Any department that does not think about the climate it is creating for its students is ignoring a factor which is highly relevant to the education its students receive.

We shouldn’t ignore a possible explanation of this: that affirmative action is (in one respect) working. Women are doing better in the non-blind hiring process than they are in the blind refereeing process, because there are rules in the hiring process in place to ensure fairness, and (additionally) hiring and admissions committees are interested in making their faculties more diverse. Many (I would guess most) philosophy departments are trying to diversify their faculty and student populations by actively seeking out qualified women.

That’s compatible both with the existence and non-existence of unconscious discrimination in blind refereeing (of the sort described by Brian W. at his blog). It’s compatible, as well, with the possibility (hinted at by Brian) that the percentage of papers published in philosophy by women is more or less the same as the percentage of papers submitted by women.

It seems to me that the big lesson of Haslanger’s essay is this: the problem of sexism in philosophy, whatever it is, is not best explained by discriminatory hiring and admissions practices.

One might draw a further conclusion: that what all this shows is that affirmative action has failed, in this respect: we’ve got all these rules in place to prevent discrimination, and most departments are actively trying to diversify, but our departments still aren’t diverse, especially our graduate student populations, and our journals are even less diverse, and women philosophers, with few exceptions, experience the sorts of things that Haslanger describes in the second section of her paper, on “Outright Discrimination.” We could admit every woman who applies to our graduate programs, make sure every woman with a PhD has a tenure-track job, and (I suspect) this wouldn’t do anything significant to combat the problem of diversity in philosophy if we philosophers (both men and women) are all still sexists who treat women philosophers badly. The worry: affirmative action isn’t doing anything to change us, in the ways that we need to be changed for sexism (both in philosophy and elsewhere) to go away. (Not that that tells us what would change us, but at least we’d know what doesn’t work.)

It’s hard to know what to make of this response, Sally, except that you’re an elitist. While you’re right that the analytic depts dominate the Leiter rankings, most active philosophers in North America—if you deign to include the ones in the minor departments—are non-analytic. And perhaps even most practising philosophers are women, and they have an easier time in those downmarket departments. I don’t speak with authority on this matter. But it’s worth YOUR taking it seriously since you pretend to be speaking for philosophy as a discipline. In fact, I might be so bold as to suggest that philosophy’s recent fixation on the Leiter Report has only exacerbated the alpha-male tendency in the field, which you yourself seem have to have gotten sucked into. Put it this way: Suppose you were to find that gender relations were more equitable in lower ranked departments, would you be willing to move to one of them in a geographically hospitable location? Or, have I missed your strategy for reversing the gender bias endemic to the top ranked departments?

Christian said (in his capacity as a previous Cog Sci editor) that philosophers do not have a large presence in the Cog Sci community because they “eat their young:” philosophers’ peer-reviews of submitted paper/talk proposals are so negative that the Cog Sci editors don’t know whether to include the poorly reviewed papers or not. To me, Haslanger’s comparison between the representation of women in Cog Sci versus philosophy is interesting because, although both can be quite analytical and abstract, there is, apparently, a clear difference in culture between these disciplines.

I don’t know how well I’d have learned (or thriven in my pre-tenure years) if I’d had to cope with the behavior that Sally describes, that I have heard many times from others (including some of these commenters) and occasionally observed myself. Maybe it would have been a brilliant spur to my own determination. I’m glad I haven’t had to find out, and don’t really think of that as revealing that I’m co-dependent or otherwise unusually psychologically flawed.

I said in my post that reversing the roles doesn’t aid the imagination much. But here’s an experience I have had—that of being the sole father in a group of parents of toddlers. I think the women involved actually wanted to be welcoming to a man (a friend of mine kept bringing me along). But in fact it was very uncomfortable for me (and, I think, for them). In this case, not especially important for me or them; but in the case of grad school, a good deal more so.

Not, of course, as important as eliminating poverty, or averting or stopping terrible wars, or many other great evils. And of course, if you’re in no position to improve the quality of a workplace, but are just on the receiving end of prejudice/slights/discrimination/harrassment/etc, then borealis’s attitude is probably a good one to adopt. But I’m not on the receiving end of any of that, and like most tenured academics Sally and I both have some ability to influence the quality of the environment in our own departments, and, through papers like hers and discussions like this, in others. Indifference would, again, be very convenient for us.

#34: I “bang on” about analytic philosophy departments because I am an analytic philosopher and I love analytic philosophy. It is also the dominant paradigm in the US (and the UK and Australia) and is the focus of all of the top graduate schools. I myself am interested in and sympathetic to some non-analytic philosophy, but insofar as one can generalize about anglophone professional philosophy, one is generalizing about analytic philosophy. And I haven’t noticed that women are doing better in philosophy programs in Europe; rather, they are doing much worse. So it is not plausible to me that once we get away from analytic methods, everything is fine.

#35: Backlash against “assumed” lowering of standards by affirmative action is a serious problem. If the studies of evaluation bias are correct, however, then the current standards for men that enable them to fill the academic ranks are actually lowered compared to the standards women are held to. So we already have “affirmative action” for men. Although I support some affirmative action policies (for women and minorities) I worry that imposing affirmative action “from the outside,” can backfire. I’d like to see more education about evaluation bias, stereotype threat, etc. so admissions committees, referees, search committees, can be more accurate in their evaluations. A model of this has been developed at the University of Michigan through the NSF ADVANCE program.

#38: It is an illusion to think that only the over-sensitive or inexperienced (or academics) suffer from the effects of stereotype threat and solo status. In the studies I cite, the subjects are not graduate students/academics. These studies show that white men also suffer cognitive difficulties when they are “solos”. “Being treated identically as their peers” is not the issue; learning to chuckle at outrageous comments is not the solution. Social class membership makes a difference to one’s performance in relation to others whether you are male or female, White or non-White, academic or non-academic. The effects are not trivial. If we want women and minorities to gain access to contexts now dominated by white males, we have to deal with this.