Gender divides in Philosophy and other disciplines

Tbh I’m suprised the gap isn’t even bigger based on my experience- it’s pretty appalling. This is something of a discipline wide crisis and it should be treated as such by philosophers. Some of the causes are probably out of our control ( i.e women being socialised to believe that they cannot succeed in mathematics heavy domains like philosophy) but I can’t help but think a lot of the sin is at our end.

The ‘maths-heavy’ excuse does get trotted out a lot, but what does it say about subjects where women are under-represented *even compared to maths itself*? I’d have thought mathematics is the canonical example of a maths-heavy subject, but perhaps a specific kind of maths is meant (eg statistics, computer-assisted calculation or whatever) that doesn’t predominate in mathematics for its own sake. Or perhaps there is more going on.

@Colin, the math is more a side effect, I think. The observed pattern is probably more about approaches use in those fields, in particular that a sort of sharp reductionism is used a lot and valued a lot. Trying to boil down a part of reality to simple, less fuzzy patterns. Spherical cows and trolley problems, so to speak. After that, maths often becomes a useful tool to work with the models.

I still wouldn’t know why that should lead to gender disparities, to be honest.

“(Perhaps more controversially, I think Psychology and English Literature, at those levels, might also benefit from asking if there might be a structural problem with the way they are going about things)”

Two not completely unrelated questions:

Is it controversial to suggest that gender disparity of this magnitude in a scientific field is problematic?

What would be the goal here? to move the curves to the right a bit? to have every discipline near the 50% line? Or to increase women’s participation in specific fields? (e.g., engineering)?
Why would the latter two choices be preferable socially or be more just than the first?

I left Philosophy as a major during my Freshman year because it was a bunch of guys arguing with each other. Any statements I made in class were entirely ignored. Women leave fields that don’t want them around.

Psychology emphasizes inclusiveness and explicitly studies gender bias and other forms of bias. There are women who are professors acting as role models. No one in psychology thinks the presence of women is ruing the field, as occurs in other fields. I think psychology is doing something right, not something that needs to be reconsidered.

I wonder whether the breakdown for computer science is as badly skewed in other countries. I have some anecdotal evidence suggesting Asian women aren’t steered away from the “harder” topics in the way American women seem to be (don’t know whether this would have happened at their overseas universities or after they began working either).

I also think some (working class) women who might have been steered into a practical and apparently math-heavy career like IT thirty years ago when there were fewer options aren’t being steered that way anymore, but that is also anecdotal. And there’s also the increasingly entrepreneurial nature of computer science. Then again, I remember there being one other undergraduate woman in my CS classes in the mid-80s (from the liberal arts colleges, engineering school, and affiliated schools combined), but I’m not sure that can be right: the department I worked in right out of college was about 1/3 women. There were two woman professors in the department, one of whom was later the first woman at the university to get tenure in the sciences (on the other hand, she was doing computational linguistics, not a “hard CS” topic).

Arrogant assholes don’t like women, women don’t like arrogant assholes.

I wonder which subject decided on the correct basis to draw up the chart …

And also not to count statistics as part of mathematics, in the process pushing the parts of mathematics that *are* counted under the heading “mathematics” in the other direction. Hmm.

Being an economist, I had to note three things:

1. Ag econ is included in “Agriculture.” For some strange reason.

2. Within the non-psychology set of social sciences, more PhDs were awarded (in 2009) in economics than in any other field within the social sciences (political science was a distant second).

3. Econ had the smallest percentage of women receiving degrees, considerably lower than geography, which was second-worst.

It would be really great to get this kind of data for the EU. Preferably broken down by country for lots of fun comparisons.

This doesn’t explain psychology or English literature, unless the phenomenon of participation being contingent on others-of-same-sex-participation applies to men as well.
Why should it not?

Couple points:

1. I imagine the math/statistics numbers come from the AMS’s annual survey of doctorates awarded in the mathematical sciences. (Preliminary survey for 2010 is here – careful it’s a pfd.) That survey separates out statistics, mostly because statistics departments are separate from math departments in most places.

2. Unfortunately the doctorate numbers strongly underestimate the dominance of males in mathematics. There are a number of reasons for this, but two particular ones are:

(a) Women consistently get less research-oriented jobs than men, by a considerable margin. (See an interesting short article here. More pdf.) As a result, the proportion of female faculty in mathematics research departments is much lower than 30% even in young age cohorts.

(b) The inclusion of math biology in the math PhD’s, it’s the one sub-discipline skewing female.

3. I’d posit that the gender imbalance in some humanities disciplines is a result of the same gendering processes that cause the gender imbalance in mathematics and related fields – and in part it’s most likely a balancing reaction to it as well (with women being pushed into these disciplines by the sexist culture still predominating in math/engineering fields). It might also be useful to take note of the fact that academics in the sciences and engineering are better paid than those in the humanities. (Although that also applies to philosophy I suppose.)

I grew disenchanted with the Greek / German Idealist tradition during the final year of my B.A. Since then I’ve become a parent and read enough to notice the primacy of subsistence agriculture in history. I find the Plato-Descartes-Kant line absurdly irrelevant to the lived experience of raising children or (second-hand) trying to wring enough food from the earth to keep them from going hungry. I see little reason to keep teaching these stupid books.

@peter (#9): My experience is that pure mathematicians are fairly humble as a rule, and don’t tend to raise their voices much, but there’s a strong tendency in talks and papers to overestimate what the audience/reader understands or can deduce themselves, motivated not so much by machismo as a desire for brevity. (I suppose ‘macho code’ is a similar phenomenon.) This in itself can be quite intimidating, and it may be that men on average feel more able to ask ‘stupid questions’ and admit they don’t understand because there is a less of a threat that they will be judged stupid or ignorant for doing so.

Well, I studied physics, the worst field in the survey. These would be my diagnoses (based on observations in Holland, not the US, but ISTM the survey would come out similarly). Going back in time through a female physicists career, so to speak:

1. Sexism is a proven problem in the ‘hard’ sciences; women don’t get the same recognition for similar work. The effect is so significant I think it is mostly subconscious. I never heard a professor actually *say* that women were somehow less intelligent.

2. I noticed the women physics students would mostly have been regarded as ‘tomboys’ in their childhoods, and probably liked doing ‘boyish’ things and hanging out with boys from a young age. The more ‘girlish’ girls (for lack of a better word) don’t fit in and leave the sciences rapidly.

3. Every single one of the physics girls I knew as a student complained about remarks by sexist teachers in high school. “Why study physics, these technical subjects aren’t really for girls.” or “Wow, you’re really good at maths for a girl!”. I was shocked, so I checked that yes, every single one could name at least one sexist teacher.

4. Peer pressure in high schools obviously steers girls away from the sciences. I noticed in school that after a maths class, the girls would all get together for a ritual complaint about how tough the test was. After a literature class, they would get together for a ritual about how well it went. They got the same grade in both classes.

5. Many Dutch women seem to have internalised the idea that evolution on the Savannah predisposed them to dislike science and engineering. Whenever I counter with the much larger number of Polish or Italian female physicists, or Indian women who become chemical engineers and IT professionals, this is diagnosed as due to the utter weirdness of Indian (or Polish or Italian) culture.

6. Just a generation before mine, Dutch parents wouldn’t even allow, or strongly discourage women to study science and engineering due to lack of femininity. This creates obvious role model problems.

FWIW, I think the physics outlier is a combination of physics being both ‘mathy’ (logic) and ‘engineering-like’ (machines), so there are two vectors of prejudice interacting here, i.e. that women can’t think logically or operate machines. (This probably explains the “reductionism/holism” divide, though I don’t like that binary opposition much)

Not surprised to see female-skewing in English lit. Surely this is partly explained by gender-differentiated rates of fiction-readership. I don’t have any numbers in front of me, but I’m quite I’ve read that women in the general population read fiction at a much higher rate than men. Unless, as I doubt, this effect totally disappears for those who consider graduate school, we should expect to see this recapitulated in the study of fiction (still, if I’m not mistaken, the central if not exclusive concern of English departments).

@Akshay, both statistics and anecdotes suggest that the Netherlands have a particularly strong tendency against women in hard “beta” fields. I can’t say I ever understood where that came from. Do you have any ideas?

On your thesis about high school teachers and reading: I don’t think that works. Literature teachers are hardly universally female, especially not some decades ago or in all countries. But women have been the clear majority of fiction readers for as long as their is marketing research, and in many, many countries too. It also starts earlier, in high school years the division is already set. Again, I have no alternative explanation to offer.

Akshay @ 32: I never heard a professor actually say that women were somehow less intelligent.

my mathematics professor in my first term at university made a remark to the effect that ‘the boys could after class explain to their girlfriends in case they didn’t understand’. I wish I had kept a notebook, but I do remember that as an undergraduate student (1990-1994) we heard the occasional sexist remark, mostly wrapped as a joke. Actually, I think I became a feminist at university, which is telling about my experiences as a student.

But if you read http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com , you’ll find some accounts of what women experience in philosophy, some of which are just appalling. As long as these things happen in philosophy (or any other discipline), it’s going to result in women going elsewhere to put their talents to use.

However, what I have found really frustrating being in academia (both in economics, less so in political science, and by the time I moved to philosophy I no longer needed it so much) was the lack of female role models. The only women teachers I had in economics were assistants, and then the odd (in the two senses of the word) female professor of whom everyone knew she was not married/partnered and had no children, so the message was: if you are a woman and want to have children, this is not your future workplace. It may sound like a detail to some, but I really wanted more female teachers, and we didn’t have them.

Ingrid @ 38: Yikes! Of course, as a male, I don’t experience most of sexism.

Continuing @39: Would women have given Becker a Nobel for his work on the family?

In addition to the blog that Ingrid Robeyns links to, I suggest Sally Haslanger’s paper, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” as well as the Feminist Philosophers blog. (Both have been linked here before, I know; but they’re still not widely enough read.)

If we are using the fact that women read more fiction than men to explain the predominance of women in English Literature, why can’t we use the fact that men read more non-fiction than women to explain the predominance of men in non-literary fields? Then the question becomes “why does the American academy blatantly favor the fields that men prefer over the fields that women prefer (to the tune of 10% of doctoral funding)?”

For what it’s worth (I await the blistering jokes about anecdata), at the point where my peers and I were being introduced to philosophical ways of thinking, my male peers found it very exciting to assume that, if you hold two plausible beliefs that are inconsistent, one of them must rejected, while my female peers would rather be inconsistent than reject an apparently plausible belief. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the latter approach as a heuristic for getting around in the world, but as it happens it’s a horrible approach to learning philosophy.

Larry Summers would not be surprised by the gender “bias” expressed in this graph’s pronounced slant, from male-dominated hard sciences to female-dominated softer sciences.

[Standby for a flurry of irate comments.]

If we are using the fact that women read more fiction than men to explain the predominance of women in English Literature, why can’t we use the fact that men read more non-fiction than women to explain the predominance of men in non-literary fields?

Is this actually a fact? I thought the case was more that men read much less, not that they read more non-fiction take fior the difference.

But women have been the clear majority of fiction readers for as long as their is marketing research, and in many, many countries too. It also starts earlier, in high school years the division is already set. Again, I have no alternative explanation to offer.

Girls are discouraged from (or less encouraged toward) other activities such as sports and video games? There’s not as much TV they want to watch?

Anyone who isn’t reading is spending their time on other things, and vice versa. I think it would be useful to see the whole time-budget (or at least leisure time) for both sexes to see why women read more.

Let me be the first to say thank God we’ve turned to the problems of men.

Firstly it is sad that these rations are so badly skewed. When I was in school (in the 70’s) us boys would have loved to have more women in our classes. Although in hindsight, perhaps that didn’t translate well into making them feel welcome. I have been pretty surprised by the numbers for computer science, I had thought of it as having a lot of women in it, at least compared to physics, when I went to school. But I suspect computer science has become more hard-edged, like the other math-heavy sciences. In fact thats my complaint, that even from the favored side of the gender divide, these fields, and the way they are taught are not very nurturing. Its more like, you didn’t rigorously prove something, or you didn’t use the currently blessed method/style (as in software engineering), you are a bad bad bad person and unfit for the field! And who isn’t going to make at least a couple of mistakes of that nature. So I think many of my cohorts saw making it through as largely a case of surviving a very long unfriendly guantlet. I’m guessing the propensity to survive that long process is slightly uneven genderwise, and as the pipeline is a long one, with many many leak points, small differential survival rates produce a highly amplified residue product by the time the end is reached. Perhaps we can make these fields a little less unfriendly for all the aspirants? [Of course we still have the very real problem of many more students entering the pipeline, then jobs on the other end, so maybe the leakiness is planned from the getgo.]

They don’t quite give all the data I’d like, but it’s pretty clear what’s happening. About 1 in 3 PhD recipients aren’t from the US. Among US residents women got 52% of PhDs. Among visa holders men got 65% of PhD. The percent of visa holders are unequally distributed across fields. So lets look at the boy heavy subjects: maths 46% of PhDs go to visa holder, physics 47%, and economics 59%. Girl heavy subjects: in psychology visa holders get 7%, english lit 10% and anthropology 16%. They don’t give the explicit numbers to nail it down 100%, but you can see what I’m getting at.

Philosophy is interestingly a bit of an exception, I haven’t spend hours looking at the data, but it seems to be about the only boy heavy subject with few (17%) visa holders.

I actually think this is very bad news for feminists. Most male dominated subjects seem to also be foreigner dominated. Unless you want to tell johnny foreigner to piss off, I don’t see how you can attack – say economics – for having skewed ratios if this is just a response to demand from outside the US. That’s unlike say psychology – which has massive gender bias, but can’t blame it on external factors.

> Then again, I remember there being one other undergraduate woman
> in my CS classes in the mid-80s

1984 was the peak year [1] for women enrolled in Computer Science programs in the United States with around 40% of the entering class being female. That was true for both liberal arts- and engineering-based CS programs, which contributed to 1984 and 85 being the peak years for women’s enrollment in engineering programs as well. The percentage dropped after 1985, and the explosion in size of the PC and networking environments created the non-CS technology world which is almost exclusively male.

[1] More correctly, the peak year post-1949; partly as a knock-on to women being shuffled into “computing” work during the Manhattan Project a very large percentage of the _first_ computer scientists were women.

Cranky

I think that the fields where women are massively overrepresented might be a side effect of the fields where men are massively overepresented, women start off university relatively evenly spread, then they cluster into those disciplines where they feel more comfortable. So responding to what a few people have said, I don’t think that it is as important to encourage males in English lit as it is important to redress gender disparities in philosophy.

I also agree that the mathematics loadedness of philosophy doesn’t explain its gender bias since, if nothing else, we’re actually doing worse than mathematics. I think it explains a portion of it though. Maybe the liteature on countering stereotype threat has some light to cast on how to move forward here?

Agree – Leederick wins the thread. 43% of variation on proportion of females at subfield level is explained by the proportion of temporary visa holders, rising to 71% at field level.

After taking out the covariate (& so more-or-less considering the native-born), philosophy ranks 207 of 213 subfields for proportion of females – indistinguishable from nuclear engineering.

When I studied philosophy I found there was a lot of talk about violence against women. I mean that rape, torture and so on were used very much as examples and metaphors, and in ‘thought experiments’. My feeling was that this was a way for the profs to prove they were above emotion, both at an overt level – ‘look I am able to talk about horrid things in a dispassionate way’ – and at a lower level, that they were symbolically trashing the female/emotional aspect of themselves.

I think sometimes overt hostility to women is a kind of self-trashing by men. Trashing the weak part of themselves. And the rigidity and fear of softness which leads to self-trashing is stronger in some disciplines and some arenas, and the need to prove you are not weak. But of course as they act out these internal dramas, the girls around them are discouraged and dismissed. So it’s not just some tragic little psycho-drama they are publicising.

Very simple answer: men like some fields, women like others.

It’s weird that people treat these statistics as something to get worked up over.

The PhD ratios probably very closely track the stats on how many people of each gender read books about the respective subjects as an amateur vocations (e.g. who reads book about physics for entertainment and who reads books about psychology for entertainment – though you’d perhaps have to define both quite broadly to get meaningful numbers). The fact of the matter is that many, many more men have substantial knowledge of e.g. physics, even if you limit your analysis to people who derive no professional or social benefit from their knowledge.

What is the gender ratio of people who know how to fix cars? What causes the imbalance there?

This doesn’t prove that no discrimination occurs in the academy – but it should inform any interpretation of the statistics.

Hmm, stubydoo, the answer “revealed preferences! Nothing to see, move along” is not particularly satisfying. It’s an expression of disdain for the conversation, not a contribution to it.

I can’t claim expertise in the matter but it’s my impression that well-educated women from the former soviet countries do less well upon moving to the US and Israel, where, say, engineering is largely a men’s game. Those “revealed preferences” reveal something I think.

Minor-league linking for investigation:

http://www.biu.ac.il/faculty/remennick/publ.html

It’s too bad statistics for MS’s or MA’s aren’t given. And at least in my small pond, the ratio of males to females pursuing MA/MS degrees in math is much more even-handed.

Now, our department is well aware of the imbalance and we’re constantly trying to get more female PhD candidates, starting with those who’ve already earned their Masters. And here’s the thing: the girls don’t find a life in academia doing math research all that thrilling. Odd, I know, but true :-) They want to take the math they’ve learned and put it to work, do the private industry thing. And on that level, the decision not to go for a PhD makes a lot of sense; I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard the corporate types say the last thing they need is more maladjusted and over-qualified PhD’s who aren’t “people persons”.

Interestingly enough, the guys who are pursuing PhD’s seem to think pretty much the same way, that is, they want the more advanced degree because they want to remain in academia and do math research. Very, very few of the males want a PhD so they can get a better job in private industry.

So it seems to me that the disparity is not in ability, or cultural or social factors wrt gender that encourage/discourage participation. It’s simply in what (some) girls like to do vs. what (some) boys like to do.

When I went to college about a century ago, I initially declared Philosophy as my major. My advisor took me aside one day in my sophomore year and told me, “Realistically, what are your chances of becoming a top philosopher, given that you’re a woman? OTOH, your chances are good that you could rise to the top in Classics.” I switched majors.

My daughter is finishing her BA this spring at a small liberal arts college. She’s majoring in Neuroscience and doing a double minor in Psychology and Philosophy. In her last two upper division philosophy courses (aka, “300-level”), she was the only female in her class (at a school where around 53% of the students are female). The Neuroscience program is staffed by women (the co-heads, one in Biology and one in Psychology, are both women), and there are slightly more female majors than male (roughly mirroring the PhD %). Like Molecular Biology, Neuroscience is an undergrad major for many medical school applicants, and I think this may explain why there is also a relatively high % of female PhDs in this field.

What I find special about this debate is how the women are presumed to lack agency. The commentators believe that the women don’t choose to go into psychology – they are somehow pushed or forced into that discipline. Even commentators admitting that women do actively choose psychology over, say, physics, portray that choice as somehow a forced choice. Bizzarely enough, when men make the opposite choice, the choice is presumed to be free and uncoerced.

This simple trick, assuming the men freely choose while the women are passively distributed, nicely establishes a per se case of sexism against predominantly male fields while conveniently allowing predominantly female fields off the hook. What defense is possible? No matter how many Women in Science and Engineering chapters a department might establish, or how many training grant slots it might reserve for women, or how hard they try to recruit female faculty – their sexism is irredeemibly established by the lack of female graduate students. And yet how many psychology departments offer exclusive scholarships, or travel awards, for male students?

What’s so damn ironic is both the importance of gender self-selection and its utter lack of foundation in fact. One of my better friends from graduate school, a mechanical engineer, once described to me how all of her female friends choose biomechanical engineering as their undergraduate major, rather than mechanical engineering. Yet the two majors had exactly the same classes, professors, fellow students, etc., differing only in a few senior year electives. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the prefix “bio” was a better lure for female graduate students than any number of travel awards or dedicated funding. You can’t push on a string.

Adam — just go back and read what Alison, CC Fuss, and dbk said. Yes, they all made free choices about what to do. No-one forced them. But no-one (let alone anyone I thought had reasonable knowledge of the case) told me that however smart I was I was unlikely to rise to the top in Philosophy because I’m a man and encouraged me to go into a different discipline instead. I’ve never been in a conversation in philosophy as the only man in a group of ten women all dispassionately discussing violence toward men, and then being irritated with me when I ask them to pick another example which would be just as good but wouldn’t make me uncomfortable. Etc. Normal people (that is, people who are full agents) are affected by these kind of things — their free choices are shaped by the expectations these experiences reasonably give rise to. I’ve no doubt that some men still avoid nursing, or elementary school teaching, for similar reasons, and I don’t doubt that they are full agents (though, interestingly, it often seems to be the attitudes of other men, rather than women, that they are responding to). It looks as if you didn’t bother to understand what the three of them wrote, which they are all probably sufficiently used to that it doesn’t bother them. Pisses me off though.

CC Fuss — I think there’s something to what you say (well, not something, quite a lot). The problem with it is that I don’t see how you change that directly — my feeling is that fairly determined action needs to be taken both from within the profession and from outside it (Deans holding us to some sort of standard and being serious about it), to get more women into the discipline. The pipeline problem that is actually addressable is graduate admissions — I am absolutely certain that many highly ranked graduate schools reject stronger female candidates in favour of weaker male candidates not through deliberate discrimination but because their attitudes are sexist (even very mild sexism can have a large effect at this level). Admitting graduate students is lower stakes than hiring faculty — it is easier to get colleagues to override their preference for what they perceive to be the absolute best at this level than at the hiring level. Deans could tell us to aim at 50:50, and impose mild sanctions if we drop below 40:60 on a rolling 3 year average. Or we could hold ourselves to those numbers. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, but if you look at my department’s graduate student page you will notice a stunningly bad female-to-male ratio; but if you peruse their achievements you will notice that, for example, the women have 1.8 publications for every 1 publication the men have — my impression is that they graduate faster, drop out at a lower rate, and place better, but I haven’t yet got the hard data on those).

If you take the strategy I recommend, a supplement has to be aggressively combating the view (among men and women) that women are being treated unduly favouorably. One year we admitted the same number of men and women. The men in the program referred to this as the year of the sorority, and I now know some of the women in that year worried that they had been admitted in an unduly favorable way, assuming that my eminent feminist philosopher colleague had had a hand in it (she hadn’t, though I don’t doubt she was pleased). Only several years later have I become aware of those worries, which I have been able to dispel pretty effectively among the women (it occurs to me that most of our graduate students read CT, and most will read this thread, so I hope I’m not giving too much away, but there it is — comment away anonymously if you want!)

Timothy Scriven:
“Philosophy is a deeply mathematical pursuit, I would say easily more so than any other humanity, even counting psychology and lingustics as humanities.”

However, at a guess, it’s not more deeply mathematical than mathematics, which has a higher female percentage.

Philosophy is a deeply mathematical pursuit

That really depends on what you’re interested in. As a general statement about how philosophy is taught and learned, it’s wrong – a little formal logic and the ability to deal with abstract concepts is all you need in many cases.

Larry Summers would not be surprised by the gender “bias” expressed in this graph’s pronounced slant, from male-dominated hard sciences to female-dominated softer sciences.

Of course he wouldn’t be surprised; this situation was exactly what they were all talking about. The disagreement was over the explanation for the slant, and Summers didn’t offer any support for his preferred explanation, he just asserted it.

Ah the “agency” dodge. Also usefully employed to deny the responsibility of colonial and imperial powers (“you are denying agency to the Ruandans/ Congolese etc”).

As for the fact that the vast majority of people commenting on blogs are male, it seems to me one important way privilege (whether gender, race, class or whatever kind) expresses itself is in the way privileged people are more likely to believe they have something interesting to say and less likely to be afraid of embarrassing themselves. And in a non-blog setting – at an assembly of people for example – we would deal with this problem, for example by implementing “step-up, step-back” or a quota for speakers. Doubtlessly Adam believes this denies women or minorities the agency to just shut up.

Incidentally, asking “Hey, how can it be sexism if Education and English are full of women” thing is similar to asking “How can there be Global Warming if we just got three feet of snow in DC?” Global warming, narrowly construed, is an aspect of climate change, and an explanation of it requires a theory of climate systems. Sexism, narrowly construed, is an aspect of gender relations, and an explanation of it requires a similarly more general theory.

I can’t make any sense of this. Surely if one can say there is discrimination against women in mathematics and point to the skewed ratio of PhDs awarded to males and females as proof one could do the same thing in the other direction for psychology using evidence that’s already been declared both admissible and authoritative.

The pipeline problem that is actually addressable is graduate admissions—I am absolutely certain that many highly ranked graduate schools reject stronger female candidates in favour of weaker male candidates not through deliberate discrimination but because their attitudes are sexist (even very mild sexism can have a large effect at this level).

I don’t know about highly ranked, but I do know that in the case of at least one mid-western land grant university ongoing and strenuous efforts are made to recruit female PhD candidates . . . to the point that I can comfortably say that what you’ve written is emphatically false. In fact, just the opposite of reality. For so-so ranked public universities at least :-)

Another thought: the guys I know going for their paper usually cite their reason for doing so as a necessary step towards getting an academic job doing research. What goes unsaid is “. . . at a major, highly respected school where the salary is good and the prestige is high.” Uh, people? If you’re going to Illinois, or MU, the odds of you ending up at Cornell or MIT on the tenure track are vanishingly small. In today’s climate especially, but certainly over the last few decades, people from places like mine are more often placed at smaller and less well-regarded institutions, say Fulton Military Academy (The look of disbelief, the realization that years of effort have come to . . . this. Oh my. I’ve seen that look a hundred times.)

The thing is, for all those years, what kept these guys going was their ability to live in denial of these facts. They’d somehow got the idea that things would be different for them personally, whatever the graduation placement stats said. Iow, another possible explanation for the lopsided ratios in the math and physics departments is that women are simply better at assessing and facing reality, more tough-minded and more realistic about their job prospects than their male counterparts.

Certainly I’ve seen very little in my own department to counter that speculation.

SoV:

Surely if one can say there is discrimination against women in mathematics and point to the skewed ratio of PhDs awarded to males and females as proof one could do the same thing in the other direction for psychology using evidence that’s already been declared both admissible and authoritative.

I don’t think that the cases are comparable. We live in a sexist culture in which many people hold biases against women, and in which women are often treated in appalling ways because they’re women. But in academia, the prevalence of sexism and the ways in which it expresses itself varies widely from field to field. Some fields are going to be relatively unattractive to women for these reasons, and more difficult for them to enter, and women who wish to pursue academic careers (as opposed to not pursuing that sort of career at all) will opt for fields (like psychology) that are more welcoming. This would explain the over-representation of women in those fields without positing discrimination against men as its cause.

Some fields are going to be relatively unattractive to women for these reasons, and more difficult for them to enter, and women who wish to pursue academic careers (as opposed to not pursuing that sort of career at all) will opt for fields (like psychology) that are more welcoming. This would explain the over-representation of women in those fields without positing discrimination against men as its cause.

Sure. This may well be true. My point is simply that you can’t point to stats like these, the ratios of PhD awarded by gender, as if they’re proof of anything in and of themselves. You want to say that the field is heavily tilted against women in physics based upon this stat? Fine. But then you’ve got to do the same thing for other fields. No fair saying that these ratios are proof dispositive in one discipline but not in another.

Isn’t this a conservative ploy, btw? Based upon ratios, academics welcome liberals but are hostile to conservatives, or so they say. Using the same ratio argument to show that, say, finance or the Air Force or police favor conservatives and are just as hostile to liberals as in converse situation in academia? Why, that’s just plain silly.

I do know that in the case of at least one mid-western land grant university ongoing and strenuous efforts are made to recruit female PhD candidates . . . to the point that I can comfortably say that what you’ve written is emphatically false. In fact, just the opposite of reality.

I certainly hope you’ve protected your anonymity well, ScentofViolets, for the sake of any of your female PhD students who might be reading. My own graduate school experience is recent enough to remember how real and vivid the “impostor syndrome” fears can be, without the fear of being an unqualified AA factor to deal with. Even when it has no basis, as in the case Harry described above, it can be a pervasive and nagging fear.

SoV @ 5:31:

“My point is simply that you can’t point to stats like these, the ratios of PhD awarded by gender, as if they’re proof of anything in and of themselves.”

Sure. But we’re not looking at those stats in and of themselves, nor should we. We have independent information about gender roles and biases in our society, both anecdotal (see many comments above, the blog What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? etc.) and not (e.g., studies about the evaluation of otherwise identical CVs that differ only in the person’s gender, and see other references in e.g., Haslanger’s paper).

I certainly hope you’ve protected your anonymity well, ScentofViolets, for the sake of any of your female PhD students who might be reading. My own graduate school experience is recent enough to remember how real and vivid the “impostor syndrome” fears can be, without the fear of being an unqualified AA factor to deal with.

Shrug. Having been through the grinder and seen those who’ve passed before and after me, I’d have to say that most people who get an MS/MA in mathematics have the talent to get a PhD. What is much, much more significant, imho, is having the willingness and the sitzfleisch to tough it out over three or four or more years. Iow, having been a smart-aleck punk who thought that it was all about the talent and then a middle-aged verging on old campaigner, I’ll take the hardworking recruit of middling ability over the talented but lazy slacker any day. And in any event, the women I am thinking of don’t have to worry about a supposed lack of talent.

It also strikes me that pressuring impressionable young people into something they really don’t want to do by painting an unreasonable picture of the rewards isn’t in point of fact being very fair to them.

I don’t see philosophers having more power than anthropologists. With this in mind, is it true that ‘societal gender roles’ is always a subspecies of discrimination?

@Harry

“I’ve no doubt that some men still avoid nursing, or elementary school teaching, for similar reasons, and I don’t doubt that they are full agents (though, interestingly, it often seems to be the attitudes of other men, rather than women, that they are responding to). ”

Hardly “some” men, when many of these fields are as devoid of men as physics is apparently devoid of women. Of course, the same peer pressure dynamic could explain the absence of women in STEM fields. It would also be an example of the external context shaping personal preferences.

“It looks as if you didn’t bother to understand what the three of them wrote, which they are all probably sufficiently used to that it doesn’t bother them.”

And you didn’t bother to read or engage what I wrote.

“Pisses me off though.”

Why? Not used to being challenged? Perhaps this cute remark is an example of the macho that drives women out of certain fields?

“I am absolutely certain that many highly ranked graduate schools reject stronger female candidates in favour of weaker male candidates not through deliberate discrimination but because their attitudes are sexist.”

Life is easier when you assume your conclusions. Of course, as ScentOfViolets said, the data provided would argue that similar discriminate exists in female dominated fields. Perhaps a male graduate student would rather not sit in a room with 10 women and a female professor discussing how men’s unconsious sexism degrades women?

The gender of faculty is definitely a factor in student preference. But that doesn’t explain why female enrollment has grown so much faster in the “bio” sciences than in the “dork” sciences, given that the percentage of female faculty started off about the same. It also ignores all of the efforts (training grants, support groups, assigned mentors, etc.) that the STEM departments put in place to support women. But rather than engage that you’d prefer to reach for the unconcious sexism cudgel.

The yutz who brought up colonialism and belgians and accused me of denying minorities a voice needs to grow up. But to the extent that they are a philosopher they definitely provide as a wonderful example of this “macho” that apparently pervades philospohy.

Regarding “imposter syndrome”: if there are some people insisting that there’s rampant discrimination against women all around, and there are some people (such as ScentofViolets above) saying that institutions have taken specific steps to ease the path for women to make up for underrepresentation, well then that means that EVERYBODY gets to suffer from imposter syndrome.

I’m instinctively pleased to see that Classics is the closest field to parity on this chart[1], but I think it’s sort of misleading. We have the contradictory effects of being a squishy, literature-loving, hippy discipline like English (and perhaps also, dbk @76 suggests, of snapping up some Platonists and such chased out of philosophy), while simultaneously being strongly tied to “The Western Tradition,” and to a bunch of dead-whitish-male primary texts (if they dig up a complete works of Erinna or something at Pompeii, I’ll bet that would push us to the right a bit).

I wonder if this schizophrenia might show up in some more detailed data — e.g., if departments are divided into very-male and very-female ones (though that is not my anecdotal experience).

[1]Of course, on similar charts about race or class, I suspect we’d look a lot worse.

A thought occurs. If there is discrimination in varying degrees going on, perhaps we should look at the data concerning the number of men and women attempting advanced degrees vs the number of men and women who actually complete them. I would think that if the discrimination is as subtle as some say it is, prospective female PhD candidates would tend to be somehow “better” than their male counterparts – more gifted or more driven and committed, what have you. So that the ratio attempted/completed would be higher for women than men in the disciplines that discriminate against them. Again, given that the discrimination is not too overt, something that’s rather iffy to measure I know.[1]

Just a thought.

[1] Come to think of it, I tend to “discriminate” for the girls in my freshman classes, and for the most trivial reason I know – their work is easier to grade by virtue of being neater and more legible. I don’t think this is significant in terms of overall grades, in fact, I’m pretty sure, but still . . . ?

‘Incidentally, asking “Hey, how can it be sexism if Education and English are full of women” thing is similar to asking “How can there be Global Warming if we just got three feet of snow in DC?”’

But it’s arguable what the general trend is. Your graph is labelled up % female and has women getting 46.8% of PhDs. A-ha I thought – a general bias against women and the list of shame presented of the worst offenders. Then I looked at the data, if you cut out foreign students that datum jumps 5.2 percentage points to the right and 52.0% of PhDs go to women. It’s debatable what the trend is, and whether Education and English are the exception or if Maths and Physics are.

In my anecdotal experience, people who go into English lit and anthro PhD programs are equally desirous of landing academic jobs as those who go into philosophy departments–if not more so. (Remember, English lit is not the same thing as creative writing.) This blog post fairly reeks with disdain and anger at those who deign to go to English grad school for any other reason.

This conversation has tended toward the typical (and important) question of “why are some fields so unbalanced by gender?” To me, the more interesting question is, “what philosophy special? That is, what makes philosophy so different from its adjacent disciplines in the humanities?” I have no doubt–indeed, I have seen–that there is rampant sexism throughout the academy, including in my field, history. I don’t think other humanities could sustain a blog like What’s It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy, generate the number of equivalent comments in this thread–and, of course, have different numbers, as demonstrated in the original post. So what makes philosophy so much worse?

I am quite unconvinced by the suggestion that philosophy is math heavy, both for the reasons articulated by others that only certain fields are mathy, and also because obviously more quanty disciplines like sociology and stats and psych do so much better in the proportion of PhDs granted to women. (I see looking again at this thread that someone else made this argument already, citing linguistics.) I’m struck by the comment of emptywheel, above in the 50s somewhere, that at some universities continental philosophy became the preserve of comp lit departments. It seems quite plausible–likely, even–that the rise of humanistic Theory in departments other than philosophy helps account somewhat for philosophy’s apparently retrograde status. Of course, I say this as someone outside both philosophy and Theory. Does it make sense to others?

I realize, too late, that my too-long post immediately above could be summarized as, “Why are there so many more sexist assholes in philosophy than in other disciplines? Is it because the rise of Theory siphoned philosophically minded people who aren’t as big assholes into other departments?”

I’m not sure I see a real problem here. The latest statistics show that females are more likely to attend college, graduate from college and have taken advanced mathematics in high school than their male counterparts (see below). Moreover, in the 2007-2008 academic year, females earned 61% of all master’s and 51% of all doctoral, and first-professional degrees (US DoEd Condition of Education 2010). Lastly, there are literally dozens of programs promoting female participation in STEM subjects in the primary and secondary grades, which has boosted female representation in these subjects – to a point.

The issue is that the disciplines in which males and females receive their degrees tend to be different. This could be the result of rampant sexism or personal choice. Can someone please show me data supporting the idea that TODAY it is the former and not the latter? Past bias and anecdotal evidence do not count. Moreover, if such gender gaps are a problem, where is the outrage that females receive far more of the health, education, pharmacy, vet and psychology master’s and PhDs (among other disciplines)?

Percentage distribution of high school seniors, by highest mathematics course taken and selected student, family, and high school characteristics: 2004
Pre-alg. or below Alg. I /Geo. Alg. II Trig/Anal Geo/Stats Pre-Calc/Calc
Male 8.5% 22.7% 24.2% 15.6% 29.0%
Female 5.2% 19.6% 25.9% 18.2% 31.1%

US DoEd, Academic Preparation for College in the High School Senior Class of 2003−04 (January 2010), NCES 2010-169

christian_h: “Please point to a single male academic who has made this experience – that is, being in a room with a collection of caricatures of radical feminists. On the other hand, almost every female mathematics PhD I know has experienced sexist attitudes during the course of her career. numerous examples from various disciplines have been given in this thread, mnore have been linked to.”
Given the existence of Title IX officers on American campuses, I would have thought that expressions of sexism or misogyny that rose to the level of “caricature” would be a fast ticket out the door of a great part-time job, at least in the US; as christian_h correctly points out in the next sentence, what we’re actually talking about here is sexist attitudes posited as unconscious.
However, your belief that no male academic has ever experienced such things on a sub-caricature level may be a bit optimistic: minus the cartoon element, the posited impossible situation is a not-inapt description of the average senior staff meeting at the research institute where I used to work. Feeling marginalized by virtue of being male was certainly a factor in my decision to leave.
There may be a tipping point factor at work: my own field of criminology, at about 2/3 women, does not “feel” overwhelmingly female-dominated, whereas the public health/epi field at about 3/4 female certainly does. For obvious reasons, a great many of the few men in public health/epi are gay-identified MSM; this may be another factor in this “feel”.

@christian_h

You claim that skewed gender ratios in STEM fields demonstrates pervasive sexism in those fields. You cite evidence for your theory in the form of gender ratios broken out by discipline (and anecdote, lots of anecdote). But yet, the skewed gender ratios in the STEM fields are matched by skewed gender ratios in the humanities and social sciences.

The question presented is: If the skewed gender ratios in the STEM fields are evidence of sexism in those fields then why aren’t the skewed gender ratios in the humanities and social sciences evidence of sexism in those fields?

So far your answer has been a combination of asserting that you have other evidence that the STEM fields are full of sexists (which doesn’t address the question. Maybe all of the fields – STEM and humanities alike – are full of sexists and the graph merely represents that sad fact) and asserting that my arguments about agency are invalid because they are like other arguments you also dislike (not a particularly convincing line of argument).

So what’s next?

Also, assuming we don’t hear a convincing rebuttal of leederick’s point, which he/she, perhaps annoyed at having been so totally ignored for raising the inconvenient fact that the phenomenon under discussion doesn’t appear in these data, has now repeated:
Isn’t the solution to the male skew of STEM fields obvious (limiting visas for STEM grad students; though some spoilsports would say this might hurt our chances of “winning the future”)?
It is perhaps less obvious how one would go about dealing with the overall female bias of the academy (52% of non-foreign visa PhDs), given that IIRC that’s also the percentage of female undergraduate degrees; likely this task may be rendered less easy if one is preoccupied with remedying the opposite trend, despite its failure to appear in the available data.

It seems that some people commenting take the accusation of sexism to be something like: women are underrepresented in certain fields ergo men are sexist, whereas the underrepresentation of men in certain fields does not indicate sexism (and therefore men in the former fields are assholes – or bad people or something). It may be the case that some people do in fact think along these lines, however, I think this is a misconception of the (feminist) critique. The accusation of sexism is a criticism of culture, not a criticism of men. There is both implicit and explicit bias regarding gender roles in and outside of academia (frankly, this claim ought to be uncontroversial at this point). Men and women are both to blame for sustaining these biases. It very well may be that the very same biases encourage men to certain fields and women to others (and I would think this is probably the case).

This is not to say, however, that there is not a difference in the way these biases affect different genders. The traditional gender roles have placed men in a position of power, and disadvantaged women, especially in the public sphere. This fact is a non-arbitrary reason to treat the underrepresentation of women very differently than the underrepresentation of men. But it is not because men are sexist pigs and women have to put up with them. Both genders are biased in ways that perpetuate the problem. Both genders need to work on solutions.

Adam
If you didn’t see that what I was saying was a direct engagement with your “assuming lack of agency” comment, I don’t know how to make it any clearer. Kieran did the same. I daresay most readers can see it.

My certainty is, of course, not based in science. Just a great deal of experience both on the admissions side and on the watching students apply side, and a lot of conversations with other people involved on the decision-making end of the process. You can dismiss that if you want; I was reporting my certainty, and assuming that in context it was clear that I have quite a bit of experience in a very small world (the size of the discipline relative to the big beasts like English, History, and Education, has not been remarked upon). Anyway, it is certainty grounded in experience, not an a priori assumption. Probably obvious to most other readers.

No one has commented on the differing sex ratios within Philosophy among fields. Without data, Id imagine that phil of science skews more male than philosophy as a whole, and ethics skews much less male than philosophy as a whole (my sister is a philosopher of physics, I’m an ethicist of sorts). Ethics never used to skew less male than other fields (ie, when women were hardly in Philosophy at all). My guess is there is a lot of path dependency in such a small discipline — Foot and Anscombe as the people who revived the field and then Rawls (in a top department) training lots of women (I don’t know the story behind that, but I assume we have female readers who were trained by Rawls and can say something about it) could have had a considerable effect which compounds over time.

I’d be really interested to know the breakdown of philosophy by sub-discipline. My guess would be that far more of the women are in ethics and social and political philosophy than, say, logic or language.

As for the significant gender disparity in the discipline: one doesn’t have to look far to see why there aren’t many female students actually completing their PhD. You’d be hard-pressed to find any female student in philosophy who hasn’t experienced some degree of sexual harassment from her professors. And, in this job market, not to mention an institutional climate in which it is endemic and typically laughed off, laying any kind of complaint (formal or informal) is basically to commit professional suicide.

This is a very small point, relating to the question, why aren’t the smaller percentages of male PhDs in fields like English evidence of discrimination against males in such fields. I think it is relevant to remember that the high percentage of women graduating with PhDs in a field like English is a relatively recent phenomenon and that most major PhD granting departments of English still have faculty which is much more male than female. (I have no idea what are the top departments in English but a quick glance at the departments at Harvard and Yale reveal that there are roughly twice as many men as women in the department.) Given this history it is hard to know what kind of story to tell that would result in their being widespread prejudice against men, chilly climates for men, etc., in such departments.

Nobody on this thread has claimed that the chart posted standing on its own is evidence of gender discrimination. So repeatedly denying that it is isn’t really an argument against anything raised by anyone. As has been pointed out, the data presented has to be interpreted within a broader context of gender discrimination, a context the majority of commenters here share without being willing to rehash that broader argument again… and again… and again.

As for “revealed preferences” that is simply a tautology. If A puts a gun to the head of B and says “your money or your life” it will likely reveal B’s preference for giving up their money. The tautology only becomes an argument if you believe the preferences revealed are due to some essential female- or male-ness; in which case you have to explain why these revealed preferences have changed with time, for example.

CC Fuss

Yes, these are all big problems. Dare I say that relatively high status male professors have a role to play here, making it absolutely clear what they think is going on, and making it absolutely clear in particular that they do not believe that women are getting any special treatment, and more generally making it clear that they understand the problem. Both to the male and the female graduate students. I don’t mean they have more of a role to play than women in philosophy, just that more skeptical corners of the graduate student population are more likely to listen to relatively high status professors, and male professors; and that it can be helpful to women to know that it is not just their female professors that have confidence in them. The recent discovery that the year of the sorority had been assumed by at least some of the women admitted in it to be the work of my excellent colleague who is identified as a feminist enabled me to make it clear that, no, it was the work of an all-male committee the other members (other than me) of which are not in anyway associated with feminist views or attitudes (wrongly not associated with such in my opinion, but that’s that). I wish I had made the membership of the committee clear to all admitted students in the first place, rather than 6 years later. I do not believe that there was any compromise on quality in that year, indeed I suspect that, even though the men in that cohort are excellent, we still underestimated the capability of one or two female candidates.

This is a very small point, relating to the question, why aren’t the smaller percentages of male PhDs in fields like English evidence of discrimination against males in such fields.

See what I’ve just posted above. Are you saying that these while these percentages are in accordance with the hypothesis that males are discriminated against in English, they are not, in and of themselves, sufficient evidence, especially given the much larger amount of data to the contrary?

Or are you saying that the much larger body of contrary data is enough to completely disqualify the ratios in those instances as evidence at all?[1]

Because the former I can live with; the latter just seems to be so much crazy talk.

[1]My own sense, of course, is that this table of ratios doesn’t say anything one way or the other – it doesn’t discriminate between a series alternate explanations that fit the data just as well. At best, all it could do is eliminate some hypotheses . . . which apparently is not up for discussion right now.

And as to my own personal sense, regardless of this table and from my own experiences? Let’s just say I’m much more skeptical of the idea that currently there isn’t any discrimination than I am of the idea that there is. And as for fifty years ago? Of course there was rampant discrimination against women in those subjects. All of them.

SoV’s last post got me thinking. What if a good part of the gender-biased action is coming not from the institutions or faculty, but from the students cohorts? My guess is that peer group pressure is probably even more important in influencing path choosing, than mentor behavior. At least in America, students have been heavily indoctrinated in political correctness, but does this really work? Don’t many of them want to demonstrate their independence from (and irritation against indoctrination), by demonstrating that they don’t buy it? In extreme cases, perhaps it is even backfiring? I say that because of the widespread comments above which indicate the problem is getting worse. If it is getting worse (that does need to be demonstrated), perhaps we need to rethink our methods, for I don’t think the problem persists because of a lack of desire to change it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I wasn’t alert to the specifically gendered aspect, but I’ve been complaining for years about gratuitously violent and bloodthirsty examples in philosophy. Once it’s been pointed out, it’s obvious that this is likely to put women off the field, even where the violence in the examples isn’t specifically directed against them.

Aulus Gellius @121:

I agree with your post (except perhaps point #6). You have succeeded admirably in giving a fair description of those who disagree with you.

Although you’re entitled to be unappreciative of having the people who have different priors from yours (or no priors) intruding into this particular thread (such is the internet), the fact remains that success in achieving change is likely to require convincing at least some such people – especially if you want to make changes that are more broad than just in academic philosophy.

You might find it encouraging that I don’t think anybody in this thread has defended academic philosophy in particular against the charge of discrimination (i.e. everyone on the side going against yours has been in the more general realm). Accordingly you might conclude that efforts to make changes in Philosophy are in better shape if they are kept distinct from similar efforts in other fields.

I’m also inclined to recommend that people should have a little more respect for the “revealed preferences” hypothesis than has been shown here, but I would say that, since it’s a favorite of mine (as with all my posts here, I’m not insisting that it applies to academic philosophy specifically – it isn’t my field anyway).

If I were asked to name the most important fields in the present day of the top of my head, in addition to earth science (climate), I would name the biologies: molecular, neuro, biochem, even conservation biology etc, — where it would appear that women have already begun to predominate! How canny is that? Of course, it is often said that women are smarter than men; indeed I have heard it from women themselves, though they remained unable to account for why so many of their sex should marry fools.

“Oh, and btw, philosophy is maths-heavy??? How on earth is that true? Most of the philosophers I know have done at most formal logic to the level of Godel’s Theorems, in graduate school, and promptly forgot it all.”

I’ve got to agree. One required logic paper is not “maths-heavy”.

Yes, there are people doing Philosophy of Physics with interesting views on Quantum Logic that take a lot of maths. But they’re very much the exception. Likewise geeks like me doing a PhD because of an interest in Logic and Philosophy of Computing who go hard on logics and recursion theory. But honestly we mostly drop out and get a MSc in Comp Sci instead because logic is severely out of fashion and anyone with the mindset to write a dissertation about AI and computing can get a much better job in industry cutting code.

Interestingly, the number of women grad students I was working with went up when I moved from doing logic in the Philosophy dept to doing logic in the Comp Sci dept. And Comp Sci grad programmes are such happy places compared to Philosophy – there’s oodles of research money and everyone there knows there’s a good job for them at the end of it, either in the academy or out of it.

At the risk of flogging the proverbial here, I returned to the original chart posted by Professor Healy. As a traditional humanities discipline, I think most laypeople would estimate that the % of PhDs awarded in the field would be comparable to those offered in other traditional humanities disciplines, e.g. history and philology. But it’s not. And the question most responders were indirectly posing (and directly trying to answer) was “Why should this be so?”

I wonder if part of the answer might lie in the type of academic discourse (the rhetorical mode) for which academic philosophy is so well known: the adversarial/confrontative approach. This would be a feature of the discipline itself – pervasive and diffuse, more challenging to address effectively than gender quotos for PhD admissions.

The linguist Deborah Tannen has a good article available online on this subject:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/pdfs/agonism_in_academic_discourse.pdf

Tannen traces the origins of this mode of discourse back to (surprise surprise) the Greek philosophical tradition, although she is careful to distinguish it from the original Socratic method, which was heuristic rather than purely antagonistic.

Her bibliography cites a chapter by Carol Moulton on academic discourse in philosophy, specifically: “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method,” Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, Philosophy of Science S. G. Harding, M. P. Hintikka (eds.), Synthese Library of D Riedel, Inc. Dordrecht, Holland, 1983; Second Edition, 2003:149-164.

Having read every single comment on this thread, I would be interested to know how the responses broke down by gender.

Regarding maths and stats… traditionally mathematics was seen as one of only two academic subjects to which women were suited, the other being biology. The idea that maths drives women away from study, and that they prefer squishy “soft” studies like literature is not reflected in the history of western science. Read The Mind Has No Sex for a detailed description of women’s integral role in mathematics over the last 3 centuries. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that maths and stats have a high proportion of female PhDs, and I suspect SoV is right in observing that women are even more likely to choose the Masters-work route.

Regarding the overseas student analysis… I teach at a university where half of the student body is “foreign” (we have 98 nationalities at our university), taught in two languages (Japanese and English). Almost all the students end up studying in a language that is not their native language. In my experience, students studying outside of their own language do much better in the technical than the philosophical subjects, because the language used is simpler and the non-language (graphical or formulaic) representation of information much more prevalent. This is also my experience of studying in Japanese – maths is vastly easier than philosophy if you aren’t completely brilliant in the language of presentation.

So it’s no surprise that overseas students are over represented in technical fields, or in that most bullshit of fields, economics. Unsurprisingly, you can’t study English lit if your English isn’t really really good.

Henri (144.): Yes, you’re correct. I should have said “the tautology only becomes an argument if you specify the underlying reasons for the preferences revealed”.

I think that’s very unfair on Keiran, Marc. It’s very easy for me or you to say these things, but if I worked in academia I’d be a bit more circumspect. A lot of the non-anonymous people in this thread would be putting themselves in a very difficult position if they flat out said we need to get more men doing PhDs and named certain liberal arts and soft science fields as having particular problems.

That’s why they have to stick to the line that gender disparities are only a problem if they’re the result of sexism. So women’s participation in philosophy, physics and maths is a problem because there’s a hostile environment created for them in these fields. But the preponderance of women doing PhDs and their large majorities in some disciplines isn’t a problem as that’s merely due to a lack of enthusiasm and/or poor decision making by men. We all know the left is a bit more concerned with equity than that, but some people’s careers depend on them not saying so in public.

Paradoxically, some studies have shown that when women do have female role models they are less likely to pursue difficult career paths because they look at their mentors and decide it isn’t worth the sacrifice. So female mentors need to be combined with a supportive environment.

Psychology is no better than any other discipline when it comes to being family friendly. Policies come from the university, not the dept. There isn’t much sympathy if a person seems to be using their kids as an excuse to slack off and I don’t think the requirements for tenure are any easier, especially given the competition these days. The main difference is that people try to treat each other respectfully and generally have the social skills to achieve that goal, in my opinion.

Harry @55 you say:

“Philosophy has been largely immune to the more irresponsible flights of fancy in the humanities. It has also, in my experience, been much too immune to the most responsible trends of attending to diversity, promoting the understanding that different people learn in different ways, and an understanding that the way you conduct yourself as a teacher in the classroom has effects on who speaks up, how they speak up, and who actually gets to learn.”

Many philosophers pride themselves on rejecting an interest in the social that would consider questions about diversity, race, gender, oppression or other such topics in philosophical inquiry. Racism or sexism is, in their mind, at best a red herring, even when it comes to politics. (You might think they’d say ‘leave it to the sociologists’ but in fact, there are some who have contempt for social science fields. I wonder sometimes if they’d prefer these questions not be studied at all because it might lead to those flights of fancy you mention.) It’s very difficult to get to the top of the hierarchy in philosophy if concerns about race, gender, etc. are too present in your work. (There are a few exceptions.) I think the philosophy culture itself is hostile to paying real attention to diversity or letting it pollute or corrupt philosophy–philosophical talent being innate and all that. Many targets of diversity find philosophy a hostile and difficult culture and *say* they find it so but when discussions of this come up on the internet there are are always long thread trying to solve the ‘mystery’ of these statistics. Inference to the best explanation. Let’s try that sometime. In the past, people were discriminated against thus we have underrepresentation. Powerful white people acted in sexist and racist ways and shut many women and people of color out of their profession. We accept these as explanations of past disparities. Why are these not on the table now?

Here is what it is like in a gender-biased lab. I regularly attended a lab meeting at Harvard. There were several female grad students but mostly males. The eminent professor brought his young daughter who sat at the lab table coloring. That made me acutely aware of the models we female researchers were offering her (although I think she was pretty oblivious). First, none of the women present said a word except me. Second, the women brought refreshments, something they were expected to organized among themselves (without the men). Third, I argued at length with the young man presenting his work about an obvious confound and he never did acknowledge what I was talking about in his data (though it was pretty obvious). Why do males continue to argue with women even when the men are clearly wrong? The eminent professor said nothing at all, not even weighing in on the dispute over the data presented. I twisted in the wind.

A similar experience happened just a few weeks ago. I made a statement about statistics and two male faculty (both with considerably less stats training, one brand new out of grad school) disagreed. They insisted that I look up the point in question and prove to them that I was right. Women are required to do that, even when they have more credentials and should be presumed more knowledgeable. After a while you get tired of having to “prove” stuff to people with less qualifications and less knowledge, simply because they are male. I would never ask a more experienced professor to prove something to me — I would go look it up myself. Men don’t seem to accept that responsibility.

Well, I’ll take leederick’s bait. I don’t think any discipline needs to strive for 50/50. Frankly, if women really, authentically, want to be doing other things, there are better thingss than being an academic and that is fine. When it is easy to identify sexism, individual or institutional (and I really think that it is easy in my discipline), that is a barrier to women who authentically want or would want to pursue a career in a discipline, that is a justice/fairness problem, and those of us in the discipline have to take responsibility for it. I’m skeptical that there is a reverse sexist dynamic in any of the disciplines mentioned. But, for some of them (nursing, education, but not english or philosophy in my opinion) it really matters that we eliminate barriers of whatever kind, justice based or not, to talented people entering. So, yes, I think it is a serious problem that there are not more men in nursing or elementary education as professions, or as academic disciplines, if, as I suspect, there are barriers (in the form of gendered norms) to talented men entering those professions and disciplines. Its probably not a justice issue but a productivity issue. English and Philosophy — well, frankly, they just don’t matter much, so whereas I care about injustice to women (and if there were justice issues to men) who want to enter, I just don’t care much about getting the talent pool up (as a matter of social policy — by contrast I do care personally about my department and my profession getting talented graduate students, and I think we fail to optimize the talent level of our grad student population by overlooking talented women).

In other words, the feminization of fields is also caused by misogyny.

Hell yes. The question is to what extent. Compensation (i.e. pay, not psychological compensation) does have a whole lot of explanatory power as a mechanism, I think.

It’s true about affirmative action for men in college admissions, which doesn’t seem (to my knowledge) to trouble or offend the male students involved. Then again, the real issue is recruiting students to majors as undergrads, which is not (usually) a formal, selection-based process. At the grad admissions level, you usually have the populations who chose physics and English in college: your pool of qualified men and women is set at whatever ratios came out of the colleges. There’s not a lot of leverage between college admissions and grad school admissions at a population level. That said, I don’t know what the “pipeline” figures are for each of these disciplines— how they mirror the gender ratios in undergraduate programs.

Sorry, sloppy reading. You say this goes on at Harvard?
I guess an endowment makes a big difference; the university where I work certainly spends a great deal of time ensuring I will not do this sort of thing to staff, because they’re afraid of losing all that Federal money.
Much of this discussion here concerns a world very far from my experience, for which I am thankful. STEM and philosophy seem like unpleasant fields; thankfully these dinosaurs just aren’t going to be able to maintain this in the face of the declining number and quality of male undergraduates.

andthenyoufall, are you a grad student?

I’ve been an instructor in philosophy for thirteen years. I am an excellent teacher, colleague, service, lots of community service but I am also the single mother of two childen. Philosophers need a lotof quiet time to think about philosophy. A single mother living paycheck to paycheck (and working second jobs to by gas) with no assistance cannot keep up with her male colleague who’s wife handles his entire life so he can wandere around and wonder. I would love that luxury. I do not have it. I will have it, but it will take some time. In the meantime, I am doing something incredibly significant for human civilization, I am raising two smart, compassionate engaged human beings. Because the burden for this falls so heavily on the female but both male and female are evaluated at the same time in their lives (when women are having children and when men are focusing on their specialties while their wives take over all the other duties), the female ends up getting a ‘glad you’re around, your students love you, you add a lot to the university, but we can’t grant you tenure (so no job security, lower pay) because you haven’t published’.

I know that many European societies do not accept this inequity. Women during child bearing years are expected that they will be expected to spend more time with childcare and hence less at work. However, the cost to the work force is more than equalled out by the addition of human life. And, when women do return to the work force, they are evaluated from their on.

This is not the case in philosophy. During my experience, (let’s not even mention the male profs who won’t answer your questions, who tell you ‘you don’t look like a phlilosopher (meaning you’re not a white male)), male colleagues had their personal lives taken care of so they were free to philosophize. The women, the few that I’ve seen, are lower ranked (my philosophy department has not had a tenured female in fifteen years), paid less and exhausted, do not have time to serve the needs of the students (which lets face it, students come to mothers to talk about their problems and female profs are the closest things they have to moms on campus) and just can not get time to publish.

It is a rigged game. Philosophy is the last bastion of white male dominance. It is the guardian of knowledge and in truth, that is for white males.

There are all sorts of ways in which the current system filters men out – for example, emphasizing homework (which girls have always done better at) over tests; emphasizing collective projects over individual effort; labeling common behaviors in boys as mental illness and medicating them; zero-tolerance policies which disproportionally expel boys over girls.

Many of these things may be (are) worthy of examination. But how is medicating problematic behaviors a disadvantageous to boys? It seems instead to be a straightforward way of addressing pre-existing disadvantages. If in fact we could do more to address stereotypically puerile behavior both boys and girls would be better off – note the greater demands that boys make on teacher time, both positive and negative, and the correlation between having more girls in your class and learning more, &c.

If in fact boys are more rambunctious and so on purely due to innate maleness, then medication is probably the only feasible answer anyway. If it’s due to socialization, then we really are doing boys an injustice and should remedy whatever’s causing it (which I strongly suspect to be tied in with the same gender ideology that does injustice to women,) but medication seems to be a very reasonable response on the margin.

Of course this may depend on your intuitions about treating things with medication in general. ADHD may or may not be a “real” “illness” – this strikes me as a useless metphysical question – but I know that when I take dextroamphetamines I’m much more productive than I am otherwise, so my intuitions are pro.

Adults can at least make such decisions for themselves, but for children?

How could it ever be that adults would not make decisions for children?

Maybe a different example: if I have a lot of protein in my breakfast, I’ll be more productive than if I have a lot of carbohydrates. Are you deeply uncomfortable with this? Why or why not?

If by “[a]t some point, society should adapt to how people are, not the other way round” you mean that we often have to look at things through the lens of social relations rather than individual characteristics, and presumably moreso than we already do, I agree 1000%, of course (though I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so if I’m interpreting you incorrectly, please let me know.)

There are all sorts of ways in which the current system filters men out – for example, emphasizing homework …

When I read that, I thought, but those boys getting filtered out were a priori already preselected to be unlikely to be future PhD candidates. I.E., that these commonly described anti-male filters are working largely on the less academically inclined part of the spectrum, and hence probably don’t have much impact at the PhD level, which predominately come from the academically gifted part of the spectrum.

I’m also suspicious of taking statistics from rarified domains such as PhD candidates, or CEOs (glass ceiling …), which are clearly composed only of several sigma individuals in terms of the metric of success, and making general conclusions about the wider society from them.

What is this supposed to mean?

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.abstract

Doug K, when I did my first computer science course in 1991 there were virtually no women in the class, pr0n was being openly accessed in the labs, the computer-game-boy wankers were taking up valuable computers during tutorial times to compare swimsuit models, and anyone who hadn’t used a computer since they were 12 was fair game for sneering and insults. There were no female faculty. The dotcom crash brought me a certain sense of schadenfreude.

Wow. Lets try this again.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.abstract

New paper, not behind firewall, reveiws 20 years of studies on bias in the “math-sciences” and finds little if any evidence of bias. Instead finds that differences in faculty achievement are largely due to differences in resources, which in turn are due to structure factors such as the significantly higher percentage of women working part time.

Perhaps efforts to increase female representation in the sciences should focus on addressing these factors? Like the provision of affordable childcare, or flexible hours, or mandatory paternity leave. Not on anecdotal allegations of pervasive bias?

We would like to solve this problem – right? So we should focus on what the data suggests IS the problem.

Sapna Cheryan (http://faculty.washington.edu/scheryan/research.htm) writes the following:

Why do women consider a future in computer science to a lesser extent than men (Dryburgh, 2000; National Science Foundation, 2009)? Might this be because the powerful image of the male “computer geek” makes women feel like they do not belong in the field? With colleagues, I found was that there was a clear stereotype of computer science students as people who, for example, “stay up late coding and drinking energy drinks” and have “no social life”. In several behavioral experiments conducted at Stanford University and the University of Washington (Cheryan, Plaut, Davies, & Steele, JPSP, 2009), we found that women were less interested in working in companies that contained objects stereotypically associated with CS (e.g., Star Trek poster, video games) compared to identical companies that had non-stereotypical objects (e.g., nature poster, general interest books). The stereotypical cues evoked a masculinity that made women feel that they did not fit with the people in these environments. These results held even when the proportion of women in the environment was equal across the two types of companies. Attracting more women into computer science may therefore depend on broadening the image of who belongs in computer science.

Might, indeed, culture be part of the “problem”?

Yeah it shits me that I have to turn up to work on time. I think punctuality discriminates against the lazy.

Maybe you need to define the difference between “selection” and “discrimination” in your definition of busywork (which I note you’re avoiding).

Come to think of it, when I was in middle school the teacher who taught the gifted math section used to like telling the class that being lazy was the key to being really good at math (i.e. because being lazy motivates you to search for the simplest and most general solutions). He repeatedly praised me for my laziness.

stubydoo, not work from years ago, but yes I solved a lot more differential equations than was strictly necessary to learn the principles. But this repetition is essential for solving more difficult problems, and indeed as a basis for the intuitive leaps that you seem to think makes maths discovery possible. If a student rebels against this “busywork” then sometime down the road they’re going to misunderstand the fundamentals they need to be completely familiar with in order to build the proper solution to a problem.

Being lazy is not the key to being really good at maths. Knowing your fundamentals backwards and being willing to work a problem from multiple angles until it comes together are, however.

sg,

If I want to use the word “busywork” to justify my own poor schooling performance at various times, I guess it has to be a purely subjective definition – some of the stuff quenched my thirst for learning, some did not (though since I was young, my judgement on such things was imperfect).

I speculatively suggest that females less frequently have such sharp variation in their schooling experience (either in their motivations or their responses). Might be something there that someone has measured.

And you may certainly be right about the long term benefits, regardless of any gender implications or lack thereof (my own long-term results probably aren’t informative, as my “rebellion” turned out to be mostly temporary).

I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying: How much data is there on this? Are boys really worse at homework? Are they more aggressive?

You may think it obvious–but I spend a lot of time with kids and this isn’t obvious to me. How much of a role is gender bias playing in these studies I wonder. We constantly hear how incredibly, astoundingly different boys and girls are. I think we may be making them different. And they often aren’t all that different.

So what are we going to say about the study described in today’s NY Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&ref=science

which claims that women in academic science have fared as well as comparable men?

My suggestion – I probably didn’t explain it fully – was not that lurid examples put off women, so much as they illustrate a common attitude by male philosophers of distaste and hostility for weakness-femaleness- irrationality which attributes are somehow lumped together in a way that is not well examined. And I also suggested the hostility to women is really misdirected hostility to repressed aspects of themselves. I am not claiming I can prove this, I am just asserting it.

If in fact boys are more rambunctious and so on purely due to innate maleness, then medication is probably the only feasible answer anyway.

Because God forbid we restructure eight-year-olds’ school days so that they can act like eight-year-olds instead of sitting silently in rows listening to one adult talk for long periods of time. No, we need to reach for the pill bottle the moment the kids’ behavior becomes inconvenient to their minders — because any other solution would require more staff for the educational institution, therefore more funding, therefore more taxes, which is politically unthinkable.

If educational systems aren’t adapted to the kinds of behavior that are natural to small children, ISTM that medicating the kids that fit the worst is not the only, nor even necessarily the best, answer to the resulting problem of “rambunctiousness”, regardless of whether it occurs primarily in boys or in both sexes. (And of course if societywide sexism weakens in the future so that girls are no longer more strongly taught to be quiet and obedient before they even arrive at school, we may find that it *will* occur in both sexes.)

In other words, the feminization of fields is also caused by misogyny.

Hell yes. The question is to what extent. Compensation (i.e. pay, not psychological compensation) does have a whole lot of explanatory power as a mechanism, I think.

I disagree so strongly I suspect you accidentally left a “not” out of this sentence. I think the social stigma attached to men in feminized fields is overwhelmingly stronger than the pay differential (even though there probably is some). Most people are just not as focused on money as economists like to think. I think a quite considerable number of men would rather be a janitor than a nurse even if the nurse is paid better — because of how other people in their social circles will react to them.

@207: No, I do think pay explains differentials in the choice of medical specialties, the choice of econ or engineering over “soft majors,” and quite possibly even the desire of many men to seek high-paying jobs that don’t require a lot of college or grad school (I am thinking of my entrepreneur brother-in-law). Higher salaries are masculinized. (It’s just like height! — you want to be, oh, 10-15% above the women in financial stature. That feels right, natural.) Nursing and janitorial work are relatively unusual— is there any other predominantly female profession that pays as comparatively well as nursing? The continued participation of men in professional fields in large numbers, once they’ve begun to skew slightly female, will *partially* depend on their being able to make more money than their female colleagues, either by working vastly more hours, by maintaining majorities in certain high-dollar specialties, or by aggressively changing the rules of their organization (forming new partnerships or spinoff orgs, whatever) to maximize compensation. I do think more men will do that than women, at least for a while. I think that the tradeoff where men will choose a lower-paid masculinized profession over a higher-paid feminized profession will remain rare— or, if it happens, eventually that wage gap might narrow. Anyway, kind of a tiresome subject, sorry.

@stubydoo: I have a really hard time not reading your comments as implying that insofar as women do better at homework, they are not as talented, because how could a truly talented person tolerate stupid rote exercises? Not that you would be alone in believing this. Do you in fact think that boys do poorly on homework because they’re too smart for it, and that girls do well because it’s “just right” for their peaceable, orderly, detail-obsessed little housekeeping minds? If so, you should spit it out. (Full disclosure: I am not a math genius, but I never did my homework, and a lot of it did seem tiresome. This seems like a more general how-to-educate-“gifted”-kids problem, to use another horrible word, than a gender problem, however— again, unless you posit that boys are naturally more gifted.)

When I read that, I thought, but those boys getting filtered out were a priori already preselected to be unlikely to be future PhD candidates. I.E., that these commonly described anti-male filters are working largely on the less academically inclined part of the spectrum, and hence probably don’t have much impact at the PhD level, which predominately come from the academically gifted part of the spectrum.

Why would you think that? It doesn’t make sense. And yes, all other things being equal (in math at least), girls do tend to do better on homework than boys. This gap does close with increasing age, but I would have to say that in my experience that doesn’t happen until sometime late in their junior year or sometime in their senior year.

SoV, Why do you think that my contention that most of the boys being filtered out, didn’t have good prospects for academic success?

Please read what I wrote; I included it above. I repeat: your comment doesn’t make sense. The closest interpretation that does is that you think that behaviour is immutable and doesn’t change with, say, age. Since that isn’t true and I give you enough credit to know this, I’m at a loss to interpret what you wrote.

Our gifted classroom in middle school was filled with posters about famous people who’d been thought to be mentally retarded until as adults they suddenly invented the light bulb or something. I have no idea what the point of that was supposed to be.

@stubydoo, from 209: I retract my baiting questions. To everyone: I apologize for lowering the tone.

Because God forbid we restructure eight-year-olds’ school days so that they can act like eight-year-olds instead of sitting silently in rows listening to one adult talk for long periods of time.

Yes.

When my son was about that age, his insatiable curiosity and his need to be physically active would have made some in a carpentry shop each week a great fit. He loved woodworking and was already an intelligent helper on projects we were doing around the property and, under the supervision of a knowledgeable adult, surprisingly responsible. I even talked with the cabinet-maker up the road about maybe having my son there a few hours a week. But insurance issues (if nothing else) made it impossible for him to have someone else’s kid in his shop. (All of this shed a little light on old-style apprenticeships for me. Not that I wanted my kid to be a semi-slave, or work a full-time job. But any constructive activity soaking up some of his energy was always a plus.)

Luckily (in some ways), my kids were homeschooled, 100% in the early years, partially in later years. In those early years I was grateful that I didn’t have to put my son in a classroom where one adult was trying to meet the needs of 15 or 20 “rambunctious” kids. My son could have soaked up the attention of 15 or 20 adults all by himself, no problem.

I was actively steered away from this degree path by an advisor who suggested that given present-day economic realities, there wasn’t much money in majors like that, and given my obvious aptitude for numbers a bright young man like myself should go for something like engineering. Which I hated, btw.

Presumably, because it’s your duty as a man to support a family (read: stay-at-home homemaker and one or more children), which means you’re going to have to go into something that makes pretty good money if you don’t want your kids to have to go to school with black poor kids. And while college girls may go for arty boys now, when you grow up and want to start a family, you’ll find that grown women will want a reliable man with a reliable paycheck. Clearly, it’s your adviser’s duty to set you on that path regardless of what you, in the folly of youth, think you want.

That said, I don’t think that even in those circles, a man is *really* judged by his paycheck, but by the prestige of his occupation; and while there’s certainly a strong correlation, it is broken by feminized professions such as nursing.

And from these numbers, psychology may be in that category in a generation. It’ll still be a profession that requires postgraduate education and so will probably still pay better than stereotypically masculine blue-collar jobs like truck driving or construction, but by the middle of the century male psychologists may be viewed with the same kind of prejudice as male nurses are now. What kind of real man would want to spend all day talking to other people about their feelings? (Hmm, maybe it’s started already.)

On the other hand, it could be argued that nursing is sui generis because it’s both subordinate — to doctors — and caretaking, and thus would be in some sense feminized, relative to currently-existing gender roles, whether there happened to be a lot of women in it or not, and in fact that’s what allowed women to take it over *before* the feminist revolution (or, arguably, as the leading edge thereof) even though it’s a profession requiring advanced training.

sbk @217, not to worry – since I’ve laid down some speculative stuff here without evidence, and made it personal to myself, I should expect personal criticism in response.

I notice that women are generally highest in subjects that deal with people, other living things and language. They appear to be lowest in subjects that deal with non-living things or the physical universe. Maybe women just find some subjects more interesting on average. Maybe there is no systematic bias to overcome, at least on a wide-spread basis. I have known many bright, self-directed women and most, but not all, seem drawn to the the social sciences and humanities over the basic sciences. The important thing to remember is that the variance within men and women’s preferences is greater than the variance between the two groups mean’s.

The question then is, is this predominantly because of some innate difference between males and females or alternatively, are males being discriminated against when it comes to the criminal justice machinery?

I don’t think those are the only possible explanations. ISTM that males are incarcerated more (at least in part) because they actually do commit more, and more serious, crimes; but that, in turn, may be related to being less strongly socialized toward obedience and rule-following. (Although a hormonal explanation is also possible, especially since crime is concentrated in *young* men.)

It could also be that they’re more likely to be incarcerated for a given crime because they are stereotypically perceived as more dangerous and in need of incarceration, too. Real-world causation is often complex.

Personally I’m pretty happy that, as an eight-year-old, I was coerced into not acting like one.

Sure; but if you hadn’t been, you’d be equally happy about *that*. I forget the name for this kind of after-the-fact justification, but it’s extremely common. Hazing and child abuse are perpetuated that way, too (not that making an eight-year-old sit down and shut up is actual child abuse, well, depending on the methods used).

The question then is, is this predominantly because of some innate difference between males and females or alternatively, are males being discriminated against when it comes to the criminal justice machinery?

I don’t think those are the only possible explanations.

BINGO!! So why are so many people here seem to be assuming that those are the only possible explanations . . . and rather selectively at that? Really not cool.

Please tell me this doesn’t mean I can date you. Would this be sometime in the 70’s?

Sorry, I’m married. But yes, and yes on the kitty posters, and the JLS. Your guidance counselor sounds annoying, especially to boys.

@sg, DougK
I started working in ’87 with a huge number of fellow college hires of both sexes, in a large corporation. There was no problem at the time with girlie pinups from anybody under 35, or for that matter from anyone in development, with one exception. It was usually accepted gossip that it was the personalities of the older guys were at fault for giving the younger ones the idea work should be like a boys’ club. The point being that it seems “PC” worked for a little while, and I don’t remember anybody complaining about anything except that they couldn’t use the c word. But I’ve almost always worked in hardware manufacturing companies–the kind that don’t live long unless they’re IBM or Cisco–and I prefer it to a software company.

The only actual pron I encountered was from an English undergraduate intern who left a large explicit picture up for the cleaner to find, and that wasn’t until 1990.

reposting

Please tell me this doesn’t mean I can date you. Would this be sometime in the 70’s?

Sorry, I’m married. But yes, and yes on the kitty posters, and the JLS. Your guidance counselor sounds annoying, especially to boys.

@sg, DougK
I started working in ’87 with a huge number of fellow college hires of both sexes, in a large corporation. There was no problem at the time with girlie pinups from anybody under 35, or for that matter from anyone in development, with one exception. It was usually accepted gossip that it was the personalities of the older guys were at fault for giving the younger ones the idea work should be like a boys’ club. The point being that it seems “PC” worked for a little while, and I don’t remember anybody complaining about anything except that they couldn’t use the c word. But I’ve almost always worked in hardware manufacturing companies–the kind that don’t live long unless they’re IBM or Cisco–and I prefer it to a software company.

The only actual pron I encountered was from an English undergraduate intern who left a large explicit picture up for the cleaner to find, and that wasn’t until 1990.

I’m a little late coming into this discussion. I’m a female leaver of phil. and I thought my comments, anecdotes as they may be, might be helpful.

I have worked on some “hot topics” that could possibly, if I kept it up, get me where every academic in philosophy wants to go. I mention this only so the skeptics (yes, I know they are out there) will know it’s not just untalented women/people who leave. (And, no, I didn’t get any special treatment because I’m female, contrary to what all my male peers may believe.)

For me, it wasn’t the “blood sport” aspect of philosophy or the “math-y-ness” that made me want to leave.

I mean, look folks, it shouldn’t be hard to see that the student peer group isn’t the best of people to be around. Anyone familiar with the phil blog world, for instance, will have seen perhaps billions of disturbing comments on the Phil Smoker and elsewhere. For some reason, in their attempt to pretend they are wholly insulated from humanly concerns and are entirely objective, some guys in phil actively display distain for political issues and, moreover, display an openness to sexist positions that, in other departments I’ve been in, are hardly even to be considered anymore. Contrary to what they think, that doesn’t make them look smart. It makes them look uninformed and ignorant.

In philosophy, you’d think none of the male students ever read On the Subjection of Women. (Seriously, we’re having *this* discussion and how old is that work?)

Somewhere above, Harry suggests that philosophy has been less open to certain moves toward inclusiveness. I think he’s absolutely right.

Someone else mentioned that philosophy may be a unique case compared to other disciplines. I think that should be seriously considered.

The reason that undergrads in philosophy can get away with positing this-or-that sexist position or thought experiment is because we are supposed to be open to any position, even ones that seem unpalatable. Further, quite a few students in philosophy tend toward the a priori model; who needs to look at years of evidence that suggests they could possbly be wrong?

Moreover, there seems to be a certain type of guy attracted to philosophy–one that is really good at solving little logic problems (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but totally lacks wisdom and life experience. They, I honestly think, literally can’t yet comprehend the texture–in all is best and worst–of human existence.

Sucks to be them, because I’ve lived a life before coming to philosophy. I’ve had responsibilities, struggles, triumphs. And, on top of that, I can solve little logic problems, too.

I absolutely consider myself excercising agency. I consider myself rational for leaving philsophy.

In light of the fact that we absolutely do not know the impact of biological differences when it comes to sex and intellectual capacities, I think the prudent thing to do is to assume the best of female students. Who knows what women are capable of if they have barely been given a chance yet–and in philosophy, it’s true that we’ve only recently been given a chance.

Lastly, I’ve noticed that people start talking about how women are socialized and brought up when these discussions come up. That’s great. But the guys should think about that, too. You don’t know how many times I’ve witnessed sexists attitudes coming from guys in philosophy that are probably due to their culture/raising. But while I reflect on how I was raised (being a feminist and all) and make changes in myself, they take their interestes, likes, and so on, as totally free of those things and not really worth reflecting on. And, perhaps worse, when I’ve brought it up to them, they act like I’m a rigid meany-feminazi, when, in my experience, I’ve been more flexible and self-critical than they have.

There comes a time in which the discussion, questions and doubts must stop, and we should act. I’ve been tracking these discussions on women in phil for years now.

People in phil, especially the males and people in top departments: it’s time to put a plan in place. It’s pretty easy. Like engineering. We know where we are. Figure out where we want to be. Then put together and institute a plan that will most likely bring that about with the most efficiency and effectiveness.

Keep it up, Harry, you are on the right track.

Why is it so many of your inferiors are male?

Look at the graph in the OP, bxg.

When I started in undergrad at the University of Adelaide all students got given a fairly solid (written) introduction to the basic concepts of sexism in academic behaviour, with particular pointers for men on how to behave in tutorials, some of the common mistakes that men make in thinking about gender relations at work, etc. I see all of those silly myths from 25 years ago being reproduced by many people here. How little academia has changed in that time…

Thanks PhilLeaver (and I admire your restraint in 239!) Basically there’s nothing you say that I disagree with (except that you’re probably to kind to me!). This whole thread’s given me a lot to think about, and I assume that lots of non-commenters feel the same.

PhilLeaver,

I would somewhat like to apologize for the tone of my first reply to you. Let me try less cynically. You are at pains to assert your agency, and that some of the issues have raised against female participation (“blood sport”/”math-y-ness”) were not at all responsible. You seem fairly clear in saying you had the ability to succeed had you kept it up. So the question in my mind is: what does this have to do with the gender divide; aren’t you just talking about one talented, experienced, person’s situation?

Because merely by sharing your story in this thread, unless you assert otherwise (and you don’t), the implication is that your experience is relevant to the gender question. And frankly, it’s clear that the gist of your story is to be critical of your former philosophy colleagues. Perhaps “contemptuous” is a bit too strong a word, but you come across as close to this (one quote among several such: “Sucks to be them, because I’ve lived a life before coming to philosophy”) .

So I request you tie this more explicitly to the gender divide. Are the people who stayed, those who – this just seems clear from your writing – you don’t think that highly of mostly male for some reason you can state? Or are there many women among them? Your story in my mind leaves this hanging. Do you think that as many men would escape for the same reasons you did? Do you think as many women would stay in the program? I’m sure there are some men who could give a similar history showing their similar disillusionment. I just don’t see how or even whether you intend to tie your own to the question at hand. You _are_ (likely you disagree, but try to read it objectively) stating a somewhat insulting picture of PhilStayers. Maybe right, but if it’s in service to this discussion I think could be clearer as to why, and more specifically, why you think there is gender divide in the PhilStayers picture.

There are two things that any participant in a discussion like this one about gender disparities in disciplines, professions etc. needs to keep in mind:

1) Any explanation in terms of characteristics of the discipline that many members of the discipline feel relatively comfortable with, such as “mathyness”, its “agressiveness” etc are to be explored ad nauseam.
2) Any explanation that imputes a character flaw to the dominant gender of the discipline is to be swiftly condemned and equal or greater character flaws are to be imputed to the source of the original explanation.

> 2) Any explanation that imputes a character flaw to the dominant gender of the discipline is to be swiftly condemned and equal or greater character flaws are to be imputed to the source of the original explanation.

There’s _some_ truth in this. But the weaker form of it which I think a certain number of commenters are more in line with is “you either think there are valid gender-relevant differences or you don’t”. There’s a mighty lot of resistance to this point, which some of us see as a tautology.

Someone can claim men of being on average more more a-social, obsessive, quasi-autistic, etc, than women. (Me, I think this is true, but so what?) But if you think this you may expect it would make men overrepresented in math … well, that’s hat 1. But these faults of masculinity also tend to (even if inadvertently/subconciously) create a women-oppressive atmosphere where-ever they work, and that’s hat 2. A lot of people like hat 2 but seem angry even at the suggestion hat 1 exists.

The reason my tone was so angry, I guess you could say, is because I’ve seen good arguments from women and people of color for years, but their work has been, I’d say, systematically devalued. I’ve seen a lot of smart people, who I look up to, be calm and reasonble. In a lot of ways that great. The feminist philosophers blog is good for being a pretty nice blog in term of tone, for example, and I think that’s good for a variety of reasons.

But beyond my training in philosophy, I also have training in domentic violence, emergency situations, and related issues. I don’t tolerate being treated badly very well. I also don’t tolerate other people being treated badly very well. If that means I’m not making a great argument at the time, so be it. I’ve removed women from homes where aruments were useless and I’ve participated in social activites for people of color where arguments were useless.

The arguments are already out there. I’m just popping a flare. I personally have tried to retain other women and minorities. I promise I’m not an evil person. And I do appreciate honest efforts to change beliefs, behaviors, culture, systems.

Harry, you can use my story if you want. I’d just like to stay anon.

EMG,

I just wanted to say I’m sorry to hear about your experiences. Despite what looks like meanness on my part, above, I absolutely know what you are talking about wrt being attacked for conservatism of background and other things. I know exactly what that looks like, because I saw it, too. And one of the other women I tried (but failed) to help graduate was one from a religious minority background who was quiet and sensitive, but a HARD worker and careful reader.