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Women in Philosophy This page intentionally left blank Women in Philosophy WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE? Edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women in philosophy: what needs to change? / edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–932561–0 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–932560–3 (alk. paper)— ISBN 978–0–19–932562–7 (updf) 1. Women philosophers. I. Hutchison, Katrina, editor of compilation. B105.W6W63 2013 190’.82—dc23 2013001689 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper { CONTENTS } Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Searching for Sofi a: Gender and Philosophy in the 21st Century 1 FIONA JENKINS AND KATRINA HUTCHISON 1. Women in Philosophy: Why Should We Care? 21 MARILYN FRIEDMAN 2. Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy 39 JENNIFER SAUL 3. Women and Deviance in Philosophy 61 HELEN BEEBEE 4. Singing the Post-discrimination Blues: Notes for a Critique of Academic Meritocracy 81 FIONA JENKINS 5. Sages and Cranks: The Diffi culty of Identifying First-Rate Philosophers 103 KATRINA HUTCHISON 6. Models and Values: Why Did New Zealand Philosophy Departments Stop Hiring Women Philosophers? 127 ADRIANE RINI 7. Not Just a Pipeline Problem: Improving Women’s Participation in Philosophy in Australia 143 SUSAN DODDS AND ELIZA GODDARD 8. Women In and Out of Philosophy 164 CATRIONA MACKENZIE AND CYNTHIA TOWNLEY 9. Rethinking the Moral Signifi cance of Micro-Inequities: The Case of Women in Philosophy 180 SAMANTHA BRENNAN 10. The Silencing of Women 197 JUSTINE MCGILL 11. Finding Time for Philosophy 215 MICHELLE BASTIAN vi Contents Appendix 1: Seeing the Trends in the Data 231 GLENYS BISHOP , WITH HELEN BEEBEE , ELIZA GODDARD , AND ADRIANE RINI Appendix 2: Statistical Analyses 253 GLENYS BISHOP Contributor Biographies 261 Index 265 { ACKNOWLEDGMENTS } This book would not have taken shape without the support and input of many people. It was initially motivated by a symposium held at the Australian National University (ANU) in August 2009. This symposium was funded by the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) and supported by the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Participants in the symposium highlighted the ongoing relevance of the questions posed by this volume. Of particular note was a keynote paper by Moira Gatens, as well as papers by Kristi Giselsson, Kyleigh Langrick, Hannah McCann, and Fiona Webster, that starkly high- lighted some of the problems female students in philosophy can face. Although these papers are not included in the volume for a range of reasons, they shaped the thinking of both editors and contributors. We would also like to thank a number of individuals and organizations for assistance with data collection. The AAP allowed us to use their data on wom- en’s participation in philosophy in Australia and provided some assistance from Eliza Goddard in her capacity as executive offi cer. Adriane Rini collected data from New Zealand to supplement the AAP’s Australasian data. Helen Beebee collected data on the situation of women in philosophy in the U.K. on behalf of the British Philosophical Association (BPA). Katherine Norlock was very helpful in providing us with her own and others’ data collection on the situation of women in philosophy in the U.S.A., much of which was done in conjunc- tion with the American Philosophical Association (APA). Canadian data were accessed from material published on the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) website, and we are grateful to those who compiled it. The people who read some or all of the chapters of the manuscript sug- gested changes and revisions that have made this a better book: many thanks to Gillian Brock, Havi Carel, David Chalmers, Joanne Faulkner, Rod Girle, Alan Hájek, Helen Keane, Rosanne Kennedy, Jeanette Kennett, Justine Kingsbury, Marguerite La Caze, Norva Lo, Mark Nolan, Pam Roberts, Kim Rubenstein, Emma Rush, Inge Saris, Marian Sawer, Susanna Schellenberg, Undine Sellbach, and Scott Wisor. Lorraine Code provided valuable advice on various matters, as well as reading and commenting on some chapters. Sally Haslanger offered great encouragement and practical support for this project from the outset. We would also like to thank Peter Ohlin, our com- missioning editor, for his invaluable enthusiasm for the project, and David Chalmers, who encouraged us to approach Oxford University Press in the fi rst viii Acknowledgments place. We are grateful to the three anonymous referees from OUP who provided helpful feedback through two rounds of review and did much to infl uence the fi nal structure of the manuscript. Our departments, the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU and the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, generously facili- tated the time spent working on this book. Finally, we each thank our lovely families for sharing the journey of discov- ery with us, through what has inevitably been a personal as well as a profes- sional project of research. Women in Philosophy This page intentionally left blank Introduction SEARCHING FOR SOFIA: GENDER AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 21ST CENTURY Fiona Jenkins and Katrina Hutchison It is not uncommon in certain fi elds of study that when academic women come to talk among themselves about their careers, powerful feelings of frustra- tion, hurt, and annoyance at their experiences start to surface. Sally Haslanger phrases it forcefully when she writes in an infl uential piece published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia in 2008: “There is a deep well of rage inside of me; rage about how I as an individual have been treated in philoso- phy; rage about how others I know have been treated; and rage about the condi- tions that I’m sure affect many women and minorities in philosophy, and have caused many others to leave” (210). In the discussion that ensues, this sense of rage should not be forgotten, although it gives way in the essays collected here, as in Haslanger’s own essay, to careful refl ection on how to make sense of such experience, how to fi nd an articulation of its form, structure, causes, and potential remedies. For women initiating and pursuing these discussions in philosophy, training in the discipline becomes a resource for careful analysis of the questions at stake. As has often been the case with the best feminist schol- arship, refl ection on lived experience, as well as the evidence of statistical data, becomes a stimulus for asking searching questions that probe broad social and institutional conditions. What may have begun, for individuals sharing their stories, as the paradoxically welcome discovery that it was not they alone who felt slights and disappointments, hostility, or simple lack of encouragement, becomes the emergent capacity to articulate the often subtle forms of injustice that shape persistent trends of exclusion. One of the questions this book addresses is what it is about philosophy—the über -rational discipline—that has left it, along with several of the science, tech- nology, 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. 2 Women in Philosophy There are considerable differences in patterns of change between areas of study and disciplines over the last 30 years or so, and progress in improving women’s representation has been very uneven. As Virginia Valian pointed out in her 1999 book Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women , a crucial dimension of this problem lies with the quite general cultural tendency to rate men’s achieve- ments more highly than those of women, an observable phenomenon that has been given substantive backing by a range of experiments in social psychology. Such judgments are supported by common gender schemas, that is, hypoth- eses shaping expectations about performance and behaviour that vary for men and women. Although such schemas shape judgment across a wide range of social interactions, they can become intensifi ed in certain settings where the expectations are supported, often in unremarked ways, by determinations of the salience or importance of features that make a person ‘belong’ to one group rather than another. Valian’s analysis of the importance of unconscious reliance upon gender schemas is important for several of the essays collected here, and it joins forces with a well-developed feminist argument that western philosophy was formed around an overlapping series of conceptual oppositions—reason/ emotion, mind/body, culture/nature—coding a hierarchical understanding of the relationship of masculine and feminine that can be discerned throughout the 2,500-year history of the subject.