, AAPSS 596 (Nov. 2004b).

Mason and Goulden, “Do Babies Matter?” 2002.