Our "Salvation": Women's Intervention in Philosophy

New School for Social Research ♦ Department of Philosophy Lecture invited for the NYC PSWIP 2nd Annual Colloquium Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & The Virtues of Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground: On the Status of Women in Philosophy Wednesday, April 8th 2009, 2-4 PM New School for Social Research Machinist Conference Room, Mezzanine 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003

2016

Why has gender equality progressed so much more slowly in philosophy than in other academic disciplines? Here, I address both factual and theoretical matters relating to the causes, effects, and potential redress of the lack of women in philosophy. First, I debunk extant claims that women are more likely than men to disagree with their philosophy professors and male peers; that women are more sensitive to disagreements in the philosophy classroom than men are; and that the gender imbalance in philosophy is no worse than in many cognate disciplines. Second, I discuss ways in which the nature of philosophical inquiry and debate may provide uniquely strong opportunities for person-perception to hinder progress toward egalitarian treatment of interlocutors. And third, I argue that a diversity of perspectives in philosophy is essential not only for reasons of social justice, but also for philosophical progress. Efforts to improve philosophy should therefore countenance the role of person-perception in the practice of philosophical debate. For philosophy to become more diverse, the steps the profession takes to achieve that goal will have to go beyond—and not merely match—the steps taken to increase the numbers of women and otherwise underrepresented individuals in other fields.

Hypatia, 2011

Philosophy has the dubious distinction of attracting and retaining proportionally fewer women than any other field in the humanities, indeed, fewer than in all disciplines but for the most resolutely male-dominated of the sciences. As Marije Altorf notes in her contribution to this cluster, ''the debate on the sparseness of women in philosophy often starts with shocking numbers or with anecdotes about means of exclusion'' (this issue, 388), and certainly there is much to report on this front. It is striking however, that while the contributors to this ''found cluster'' 1 take such evidence as their point of departure, their focus is on questions about the implications of under-representation-not just of women but of diverse peoples of all kinds in philosophy, as Kristie Dotson characterizes the problem-and on devising effective strategies for change. I begin with some of the depressing figures presupposed by the article, the four Musings, and two reviews that make up this cluster, and then briefly identify key themes that cross-cut these discussions. Although those interested in counting find it challenging to assemble robust data on the representation of women in philosophy, current wisdom is that women have earned between 23% and 33% of doctorates in philosophy since 1997 (Van Camp 2010; based on the Survey of Earned Doctorates), and currently make up 21% of those employed teaching philosophy in colleges and universities in the United States (Norlock 2009; from payroll data reported by the National Center for Education Statistics). In some contexts the representation of women is lower: for example, Solomon and Clarke report that women make up just 15% of the membership of the Philosophy of Science Association, with little change in the last five years (Solomon and Clark 2006; 2010); and Van Camp's summary of women faculty in U.S. doctoral programs shows that close to a quarter have 15% or fewer women in tenured or tenure-track positions. 2 These are striking statistics when you consider that women have received more than half the graduate degrees (across all disciplines) granted in the United States since 2004 3 and, by 2006, constituted between a third and half the full-time faculty teaching at U.S. universities and colleges (West and Curtis 2006, 5-7). In the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), where the case has been made that the ''needless waste of the

European journal of analytic philosophy

It is clear that philosophy has a “woman problem”. Despite the recent acceptance of this fact, it is less clear what ought to be done about it. In this paper, we argue that philosophy as a discipline is uniquely well-positioned to think through the marginalisation suffered by women and other minorities. We therefore interrogate two values that already undergird conversations about inclusion— representation and intersectionality—in order to think about the path ahead. We argue that, once we have done so, it becomes clear that the slow pace of improvement over the last few decades is unacceptable and more radical steps need to be taken. First, we outline the current state of women in philosophy focusing on three areas: levels of employment, publishing, and sexual harassment. Then we turn to representation and intersectionality respectively. We conclude by arguing that many women and people of colour have been arguing for a more radically diverse philosophy for many years. What we are ...

Hypatia Reviews Online, 2015

What Needs to Change? is a collection of articles addressing the question: "what it is about philosophy-the über-rational discipline-that has left it, along with several of the science, technology, and engineering (STEM) disciplines and a couple of the social science ones (notably economics and political science), lagging well behind a general trend toward improvement in women's representation and standing in academia"? (1) The articles focus on the under-representation of women generally, and are written by professional philosophers in Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the US, about the institution of academic philosophy in their specific national contexts. An appendix provides useful empirical data on women in philosophy.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2012

Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Although women garner a little more than half of the PhDs awarded in the United States, and about 53 percent of those awarded in the Arts and Humanities, 2 slightly fewer than 30 percent of doctorates in philosophy are awarded to women. 3 And women's representation in the professoriate falls below that. 4 Why is philosophy so exceptional in this regard? My aim in this paper is not to answer this question but to contrast two different frameworks for addressing it. I call one model "Different Voices" and the other "The Perfect Storm"; I'll argue that we ought to adopt the second model and that we ought to abandon the first. Why are there so few women in philosophy? Women who are in the field have been speculating about this for quite a while, but interest in the question has suddenly surged, engaging men now as well as women. 5 Most recently, a paper addressing this issue by Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich has sparked intense controversy. 6 Buckwalter and Stich claim to have found evidence of gender differences in people's responses to common philosophical thought-experiments, and they speculate that these differences may help account for the dearth of women in the field. Their idea is that if women have different intuitions about standard thought-experiments than men do, and if men dominate philosophy, then women studying philosophy may come to the conclusion-or be told explicitlythat they just don't "get" philosophy-that philosophy is not the subject for them. More precisely, Buckwalter and Stitch's suggestion is that women may be victims of a "selection effect" within philosophy. If agreement with the philosophical consensus is taken to be a sine qua non of philosophical ability, individuals with non-orthodox intuitions will be filtered out. If that consensus is forged within a community that is almost all-male, then it will be men's intuitions that will constitute the philosophical mainstream. If women, then, have systematically different intuitions from men's, then their intuitions will be less likely than men's to agree with mainstream opinion, and thus more likely to be filtered out. Women, in short, will be disproportionately selected against. Now this suggestion-that there's something about philosophy and something about women that makes the one alien to the other-is not new. To choose one notable example: Kant notoriously held that women were generally incapable of abstract thought, that women's faculties of understanding were merely "beautiful," not "sublime" like men's. For this reason, the idea of a woman philosopher bs_bs_banner

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2014

The Torn Robe of Philosophy: Philosophy as a Woman in The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, 2020

This book introduces methodological concepts aimed at including women in the canon of the history of philosophy. The history of women philosophers is as long and strong as the history of philosophy, and this holds true not only for the European tradition, as the research of women philosophers of the past shows. The phenomenon of ignoring and excluding women in 19th and 20th century views on the history of philosophy was a result of the patriarchal tradition that ostracized women in general. In this book, leading feminist philosophers discuss methodologies for including women thinkers in the canon and curricula of philosophy. How does the recovery of women thinkers and their philosophies change our view of the past, and how does a different view of the past affect us in the present? Studying a richer and more pluralistic history of philosophy presents us with worlds we have never entered and have never been able to approach. This book will appeal to philosophers and intellectual historians wanting to view the history of philosophy in a new light and who are in favor of an inclusive perspective on that history.

Choice Reviews Online, 1998

A whistling woman and a crowing hen Will never come to a good end.-Midwestern proverb PHILOSOPHICAL APPEALS TO "HUMAN NATURE" Essentially positive conceptions of human nature have figured prominently in the normative theories of Western philosophers: Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and many others based their general ethical and political systems on substantive assumptions about the capacities and dispositions of human beings. Many of these views have been interpreted as affirming the inherent moral value and essential equality of all human beings, and a few have provided inspiration for emancipatory movements, including feminism. Nonetheless, for anyone who would find in these theories a message of universal equality, there is one immediate difficulty: none of the major philosophers intended their claims about the natural entitlements of "man" to be applied to women. 1 Contrary to what's maintained by many contemporary exegetes, it's unlikely that the philosophers' use of masculine terms in the framing of their theories was a "mere linguistic convenience." 2 For if one looks at the (very few) places at which the major philosophers explicitly discuss women, one finds that women are expressly denied both the moral potentialities and the moral perquisites that are supposed to accrue to "man" in virtue of "his" nature. 3 If "man" is generic, and women are "men," then how could this be? It's possible that the philosophers in question believed that men and women did not share a nature at all, in which case all their talk of "man" would be simply and literally talk of men. But this seems unlikely. Philosophers have not really wanted to claim that men and women are members of distinct kinds. Aristotle, Rousseau, and Kant, for example, who all made the possession of reason criterial of humanity, agreed that women could not plausibly be claimed to be utterly devoid of rationality. 4 Alternatively, then, the view must have been that men and women shared some sort of "human" nature, even while women differed from men in morally relevant respects.

Hypatia, 2013