Gender dynamics in the philosophy classroom

Great post, Harry, as always. Slightly off topic from what you want to talk about, I know, but I did wonder how much of this is more peculiar to elite schools, whether public or private. I remember this all too well from grad school and undergrad, but I’ve noticed at CUNY, where I teach, that I see a lot less of this. Whether it’s because the male students feel less entitled or the women students must push harder just to succeed in the most basic ways, I wonder how social class can affect these dynamics. I know what I am saying may seem counterintuitive to some — the stereotype of working class and immigrant students is that sexism is more rampant the lower down the social totem poll you go — but it’s just not been my experience at Brooklyn College.

You could do as the hippies do and pass the deal to the left. Everyone speaks, or explicitly passes up the opportunity. Slow but sure.

Male children are probably still being taught from infancy that they must compete and dominate, so you need something pretty clunky to restrain the tendency.

Very thoughtful post, not much to add. One thing I would note is that some sensitivity to these concerns going into the first couple class meetings can go a long way. A lot of the strategies suggested here are useful once students have settled in to the class a bit and built some rapport with one another & the instructor. However, the first few class sessions are the most likely to be dominated by a small group of students, generally male, and the environment set in these early sessions can be hard to shift once established. So I find that attention to these concerns during this opening stretch is crucial, and the most outspoken female student(s) can be your best ally in warding off the general impression that the class conversation will be mostly among men (moving forward).

I’m rather out of touch but seems to me that more than most fields Anglo-Ametican philosophy has an image of itself as a gladitorial pursuit with a heroic view of its champion fighters (eg. Rawls, Dworkin and Cohen, when I was studying pol phil). In so far as students are influenced by their example, isn’t this likely to lead to discussions where one or two brave knights end up commanding the field?

(Okay Rawls’ style wasn’t really gladitorial. Siege warfare perhaps?)

@10 Shelley Correll has done interesting experiments on how male self-assessment of results on a test of made-up ability are much more generous than female self-assessment of the same results on a made-up ability especially when the experimental subjects are primed to think about gender. The results indicate that such differential self-assessment may contribute to women not pursuing paths that men with similar results think they would do fine in.
https://sociology.stanford.edu/people/shelley-correll

It’s too bad you’ll probably get so few descriptions of personal experience from women, Harry, because some who might respond will either assume you want only reports from other teachers or from experts, or will hesitate to open themselves up to criticism about whether they interpreted things right. In any case, it’s not unheard of for women to complain that other women talk too much in class, though probably they complain more that the girl in question is “ditzy” or something, than that she should talk less. It’s not unheard of either, especially in grade school (at least it wasn’t not too long ago) for parents and teachers to tell girls it would be wrong and unfair not to make sure the best students were recognized to be boys, so while I’m sure that doesn’t happen in the classrooms of CT participants, it might not be unreasonable for students to assume it would be likely.

My experience, and conversation with female peers/students both contemporaneously and years later, backs up RNB’s point: females tend to have less self-confidence in their own thoughts / ideas as the males do. Even comparing them with males that have a fairly objective read on their own abilities.

I’ve seen / heard of in-classroom compliments about intellectual performance going a long way. Either in the moment – “excellent point” – or calling out assignments as “the best” or “bringing up ideas I hadn’t thought through”, etc.

Can be “showing” instead of “telling” too: engagement with students as peers engaged on the same plane of intellectual discovery as the instructor can be as powerful as positive re-enforcement. Asking clarification questions, asking questions about the implications of an argument, etc. Puts the student in the rhetorical position of “knowing”, and once they’re comfortable with that role they tend to do it more often.

As the OP puts it, “like gold dust”.

I’m a woman who noticed this dynamic way back when I was in college and law school, but was for some reason always on the high side of it — that is, a few students would suck up all the oxygen in the room, and they were generally a bunch of guys and me.

From the student end, it looked really professor-driven a lot of the time: that is, there’d be multiple hands up, but the usual suspects were the ones who got called on — it felt as though professors had identified a small group of students as permitted to speak at will, but everyone else would only be acknowledged at long intervals. I’m sure no one thinks they’re running their classroom like that on purpose, but it might be something to suggest that professors do some self-examination for.

The gender split of the students who are allowed to pontificate is an issue, certainly, but it would be fixable by not having particular students allowed to take up a disproportionate amount of attention at all: I shouldn’t have been allowed to take over classes as much as the male students in my classes shouldn’t have been allowed to do the same.

I’m one of those women who does not talk much, but I do get very annoyed with those guys who always talk and mostly about nothing. Often, if I want to say something I am talked over. The thing is, it should not be necessary to constantly be talking rubbish in order to be heard. Telling me to say more, i.e. talk more rubbish, will not make the classroom into a better environment I think. It would be great if talking rubbish was tolerated less. Also, I usually do speak when I feel passionate about something (when i think the other is absolutely wrong or when it touches me personally then it is important enough for me to interfere) or when I have a good idea, so perhaps it would help if classes are more thought provoking.
Doing it in a way like ‘who has something to say?’ will get the bullshitters going, so instead more structure would be great….pose a provoking thesis, make a provoking claim, ask a difficult question and ask a difficult follow up question, or two or three,….and moderate the discussion (let people speak who hold up their hand instead of just the loudest people, i.e. point at them and say ‘yes, you, go ahead’).

I think LizardBreath (a female who was outspoken in Philosophy classes) hit the nail on the head:

“…it looked really professor-driven a lot of the time: that is, there’d be multiple hands up, but the usual suspects were the ones who got called on — it felt as though professors had identified a small group of students as permitted to speak at will, but everyone else would only be acknowledged at long intervals. I’m sure no one thinks they’re running their classroom like that on purpose, but it might be something to suggest that professors do some self-examination for.”

I’ve known professors like this in various disciplines, but they seem in more abundance in philosophy. I suspect the driving force behind their behavior is the belief that it take “a certain kind of mind” to be a philosopher, namely, the kind of mind that has always been in the field. From my vantage point, this seems to mean someone who argues primarily to display his (real or imagined) brilliance to his peers and to attract the attention of “gurus” (big names in the field) so that he can “prove himself”.

For whatever reason, this “kind of mind” usually belongs to a male, and the professors who preferentially cater to these “minds” usually have this “kind of mind” as well.

Women have no problem with argument as the fact that half of law students and practicing lawyers are women. It’s that “craving attention from the guru so I can prove myself” that seems to be the defining difference.

Sorry – ‘and _women’s_ underrepresentation in philosophy’

I always felt that teachers called upon students to try to keep them engaged by having them make the points that the teacher intended to make all along, and the students most reliable at saying what the teacher intended got called on the most. Could it be that students speaking less are either less sure they know what is intended to come next or less interested in inserting themselves between the classroom and the material under study?

This rings true in lots of ways – especially the phenomenon of the student who gets lots of attention by talking, regardless of whether he has anything terribly helpful to contribute. I am conscious that I tend to under-use cold-calling, simply because I’m all too aware of how much I would have hated it myself (and tending to ignore the fact that it might have done me good…).

I have a particular – and perhaps not very generalisable – problem with the mix of degree programmes (US majors) in most of my classes; generally, majority Ancient History (which means predominately male) with a minority of Classical Studies and Classics students (more likely to be female). However much I reiterate that all perspectives are equally valuable and this *isn’t* supposed to be a purist ancient history class, they don’t appear to accept this – which means that the majority of female students then doubly disparage their own right to speak.

In the community ed classes that I teach, I’ve found that non-talkers/women generally/marginalized people generally participate more when some effort has been made to build relationships in the room. When there’s some trust between people – even if it’s only “I know a little bit about you so you’re not an unknown quantity who may blow up at me if I disagree with you” – I think typically marginalized groups tend to open up a bit more. The well-meaning yet chatty also tend, IME, to find it a bit easier to listen attentively when they see their classmates as full people with complex thoughts and interests rather than as people-shaped blanks.

I usually spend the first class session at least in part on some getting-to-know-you-getting-to-know-all-about-you stuff – round-robin questions about students’ background and interests, small group brainstorming, collectively creating a timeline based on our existing knowledge about whatever we’re reading, open-ended general knowledge questions, etc. I keep it relatively light, since the purpose would be totally defeated if students came away feeling stupid. Basically, the goal is to get everyone to talk once or twice to the whole class and in a small group setting. This also doubles as a chance for me to see what people already know about the topic.

Until a rhythm is established, I try to start classes with a lighthearted opinion question that relates to the material and that everyone must answer. “Would you date Mr. Rochester?” “If you were invited to Mars by Bogdanov’s Martians, would you go?” “What would be an appropriate nickname for St. John Rivers?” That type of thing – and I figure you could adapt it easily to at least some philosophy classes. Ask a silly question about one of the famous phrases in Kant or something. On several occasions, we’ve actually jumped right into very productive discussion from the intro questions, and the sillier questions actually provide fun call-back as the class sessions progress.

I also do some small group work at the start of some classes, but I keep it very short – three people sitting near each other have [five minutes-ish] to respond to a prompt.

For all of these, the actual content of the discussion is secondary to getting students into the habit of talking/listening.

Admittedly, community ed is pretty far from Serious Educational Institution philosophy classes, but I did go from having students drop out pretty regularly to having a consistent and engaged group when I started putting more time into creating some connections between students.

Competitiveness is the western way of life. Whether we like it or not. The aggressive succeed, the shy are left behind.

The Western world seems awfully large.

Harry, I love your exchange at number 8. This post has made me remember my long-ago student days, when you could not have paid me enough to speak in a large class. Even in classes of 10 to 12 students, I rarely spoke, and was very nervous when I did. When I was in graduate school and became a TA, obviously I had to overcome this reluctance to talk in front of groups, and I did this well enough to tutor the classes I was assigned, where I was expected to supplement the professors’ lectures rather than facilitate a lot of discussion.

I think I would have felt quite different as a student if my classes were all-female. I never had such a class, but, at least as I remember it, my reluctance was a paralyzing fear of being mocked by the boys. (I experienced quite a bit of that in high school.)

Since you don’t have the option of dividing your classes, some of the suggestions for rotating questions among the class, with fair warning, seem like they might be good ideas, but I don’t know whether they would have decreased my dread of speaking. I do remember that by the end of my undergraduate years, I had got to know the other honours students, and once we knew each other, I felt much more relaxed. By that time I had also distinguished myself academically, too, so no one in those classes was going to mock me. That took a few years, though.

Perhaps in future the classes will be conducted via social media and people who ‘over-participate’ will get unfollowed or unfriended by everyone else

I wish I’d known about mansplaining 15 or 20 years ago when the Intertubes were becoming a thing; I would have saved a lot of time.

I don’t think he has any doubt, bianca.

Thanks for this, Harry. I really appreciate your posts here on teaching.

My solutions to this problem are, first, cold-calling. Like Paul Reber, I use a randomized list to call n every student an equal number of times over the semester. (This also works as an attendance-keeping device, if you need one.) Besides its other benefits, going to the trouble of making a list protects you from your own unconscious inclination to call on certain students disproportionately. Second, like Rob Barrett, I require students to write response papers that are due prior to the class meeting where that reading will be discussed, so it’s easy to say “Student X, you pointed out this in the reading…”

Couple more points on this second one. Obviously everyone should experiment and find what works for them, but personally I would not recommend giving students a choice of dates for response papers/memos/etc. You think you’re being flexible and accommodating but in reality this kind of “choice” is just one more task that takes up students’ energies and they will often fail at. I assign every student their dates for response papers on the first day of class. (For my classes, one response paper every other week, so 7 per semester seems to work well, but obviously that will vary.) the most important thing is that students turn them in early enough that you can look at them before class. i also find it’s helpful to have very specific prompts — I used to give students the option of writing about whatever in the reading in was interesting to them, but again, this kind of “flexibility” actually just means more work for them. Better to tell them what you’re looking for — a couple of well-crafted questions will be useful for all the students as they do the readings, whether they are writing a paper for that class or not.

A couple of people here have said they are naturally reticent and wouldn’t like being cold-called. With due respect, I can’t quite accept that. I teach economics, so every class I get some students who say they just can’t do math. I don’t accept that. They may well have gotten a poor math education in the New York City public schools, but they aren’t incapable of doing math. Often — not alway, but often — with some coaching and encouragement they end up doing fine on that part of the class, but the big hurdle is always first getting them to accept that it isn’t impossible for them.

It’s the same for you reticent people speaking in class. Ze K is trolling but he’s kind of right. We do live in a society where you do sometimes have to get up on a plinth. I don’t have a completely satisfactory answer to Ronan;s question @32 — why does everyone have to participate — but I feel like, they do. Partly for the reasons Harry gives, but also because I think the capacity to speak up, state and defend a position in front of a group, is one of the big genuine capabilities that you should get in college.

I took university classes in three different decades. My experience of the classroom wasn’t that “men in general dominated” the discussion. It was that a very small number of students ever bothered to speak at all. So while you did have a lot of women remain silent, the percentages of silence were about the same for both genders. The vast majority of students, male or female, remained silent, for whatever reason. Professors struggled to get anyone to talk most of the time, and their frustration with this was often visible.

In smaller seminars, I think this reluctance broke down a lot. It was the greatest in large classes. But the problem seems to me to be far less gender-specific than one of alphas and those seemingly content with following.

Is alpha culture more prevalent among men? Probably. But this still yields a situation where most men are time-dominated by other men in the classroom, too, as are most women.

Interestingly enough, in grade school, girls in general seem to be the most outspoken, and are often called on by the teachers more than the boys — unless it’s to discipline them.

Not sure what changes through the years, but it doesn’t seem to shift later. Umpteen studies have been done about this shift, of course. But I think an important point is missed if we just look at this in strictly gendered terms. It’s more about social hierarchies in general, how they form, what they entail, and this impacts men just as much as women.

That said, professors should always be aware of any patterns of discrimination and avoid them, studiously.

I’m grateful for how the teachers, discussion leaders, etc. here are working to reduce the glibocracy — thank you!

ok Harry. No beating about the bush. Just straight in.

I’ve worked in large organisations where this stuff is taken very seriously, so if I consider a specific case of a departing employee in one of my teams and translate it onto someone leaving your course, here’s how it goes. And in this, I’m the head of department and your boss.

The person leaving your course gives feedback to the institute central team that they left because they were talked over and had their opinions misrepresented and ridiculed. My boss in the central team brings me in and says there is a clear problem with repeat women leavers in one of my departments. what am I going to do about it? Failure to address this will result in a low personal appraisal, lower remuneration, eventual dismissal.

I get you in my office and tell you that this is not good enough. you need to run a course for everyone, not just a few loud mouths. I want you to come back within a week with an action plan. What I am looking for is for you to accept that there is a genuine problem (which you’ve done above) and that you are accountable for sorting it out. What I am expecting is that you will come back with some specifics, but that you will also come back with some general points that you, me, and other heads of courses can sit down, work through, and implement to improve participation across the whole school.

Now going away from the actual case, the thing is, Institutions Deliver Performance. Raw material in, professional goods out. Some of that raw material has ego issues that they can only (currently) resolve by dominating other people in arguments. They may not actually be smart at all. The institute has to not only deliver knowledge, but teach some professional skills that allow students to function in a professional environment. If big egos carry on driving out less forceful women, not only have you failed the women, but you have failed the big egos who will go into the outside professional world and find that modern organisations have little time for this kind of behaviour.

I see no reason why a teacher should require people to instantly respond out loud to material they have just seen. Is that how philosophy progresses? Surely there are better ways of organising time than this? More formal structure round discussion, more planned participation of individuals?

Are we trying to figure out why men are falling behind, why the education system is failing them? Why boys are doing so horribly in primary school? No, of course not. We’re focusing like a laser on the shrinking domain where men still do better than women, and trying to figure out how to eliminate them. With the eventual goal, one must assume, of making sure women do better than men in every field.

You’re careful here not to explain precisely what the consequences of boys “failing” and men “falling” are, or what it means for women to be doing “better.” Is male poverty growing? Is male employment shrinking? Is the under-awarding (not the undereducation) of men of certificates and higher degrees costing them anything? What subjects are the bulk of these degrees awarded to women? Do they lead to high-earning positions, are they located in prestigious fields? Are men’s wages falling below those of women? Is there a scarcity of male CEOs? Are, in fact, the majority of women doing better in nearly every field? What does this “better” look like, how is it being measured? In short–and pretending that all uncited claims you’ve made are wholly correct and easily substantiated–what are the actual outcomes?

When I first took philosophy classes, I was definitely one of those who talked too much and too combatively. A few things would have helped both myself and the rest of the class:

– If whoever was leading discussion could have specifically instructed me to listen rather than speak at certain points, perhaps with additional instructions to be able to summarise the discussion or provide a single response or clarification at a later time.

– If I were told to structure my responses in an organised way – to explain what I was responding to, why I thought it was important, how it related to the topic, etc. before jumping in, and to avoid rambling – with the structure of comments praised or corrected just as the structure of a sentence or essay might be. In particular, reminding me and others not to start with “Yeah, but…” every single time would have improved both the comments and the atmosphere.

– If there were a few minutes between presenting an argument or idea and discussing it, with encouragement to collect my thoughts in the meantime. In fact, now that I am a much more reticent speaker, this would still help, just in the other direction.

Perhaps some discussion at the start of the course about what makes for aggressive or disruptive discussion habits would also have been helpful. Even at my most talkative, I stopped speaking when I felt the room had that kind of atmosphere, or if the dynamic between myself and someone else felt that way. I was just a bit overenthusiastic, and clueless as to how things might have felt for others. And even people who self-consciously enjoy combative discussion probably don’t like to think of themselves as aggressive, so a quick warning at the start of the course might work for them too.

I should add that I think the unpleasant nature of some professional philosophical debate is a result of untreated cases of loudmouth-undergrad-itis rather than a cause. Undergrads just don’t have much exposure to actual discussions between philosophers. I never saw any until I was in my last year at uni and I was surprised by the atmosphere. (In my case, it was just experience of talking about philosophy, listening to others, and formulating adroit responses that calmed me down, so my surprise was that that hadn’t happened for people who were much more experienced than me.)

In fact, this inspires me to think that early exposure of undergrads to discussion between philosophers who are careful about how they present themselves might be helpful too. To come briefly to the subject of women being more likely to stay silent, seeing competent professional women discuss philosophy with each other and with men, and seeing them listened to and responded to, might encourage undergrad women to speak up. Though that can only be conjecture coming from me.

sometimes I just think education is like health and longevity — once you treat men and women roughly equally maybe women do better, because they are superior

Sorry this is far OT but I’m puzzled how this fits with what I thought was your defence of ‘radical equality’ in education. I can’t seem to find the paper it’s in but eg.

what I call the radical version of the principle of educational equality, which demands that children face equal prospects for educational achievement regardless of their social background or their natural level of talent

Also, ZM @65 and RNB @ 8 raise good points. I also wonder about RNB’s questions. From a lay point of view, that’s what it seems like Merleau-Ponty is all about, right? To go in that direction and find questions specific to women were not what was meant by attention to the body would be a somewhat frustrating experience, and I’d assume understandably so.

Harry, I’m curious what you found valuable in Dipper’s comment? Frankly it struck me as a good example of exactly the problem we are trying to solve — someone with no particular knowledge or insight on the topic, but very confident their voice should be heard.

bianca steele,

I think RNB had some good ideas, but I also think it could be problematic for young women for the lecturer to objectify them as part of the subject like that, particularly when the same was not done for men as a distinct gender group. I remember a class I took where the Professor started a discussion about gender generally then asked male and females both questions about gender in their lives.

I think problematising male-ness is as important as bringing up the different experience of women.

Related to Val’s comments above, I think in some cases discussions she has with male interlocutors on CT the male commenters say things like they are feminists and see women as being equal to men and therefore they aren’t being sexist etc which I find really problematic since it is still seeing male experience and subjectivity as normal and then saying women are equal — or can be equal to this if they act a certain way and argue like a man — when Val has repeatedly said that is not her type of feminism. And rather than a discussion eventuating about this often the male commenters shut down the discussion by saying they are feminists and she shouldn’t call them sexist. To be honest I think gender becomes a better lens here than feminism, because while the male commenters may identify as feminists, they are not female, and don’t have the experience of being a female commenter on CT.

I know in studying history there were a lot of women’s and gender subjects available, and gender would also be part of the content of other subjects which were not themselves based on gender. I think history as a discipline is a few decades ahead on this than philosophy seems to be, as far as I can tell without studying it much.

But it’s all kind of undermined by the way Bretty shits all over the table and you do nothing to stop him, isn’t it. You’re talking about all these tools you could use to stop over-aggressive narcissists from bullying people out of spaces, but you don’t even try and use them, you don’t even think of using them.

What’s the point, here? What are we trying to help you with?

Kiwanda,

Your comment is very contradictory ;-) on the one hand you imply women must like trolley problems since one woman invented trolley problems and other female philosophers have done trolley problems ; but on the other hand you point out that just because bombers were mostly men doesn’t mean most men were bombers . I appreciate your points, but I have never seen such a short entirely contradictory comment before ;-)

Oh, and Harry, thanks for the kind words! I’m embarrassed to admit I was pressed for time and forgot I’d only skimmed your comment before I replied to it.

It would definitely be nice to think readers would judge for themselves AND agree with me, but I worry that the wish may be only a hairs’ width away from “the lurkers support me in email (or they would if they emailed me)”.

ZM, more complete quote:

Then ensure that the course content included about equal amounts of work by female and male philosophers and theorists..

Also the historical and literary examples and hypotheticals should be equally about things women would do or be interested in, not just with sci fi and trolley problems and dilemmas of bombing munitions factories

It’s a fair point, ZM: you believe that although trolleyology was started by a woman, and appealed to a number of female professional philosophers, at the same time it is obviously a topic that does not appeal in general to female students of philosophy. Similarly, you believe that while sci fi has many female authors and readers, it does not appeal in general to female students of philosophy. On the other hand, although vast numbers of men and women had the opportunity to be bomber pilots in WW2, somehow only men chose to have the pleasure of participating in bombing, and so problems related to bombing are obviously appealing to men in general, right up to the present day. This is sensible and not at all contradictory. :-)

There is quite an interesting article about Trolley Problems at The Atlantic, apparently neuroscience has found different parts of the brain are activated in the different decisions

“He ultimately found that the answers people gave correlated with how emotionally engaged they felt with the dilemma. The decision to pull the switch was related to activity in the prefrontal cortex (associated with cool, conscious deliberation), while the decision not to push the fat man involved areas like the amygdala, associated with strong emotional reactivity.
….
The ethicist Peter Singer cites Greene’s research to support some of his positions about why we ought to make greater sacrifices for problems that may seem distant, like world poverty or a disease raging halfway around the globe. Singer argues that we shouldn’t avoid our moral obligations to someone just because they live too far away to engage our brain’s emotional machinery.”

But apparently trolley problems are being used to decide the ethics in programming driverless vehicles.

I did a summer term at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and the seminars there followed the pattern that everyone was required to come to class with a question about the reading, and the instructor (“tutor” @ SJC) would pick someone to begin, go around the table, allowing a brief discussion from others re: each student’s question, but guiding so that everyone (usually) was heard as to their question.

Not perfect, but it did not favor monopolizers, & probably I heard more women speaking up there than in any other school.

Kiwanda,

Well to be honest I dislike trolley problems all together and also got put into one in a novel the author of which decided not only in his novel but in real life that my life is not so important as a group of other people’s careers, so as well as disliking trolley problems I am also very bitter to whoever encourages trolley problems as being an ok way of making moral decisions.

Also I don’t like a whole lot of sci fi , so perhaps that is my prejudice. I do think sci fi historically was more male oriented but has changed more in the past couple of decades to have more female characters so perhaps more modern sci fi examples would appeal more to female students now there is quite a bit to choose from. But I don’t know why there arent more literary examples from other sorts of novels. Sci fi is more like adventure stories , whereas you could just as easily study novels about society and relationships in philosophy but neither of the subjects I took had these literary examples.

In terms of bombing, I mentioned that as well as bombing men were also involved in other fighting work in WW2 involving killing, and also commanding. It is very difficult to imagine oneself as a woman in WW2 making the decision to bomb munitions factories, and much more easy to imagine oneself as working in a munitions factory and getting bombed. This is not to say all men did aerial bombing in WW2 but that it is something make philosophy students have probably read about men doing and considered the possibility of if they were alive at the time they could be in that situation. When we had to discuss that in class I found it completely unfathomable to consider bombing munitions factories , although there was one male student who also disagreed it was moral to do. Possibly the proportions of men and women who agree/disagree about bombing munitions factories being ethical are the same, I don’t know, but it occurred to me that while male students may have grown up reading about war with men as soldiers and commanders , women grow up reading about war where women are nurses or work in factories etc and that this could alter ideas about whether bombing munitions factories is moral or not

I guess so since women do not find the philosophical problems studied in philosophy courses as interesting as men do, or there should be the same number of male and female students.

Oh dear. No. Just no. No, no, no, no, no.

I took one (1) philosophy course in college. I very quickly realized I was shipwrecked in dudeland. I was not welcome there.

Maybe I am the only woman on Earth to ever have that experience? Possible, but unlikely. And if this has happened to other women, then one might suspect that feeling unwelcome is at least one reason why there are fewer women studying philosophy.

But how adorable of you to hint that the problem *might* not be with women.

Elly,

I didn’t feel unwelcome as a female student in the philosophy subject I took, so I guess I don’t really relate to that on a personal level. i disagreed with the tutor about everything since he was a utilitarian, but otherwise it wasn’t an unwelcoming environment .

Was your experience that you were interested in the content of the course but found the class atmosphere was what you didn’t like?

Elly @91,

You’re talking physical threats being directed at people who did not have the protection of anonymity. Those threats were real-world threats, if I understand what happened correctly. They had nothing to do with threaded online space. They went well beyond that space.

I’m speaking in the general sense of a threaded medium, where people don’t know each other, don’t have access to real-world information about where people live, etc. etc. No one can “bully” you into silence in that case, unless you let them. If they don’t know who you are, or where you live, they can’t physically touch you. Ever. They can’t physically silence you. Yes, they can’t frustrate you and piss you off and say truly disgusting things. But if you choose to keep posting, they can’t stop you from doing that.

In a forum like CT, the only person who can do that is the mod. And the mods here would quickly shut down the person who said disgusting things, delete them, and likely ban the poster, etc.

I agree 100% with Elly. Online bullying of women is a thing, and I see it often in Crooked Timber threads, most obviously against female posters and longtime female commenters.

Harry B: …once you treat men and women roughly equally maybe women do better, because they are superior.

Wow, that’s the kind of sexist essentialism that gets Harvard presidents (rightly) removed. But I guess the scoring system depends on whose team you’re playing for.

I wouldn’t, actually, be that surprised to discover that women, minorities, and the economically disadvantaged have superiorities (both moral and practical) for socio-cultural, rather than essentialist reasons. Very roughly, having to jump more hurdles to get half as far may promote character traits conducive to success. On the other hand, it may be selective bias: those who get into the game at all are better than the dominant group, since everyone of merely equal ability to the dominant group or less got weeded out by the additional hurdles.

That one can post too often, apparently, and this provokes even lurkers to complain — or email mods. I find this too bizarre for words. Participation, one would think, would be encouraged. And since one person’s post can’t possibly crowd out another’s — again, that’s just not how threads work — it should be “the more the merrier.” And if lurkers and others don’t like seeing this or that person, they can easily ignore them. Scroll on down the page. The words on the page remain silent if you don’t read them.

In theory, perhaps. In practice, no. I have myself avoided threads, and occasionally forsaken whole blogs, because they were dominated by obnoxious windbags. I would try “scrolling on down the page” for a while, and eventually give up: no longer worth the effort. So an excess of certain kinds of comments or of certain commenters may in fact be harmful to discussion, assuming the ideal is to keep as many minds engaged as long as possible.

ZM,

It was 25 years ago, so my main recollection is truly that of being shipwrecked on an island full of misogynist dudes. I think there was one other girl in the class. It was supposed to be intro to philosophy, but it didn’t feel like an intro class. Maybe I wandered into Plume’s alternate universe by mistake?

The experience was so off-putting that I withdrew from the class.

As long as you can keep them away from men, women are generally superior from a capitalist point of view and bosses have known this for centuries.

(Elly is quite right that online bullying of women [anonymous or otherwise] is a problem and it’s a bit depressing that people here are arguing about it.)

Plume,

“Can’t” is a strong term. That would suggest that using only words one can’t bully someone successfully. Since that flies in the face of my experience, I have to reject it. I do think people can be subjected to sufficient bullying on a thread to withdraw from it. And I see it all the time, including on CT threads.

Plume, I am not sure what you mean by “threaded” since I have often wished for thread trees here on CT.

I’m afraid I disagree with you, though, on both counts. If someone says disgusting things so someone else leaves, what is that if not bullying? If you restrict the term “bullying” to the reasonable threat of physical violence, then we can call it something else, I guess. If people have been discouraged enough, though, they aren’t here to put up their hands and refute you.

As for the long posts, in theory it shouldn’t matter, but in practice I find my eye runs more lightly over a thread dominated by a few people posting long comments.

Tweeeettttt! Tweeeettttt!

Personal foul on comment #103 Plume – “Mansplaining”

15 comment penalty fromt the spot of the comment, repeat first down.

Restart the play clock.

Elly: “I’ve read CT for years, but have only commented a few times. It’s not a pleasurable experience, so why bother?”

I’m sorry to hear that. I keep an eye out for women commenters and was glad when you appeared in this thread.

My point is that without the ability to physically silence someone, that online bullying really has no teeth

There is such a thing as ‘psychological injury’

Plume-

Your position would make sense if people took part in conversations without regard to whether anyone wanted to hear them. But with notable exceptions, people do care about that. So making someone feel that they are not welcome in a conversation, effectively excludes them from it.

The reason people are disagreeing with you is not that they don’t understand you. It’s because they don’t agree with you.

““not using people’s comment sections as if they’re providing a chat room for others, and have tried to follow them.”

Note to self to do the same!”

I must say I disagree with this. Friendly back and forth, as long as it doesn’t get excessive, is a great way to build community.

MPAV, Actually I agree with you, and that is how I behave (as I’m sure you’ve noticed). But I’ve been wishing hard that CT would address the Ghomeshi verdict with a post and I was just reminding myself that it isn’t my blog and no, I can’t discuss the fallout from that trial here. {sigh}

Engels @ 118, why is that? if you don’t mind saying.

Good point.

“Being vulnerable to bullying is not a weakness or a character flaw. It’s a necessary result of caring about other people’s ideas and emotions. A lack of that is not something to be proud of.”

You can be empathetic and still try and not let bullies push you around.

JW Mason: Being vulnerable to bullying is not a weakness or a character flaw. It’s a necessary result of caring about other people’s ideas and emotions. A lack of that is not something to be proud of.

What does this mean? That bullying is really nothing more than normal group dynamics and someone who doesn’t knuckle under is ethically or psychologically unfit? That the only correct response to bullying is to break down and cry, and run away? I expect better from you, and this surprises me. I was amused to see the old 1990s Internet shibboleths come out–speech can’t harm, you’re obliged to instantly agree with everyone who speaks up loudly enough (unless the group thinks they’re a troll)–but not to see them taken up by someone like you.

I’m a regular viewer on CT and I reckon the amount of ‘bullying’ that occurs is negligible. There are an awful lot of intelligent and principled people commenting here, and that obviously leads to argument but rarely abuse- I expect the moderators would put a stop to that anyway. If anything, it is the nature of a comments thread that can cause problems. People often do not have the time to adequately respond and this often leads to misconceptions as people have not had chance to properly explain themselves or are frustrated that someone else does not appreciate the full force of their argument.

Disagreement is inevitable where comment is permitted, and never to be questioned or contradicted would lead to a lack of intellectual stimulation and moral doubt. I have seen threads where women have been bullied in a sexist fashion, but I’m rather puzzled that anyone should think it happens here. Maybe I’ve missed something.

“I saw one Brett Bellmore being bullied right here in this thread.”

Brett was banned months ago. Apparently no one cares.

This isn’t directly related to Harry’s original call for classroom strategies. But it seems somewhat relevant to some of the anecdotal (and not-so-anecdotal) stories in the comments.

Back when my (first) wife was a grad student and I worked at UW CS&E with mostly grad students for friends, a group of us used to meet every week for dinner. A recurring theme that appeared after a while was the very different verbal behaviour patterns that would show up during these gatherings. It became the main topic of discussion for a while, and we eventually settled on this analysis:

There were two main behaviours, which we characterized as “nurturing” and “non-nurturing”. The latter consisted of people who considered conversations, discussions and debates primarily as opportunities to get closer to truth and who viewed it as a good strategy to work from a basic operating principle of “you’re wrong, and here’s why”, thus giving the other person a new opportunity to either change their mind or refine their explanation/concept/idea.

The former group consisted of people who considered conversations, discussions and debates to be a chance to help others develop their ideas and opinions and knowledge by thoughtful support, open-ended questions, claiming confusion rather than disagreement, and generally operating on the assumption that everyone’s ideas probably had some merit and interest for all of us.

We labelled them “nurturing” and “non-nurturing” very deliberately to mirror the same assignment of that behaviour by the culture toward gender categories, observing that it was about as accurate: correct in some cases, but not universally.

Classrooms generally seem to be places where “nurturing” behaviour is expected, but it can be hard when there are people present for whom “non-nurturing” behaviour is a more natural mode. As someone who is naturally a “non-nurturer” but who has tried to be more “nurturing” in his intellectual interactions with others, it seems wrong to try to tell non-nurturers that their behaviour is unacceptable, but also wrong to allow it block out, or worse, scare away, the non-nurturers.

So the problem can beyond merely the amount of speech coming from certain individuals, but also encompass the style, if not the actual content.

Elly@135,

I’m fine with your disagreement. It’s a part of the give and take of these forums.

But another way to look at it, which is always in the back of my mind when I do experience online bullying:

You leave, they win. You leave, and you’ve just ceded them ground they don’t deserve, given their behavior. In a sense, you’ve empowered them to bully others, because they see it works.

Fight back and maybe that’s not the case. Fight back, or just ignore them and post on, and maybe they see the place isn’t hospitable to bullying. The old “do not feed the trolls” thing.

We disagree about this and that’s okay. Again, I wish you hadn’t experienced the bullying. All the best, regardless of your decision to stay or go.

Lynne and Bianca
Thanks for your comments. I have on a few occasions received emails from people who agree with me ( as well as a few who don’t necessarily agree but are interested or want to pursue discussions off line) because it is possible to find my university email via my blog. So I know there are some people who agree with my views but don’t want to comment online.

Elly – I am sorry to hear you don’t want to comment and wish you would, but I agree with you and don’t agree with Plume. It is possible to be excluded online. I have sometimes made up my mind ‘I am not going to be pushed out of the conversation’ but even I give up sometimes, and think many other women give up or don’t even try.

One of the things that is particularly annoying here, as ZM has suggested, is the male posters who repeatedly tell me my feminism is wrong, or “nutty” as one repeatedly said. It does seem to be the height of ‘mansplaining’ to tell someone who is not only a woman, but also formally studying feminist theory, that her feminism is not just wrong but nutty! However mansplaining feminism even seems to be happening on this thread (ZK @ 90).

Will write a bit more later as I’m in danger of going on too long here.

To be clear, I am referring to gender behaviors impressed by socialization.

The question why men as a group seem to have educationally “stagnated” deserves better answers.

I recall reading somewhere a few years ago that the whole trend has big class and race specific aspects to it, so talking about the academic performance of generic “men” and “women” can be misleading. If I can find the article I’ll post a link.

anon — its a good job I’m not President of Harvard. It was a joke….

Doesn’t ‘radical educational equality’ mean policy should target a 50/50 gender split in graduation numbers, regardless of whether unequal aptitude is the cause?

Again, a startling lack of specificity about what women have achieved and how those achievements are measured and defined.

Of course, one of the ways in which men and women could be different, one of the possibilities we might have to structure our society around and respond to, is that men might be substantially more likely to be narcissistic bullying fucktards.

I think the interesting part of this discussion finished a while ago. If I can figure out how to close it, I will….

You’ve said as much yourself belowthread, harry. What are the outcomes of enrolling and graduating more female students? What are the outcomes of enrolling and graduating fewer men? You mention in #63 that the achievements women have been given are “unequal” and “stark” and will result in “unpredictable” changes. What are those changes? What have more degrees given women that make them more successful (not almost achieving parity with) male contemporaries, in terms of income, debt, employment, occupying the upper echelons of their profession?

And in 148

For the generations in which men outachieved women it was generally claimed by conservatives that this was because men were superior to women. Interesting that when women stared outachieving men, conservatives found the explanation in social construction.

How are you defining achievement, then and now? Where are women outachieving men? What are the consequences?

I don’t disagree that goalposts move and essentialist arguments get re-tinkered when the stranglehold men have enjoyed over, well, nearly every tiny little sphere in the universe slightly dissipates, but I’m not seeing the connection between earning a degree in 21st century USA and overachievement, which is the obfuscatory blanket term being employed to describe the phenomenon of women increasingly pursuing post-graduate degrees of a very specific kind (but conveniently leaving out what fields those degrees might apply to, what concrete and long-term advantages the degrees confer that put them permanently ahead of less educated men and other women, and whether they positively affect female employment opportunities, advances, and income, not to mention the salutary effects on previously male-dominated fields*).

The post is an interesting one. The predictable, handwringing derail less so, mainly because there’s no substance and the handwringers seem incapable of providing it.

*of course, we know that, in general, fields where women flock, blossom, and achieve high ranking, the average wages go down and the men disappear; I suppose this must be part of that “overachievement” under discussion

Ok well I will seize the opportunity to add a bit. I do apologise for taking the thread OT a bit Harry, but I think it’s related – we can strive to do the right thing in classrooms but so much of gender is learnt informally.

First just clarifying what I meant about Ze K ‘mansplaining’ above – Ze K appeared to be making the mistake (quite common on CT I think), that actions coded as feminine are actually inferior. They’re not actually (reading romances is not inferior to reading sci-fi), they are treated as inferior because they are coded as feminine. Same with pay rates for different kinds of work etc.

I can see that the relevance of that to what Ze K said still may not be entirely clear, but I’d better leave it at that for now.

The thing that particularly bugs me on CT is when I make a comment, and someone straw-womans it, thinking (or pretending to think) that I have said something much stupider or more right wing than I actually said, and then a whole lot of other people jump on board to condemn the stupid thing I’m supposed to have said. It’s really frustrating. I can explain it all again, but even then it’s likely that the same person or a new person will straw woman me again. I can keep on explaining myself, but that makes me look like someone who is self righteously justifying herself and taking up too much air time, or I can give up and let the misrepresentation stand. Hopeless.

I know one time it really bugged me was when I was about to start teaching in a post-graduate course. The thought of my prospective students reading this description of me as some kind of simplistic neoliberal do-gooder that I was repeatedly being portrayed as by some people agreeing amongst themselves really got to me. I got very angry on that occasion.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I realise CT bloggers can’t patrol every thread, but maybe when it happens we can state that strawwomanning is happening – name it, and if it keeps happening, maybe report it.

Of course male commenters can do this too, but I’m particularly concerned here about how female commenters are being excluded from CT.

I may have missed someone saying this above, in which case apologies, but I think that two different issues in respect to undergraduate education have been conflated at points: overall perfomance of male v female students (admissions to programmes, percentage of degrees awarded etc.) and performance behaviour in specific tasks/areas. My female students do perfectly well in different forms of written assessment, hence in overall degree class (we mark anonymously; I don’t know how much of a difference that makes). They do less well on average in contexts like seminar discussion and making presentations, as the OP discusses, despite the fact that I’m making effforts to ensure everyone participates equally. It doesn’t noticeably affect their grades; it does mean they’re getting an inferior education overall – and, since I know what some of them *could* contribute, it means everyone else gets an inferior experience as well.

I was going to suggest the discussion could be progressed by reading about Laszlo Polar and his three daughters …. but what I should suggest is reading about Laszlo and Klara Polar and their three daughters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/László_Polgár

@165
No it’s not seen as biologically determined – just empirical I think. ZM was just suggesting that in philosophy classes, examples could be used that are more likely relate to women’s experiences, based on empirical evidence. Of course you would have to beware of stereotyping – not just assume that women are going to read romantic literature – but if you chose examples from generally highly regarded authors like Jane Austin etc, you could effectively avoid the possibility of shallow stereotyping.

Or of course you could use sf examples but draw on Ursula La Guin, say!

I also understood perfectly well what ZM was saying about bombing munitions factories – it seemed perfectly clear to me and again drawing on empirical evidence to talk about how women and men might relate to such an example. The fact that seem to find it difficult to understand perfectly clear reasoning when talking about feminism is what makes one doubt their good faith. Possibly they really don’t understand it, but it seems more likely they have a low expectation of women’s reasoning and therefore don’t try very hard to understand it.

Ze K,

“No, I don’t. It’s just that I thought that a feminist would declare the coding itself atavistic and insulting. That the coding is a consequence of Gender-Roles, Gender-Roles are a major feature of Patriarchy, and Patriarchy is the enemy. I actually asked for a clarification in 85.
But now I see that in this version of feminism (which I would call ‘stereotypism’, to distinguish it from the one I’m used to) this coding is assumed to be biologically determined (was I right to come to this conclusion?). ”

Breaking down your comment:

1. “a feminist would declare” — feminists do not all think the same about everything, there are a lot of different major feminist theorists, and then everyday women also have their own views about what is feminism. Also, you could historicise major feminist trends such as suffragettes and ideas that women were naturally more virtuous, to Simon de Beauvoir and existentialist structuralist accounts of women’s oppression (I think the existentialism and the structuralism is connected as structuralist feminists don’t usually just say that’s the structure and lets leave it at that), to post-structuralist feminism which looks at gender, the body, and agency while not giving up on structure all together. The sort of feminism you are thinking of as what “a feminist would declare” is pretty much the structuralist sort of the mid 20th C.

2. “the coding is a consequence of Gender-Roles” this is again the structuralist account (although I am sure reading structuralist feminist theory it is a bit more nuanced), and you have to think of this sort of structuralism as being partly the result of Western engagement with non-Western cultures where gender roles are different. While there are different roles for different genders in different cultures, pretty much every culture has some sort of gendered division of culture.

3. “But now I see that in this version of feminism…this coding is assumed to be biologically determined” This is not what either I or Val have argued. I would argue that there are a range of factors involved. However since the 80s The Body has become a site of analysis, and some difference is located in The Body. You also have dominant cultural gender roles, and this also comes down to the individual actor and how they negotiate these during their lifetimes, and what their personality is and so on.

It is not a opposition of body/culture — both of these can be important at the same time, and there is also the personality and agency of individual women to take into account etc.

Dipper,

But neither Val or I were arguing that women are incapable of doing philosophy. I was saying that women may not be so interested in the content of philosophy courses as I think it is quite masculine gendered and this might be one reason women are underrepresented in philosophy.

I have a read quite a bit of theory for other subjects, including a lot of theory around gender and I think philosophy could remain just as rigorous while the content was altered to be more inclusive of feminine gendered topics, I wasn’t saying women can’t do philosophy because women can’t play chess.

I think in this respect philosophy is quite different from STEM subjects being a humanity, for STEM subjects I think one of the main things is encouraging young women to take an interest in them and breaking down gender boundaries. But as philosophy is a humanity I think part of the problem is the content is not gender neutral and skews towards male content.

Harry, thanks. Since I think I accept Brett’s statistics and Saurs’ analyses, I assume it now requires channelling a greater share of educational resources towards men and boys than to women and girls in order to equalise their educational attainments, even on the expectation that women will be (further) disadvantaged in the labour market and in society at large as a result. I’m guessing your answer to that is that it’s only one value that will be outweighed by others in practical decisions but it still seems a bit hard to swallow…

ZM 04.08.16 at 9:37 am
“Dipper,

But neither Val or I were arguing that women are incapable of doing philosophy. I was saying that women may not be so interested in the content of philosophy courses as I think it is quite masculine gendered and this might be one reason women are underrepresented in philosophy.”

The last time I looked at Ph.D./grad student figures, Philosophy looked very bad, compared to field which were considered to be very masculinely gendered, until women entered them, such as math, engineering, law, medicine, physics,…

From https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/10/01/are-stem-fields-more-gender-balanced-non-stem-fields-phd-production

“Interestingly, the top 10 fields in which women are overrepresented among doctoral degree recipients include five STEM fields, as defined by the study: forestry, information science, engineering-related fields, computer engineering and engineering physics.”

I appreciated reading this article – thank you for posting it.

In teaching writing to classes composed primarily of male computer science majors, I have learned that there seems to be a critical mass of female-identified students needed before any of them will speak freely in class. Three seems to be the threshold number, unless the two students in the class are very close friends. I don’t know if these numbers are affected by having a female-identified teacher. For that reason, I don’t cold call on that single female student, but I do work consciously to provide constructive support on papers, and often make it a point of praising some writing choice the student made in one-on-one conversations. I feel this helps, but I don’t really see an obvious solution to getting the one or two female students to speak up in these discussion based classes. My class deals frequently with identity politics and other social issues — I don’t want the few female-identified students to feel like spokespersons for their gender.

What does this mean? That bullying is really nothing more than normal group dynamics and someone who doesn’t knuckle under is ethically or psychologically unfit? That the only correct response to bullying is to break down and cry, and run away? I expect better from you, and this surprises me. I was amused to see the old 1990s Internet shibboleths come out–speech can’t harm, you’re obliged to instantly agree with everyone who speaks up loudly enough (unless the group thinks they’re a troll)–but not to see them taken up by someone like you.

I originally commented ont his thread to contribute to the discussion of how to encourage broader participation in the classroom, and I should have stuck to that topic. I regretted posting the comment you’re responding to almost immediately after hitting Submit. For the record, no, that is not what I meant. But it really isn’t worth the trouble to get into it further.

@183 But having sent that message, JW Mason, you will no longer be remember for provocative empirical work on a whole set of economic issues but for being an anti-bullying ideologue. You can’t make us unsee that message.

JW–

I could have phrased my reply better, sorry. I do think a classroom is different from a comments section is different from a discussion in a bar, and there are times to pay careful attention to what someone says and times when you can just dismiss what they say out of hand. Obviously as more people are involved and the more likely they are to be strangers to one another, it becomes more difficult to expect “normal processes of group formation”, whatever those are, to hold.

You’re joking like I was?

RNB @189,

Cool. I kinda thought so. But wasn’t entirely sure.

;>)

This, again, is a medium without roughly 90% of the communication pool involved, which is non-verbal, etc. But you may be right about the bar — kidding or not. In that scenario, looks can kill. Sometimes, no words are needed.

JW Mason: no, I’m not a teacher. But ensuring class participation seems to me to be an absolutely fundamental skill of teaching and, it seems going on the ideas given here, one with very many fairly easy solutions. It is scandalous that university lecturers who are, let’s not forget, hired and paid to teach as part of their job, are neither selected in their teaching ability nor trained in basic teaching methods, nor as far I can tell subject to any rigorous CPD whatsoever when it comes to teaching skills.

I say again, there is, in my experience, an abject lack of teaching quality at university level which is being institutionally ignored, to the detriment of the young adults paying top dollar for it.

Sanbikinoraion, I agree with you. It is scandalous. The instructors who care about teaching probably wish they were better prepared, too, and some of them are trading ideas in this thread, but as for the rest of them, there’s no touching them. University education is far more expensive for students today than it was in my day, and class size is bigger. I have the impression from my kids that it is harder to get a decent education in university than it used to be, despite the high cost. As you say, scandalous.

193 Here’s a hint: university lecturers are indeed hired and paid to teach, but they are often paid miserably.

Another hint: An advanced education isn’t something you can buy for tens of thousands of dollars/pounds. It’s something you have to aquire by your own effort. The educational system is indeed cheating students but the cheating is not primarily in offering an inferior product – the cheating lies in treating education as a product.