Women In Philosophy

I am really happy that we have this community feature now, because I’ve wanted to link this article for ages.  Sally Haslanger , a philosophy professor at MIT, wrote this amazing article about women in philosophy in early 2008 called Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not By Reason (Alone).

Many laypeople seem to assume that philosophy, as one of the "humanities," must have at least a respectable amount of women working in it, if not an abundance — but this simply isn’t so.  While much discussion and controversy has surrounded the issue of gender equality (or the lack thereof) in the maths and sciences (see also the now infamous Larry Summers scandal), the stunning amount of discrimination against women in philosophy seems to slip under the radar. 

In any case, I think Ms. Haslanger’s article does an excellent job of opening up this issue and putting it in admirably clear and plain-spoken language, accompanied with some pretty revealing data.  This article should also be of interest to really anyone interested in feminist issues — I have to admit, I teared up a little bit when I read these amazing and bold first lines:

There is a deep well of rage inside of me.  Rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philosophy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the conditions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave.

She goes on to describe numerous appalling anecdotes of discrimination, both against herself and against others in the field, and then follows it up with a few appendicies of eye-opening hard data.  She also offers some interesting discussion of what it’s like to be a "solo," which is all too often the case for women and minorities both in grad school and as professors.  To begin with, less than 20 percent of faculty in the Top 20 departments are women.  However, this number starts to look awfully good when one considers how many top journals publish overwhelmingly male-authored articles (of the journals she lists, only one of them, Ethics , breaks 15 percent female authorship). 

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this article consists of the anecdotal stories she shares, in which she and others are constantly questioned, undermined, explicitly told that women "don’t have seminal ideas" (a terrible word choice there, heh), and intellectually ghettoized even as they stand as perhaps one of 2 women in a department of 18.  I myself have some similar stories (although mostly at the undergraduate level so far), in which women persuing philosophy are prone to a sort of two-pronged attack: We are often in a very small minority to begin with (I have been in a few classes where the male-to-female ratio was 4:1), and then it is simply assumed that we do not have the intellectual capacity for the "hard" stuff — which will affect the way we’re treated personally and professionally.  As Ms. Haslanger says:

My point here is that I don’t think we have to scratch our heads and wonder what on earth is going on that keeps women out of philosophy.  In my experience it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isn’t actively hostile towards women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act like a (traditional, white) man.