Why Do Women Leave Philosophy?
Philosophers’ volume 16, no. 6 1. When do women leave philosophy? Imprint march 2016 In 2012 in the United States, for every 100 men graduating with a col- lege degree, 141 women graduated.1 For decades now, more women have been enrolled in American universities than men. Yet, during these same decades, the proportion of women who major in philos- ophy has remained stagnant, hovering below one-third. So, while al- WHY DO WOMEN LEAVE most 60% of college graduates are now women, only 30% of philoso- phy majors are women (Department of Education, 2013; Paxton et al., 2012). In the humanities, religion and theology (35.6%) is the closest PHILOSOPHY? SURVEYING major to philosophy when it comes to the underrepresentation of fe- male majors. Among all majors, the only ones with similarly low ratios are economics (31%), physics (19.7%), computer science (22%), and en- gineering (20%).2 STUDENTS AT THE With women getting just 30% of philosophy bachelor’s degrees, it’s no surprise that the ratio of women to men is so low among philos- ophy graduate students (30%) and professors (20.7%) (Paxton et al., INTRODUCTORY LEVEL 2012; Norlock, 2012).3 The underrepresentation and treatment of fe- male graduate students and professors in philosophy has, for good rea- son, received increasing attention in recent years. But there has been limited discussion, and very few empirical investigations, of why so Morgan Thompson∗, Toni Adleberg†, Sam many women say goodbye to philosophy just after being introduced to it. In this article, we offer our initial attempts to gather data to test Sims‡, Eddy Nahmias§ various hypotheses aimed at answering this question and to suggest University of Pittsburgh∗, University of California, San Diego†, 1.
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