ratcliffe; shaw. philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds' – why are there so few women...

15/04/2015 Philosophyisforposh,whiteboyswithtrustfunds'whyaretheresofewwomen?|HigherEducationNetwork|TheGuardian

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'Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trustfunds' why are there so few women?Over 70% of philosophers in UK universities are men. We speak to academics about howinstitutions can become more inclusive

Rebecca Ratcliffe and Claire ShawMonday 5 January 2015 13.06 GMT

Philosophy stands out among the humanities: its one of the few subject areas wherewomen are vastly outnumbered by men.

Although male and female students take philosophy undergraduate courses in almostequal numbers, the number of women who pursue a career in philosophy is much lower.A recent report by the Equality Challenge Unit found that, among non-Stem (science,technology, engineering and maths) subjects, philosophy is one of the most male-dominated, with men accounting for 71.2% of the profession.

Why arent there more female philosophers? And how can university departmentsbecome more inclusive?

Professor Jennifer Saul, head of philosophy department, University of SheffieldWhen I was a PhD student at Princeton in the 1990s, nobody that I knew was talking inany kind of systematic way about women in philosophy. I remember just oneconversation, on a train, in which several of us women PhD students remarked on howlittle we spoke in seminars, and swapped some tips on how to overcome the fear ofspeaking that had somehow come upon us only once we hit grad school Get used toyour voice! Try asking how do you spell that name?

It wasnt until many years later that I started getting to know women who did gettogether to talk about these issues. Then I learned facts that women are only 17% offull-time academic sta in philosophy in the US (the UKs a bit better with 29%). And Ilearned that this was worse than in most elds of science, where gender disparities havelong been a source of concern. I wanted to learn more about the range of womensexperiences good and bad in philosophy. So I decided to create a blog where peoplecould share brief anonymous anecdotes.

What I received shocked me. It was a deluge of stories 10 or more a day, almost all talesof horrendous sexual harassment. This wasnt the sort of open-to-interpretation stuthat Ive found many expect. This was the distinguished visiting speaker whose rstwords are: Show me a grad student I can fuck. This was woman after woman leavingphilosophy after being harassed, assaulted, or retaliated against. It was bad, and it was atorrent. (And the stories and help requests that came to me o-blog were even worse.)The profession was shocked, and galvanised.



Since the blog started, there have been several very public high-prole sexualharassment scandals in philosophy. And theres now starting to be a backlash against thefeminists who have taken over the profession and who are now said to wieldenormous power to persecute.

The truth is were not running the profession: were still down at 17-29%. Were startingto make some small bits of incremental progress in ghting a problem thats been goingon far too long. This is an enormous source of hope, for me. But its far from a completeturnaround. And we have even further to go with other issues. As male as philosophy is,for example, it is far, far whiter and philosophers are barely beginning to address thisproblem.

Patrice Haynes, senior lecturer in philosophy, Liverpool Hope UniversityEducation was valued highly by my Caribbean parents, especially mathematics and thesciences serious subjects that would set you up for a secure, professional job. When Ideclared that I was going to do a masters in philosophy my father was pretty horried.Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds.

My fathers image of the uselessness of philosophy reects a wider suspicion outside(and even inside) academia that its merely a relic of the past, languishing in the shadowsof science.

In some sense my father is right: pursuing an academic career in philosophy is rathercavalier, for theres no guarantee of a job at the end of many years of study. I suspect thismay explain why ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the discipline. Add to thisphilosophys eye-blinding whiteness and it is easy to see the lack of appeal.

To my knowledge there are just ve black philosophers working in the UK, three ofwhom are women and Im one of them. At philosophy conferences, Im typically theonly black academic among the delegates, and often Im one of the few women present unless its a feminist philosophy conference, in which case the number of men can becounted on one hand...

To date, Ive not encountered any direct racism or sexism in academia (excluding thepresence of this in the western philosophical cannon). Yet its worth noting that neither Inor the two UK-based black women philosophers are employed by standalonephilosophy departments: this threshold remains to be crossed. Moreover, while there arefew women philosophy professors there are zero black philosophy professors in UKinstitutions.

Occasionally, Ive been told by American academics, usually middle-aged males: Theylllove you in America. All you need to do is mention youre a black woman in yourapplication and youll be in! Im not entirely convinced. After all, although theAmerican Philosophical Association has 11,000 members, there are only 30 or so blackwomen philosophers based in US philosophy departments. More problematically, whilesuch comments are no doubt well-meant they also raise the dreaded spectre oftokenism. Hard-earned academic achievements are overshadowed by ones ability toimprove the diversity prole of a department by 100%.

Stella Sandford, professor of modern European philosophy, Kingston University



Academic disciplines and practices are not immune from the tendency of societies togender everything. They are fully part of the social-cultural world, even if people oftenconsider them to be remote.

But there are also reasons internal to the discipline itself. In comparison with othersubjects philosophy tends, still, to be very inward-looking. It tends to dene itself rathernarrowly and has found it extraordinarily dicult to accept challenges to its traditionalways of doing things.

Other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences were generally quick torespond to the ideas of the social movements of the past half-century, but for a long timephilosophy remained indierent to these. The kind of philosophy that dominates in theUK has tended to see itself as engaged in a purely rational practice uninuenced by socialand political contexts. It hasnt therefore been able to see the ways in which it in factmirrors the interests of its relatively narrow band of practitioners and excludes others.

In the wake of the womens movement, for example, most Anglophone philosophersclung on to the idea that thinking about gender belonged to sociology and had nothing todo with them. The groups most aected by these social movements didnt perhaps theystill dont see their concerns taken seriously in philosophy. It is little wonder if theychoose to study in more hospitable areas.

Helen Beebee, Samuel Hall professor of philosophy, the University of ManchesterIn philosophy, the ability to think with exceptional clarity and rigour about very abstractissues is highly valued, and rightly so; but this is, of course, a stereotypically male virtue.And that means that women have to be that much better than their male counterparts inorder to be judged to have the same level of ability. Thats just the way stereotypes work:its much easier to think that someone is an intellectual giant if thats a quality that tsneatly with other things you know about them.

Its really hard to tell when or whether youre the object of these kinds of biases. If youdont get a job or get your paper accepted for publication, there are always other possibleexplanations.

But there is at least good general evidence if not specic to philosophy thatstereotypes can explain, at least in part, the relative lack of success of women and otherminority groups.

And there are personal experiences. Ive sat in plenty of meetings and seminars wherewomens views have been accorded less respect than those of the men in the room.

My own level of standing within the university hierarchy has, throughout my entirecareer, been systematically underestimated by colleagues.

As a 40-year-old head of department, when I arrived at a meeting for heads ofdepartment one of the other heads (a woman) said: Oh, Im sorry, student reps arentinvited to this meeting. Early on in my career in my late 20s and early 30s I took towearing a suit in the rst few weeks of the academic year, in order to save people theembarrassment of mistaking me for an undergraduate (and this is in institutions wherethe chances of someone being a mature student were pretty low).



These days, like most of my male colleagues of whatever age, I dont bother; nobodymistakes me for an undergraduate. But they do and Im 46 routinely mistake me for aPhD student or a postdoc, unless I very quickly say or do something that makes thatassumption untenable.

I sometimes think I should cultivate the look of the stereotypical woman professor. Imnot sure what that look is, but minimally I think you have to have grey hair and be over50. So, if I stop dyeing my hair, I wont have long to wait.

Katharine Jenkins, PhD candidate, department of philosophy, University ofSheffieldI started thinking about the situation of women in philosophy when I was studying formy MPhil. Some undergraduates reported that women spoke in seminars much lessoften than men, and as the graduate student representative, I helped raise this issue withthe philosophy faculty.

Initially, there was some resistance to the idea that this was an issue of gender, asopposed to simply an unavoidable problem caused by some students being shy. Butwe surveyed the students and found that this was indeed a gendered phenomenon.

Discussions in philosophy are often conducted in a very aggressive and combative way,and given that social norms discourage girls and women from behaving in these ways,its hardly surprising that these modes of discussion make some women feel less thanfully at home.

This problem can be addressed quite straightforwardly by having seminars that are moreclosely moderated so as to help make them less combative. This is good for anyone whomight be put o by a very aggressive environment, and I also think it encourages morenuanced philosophical engagement.

Richard Pettigrew, professor and head of the department of philosophy at theUniversity of BristolYou often hear people speculate that the adversarial nature of some philosophical debateis oputting for women because they are less comfortable in combative situations. Idont see any evidence of this. But it is certainly true that women tend to be judgednegatively by others if they display adversarial behaviour.

It seems that women in a philosophy debate are in a lose-lose situation. Either theyperform well by the standards of the debate, but then they are judged negatively on theircharacter they are judged abrasive or high maintenance for behaviour that wouldhave earned a man plaudits such as competent and knows his mind. Or they behavein a way that will attract less opprobrium, but then they are judged negatively on theirphilosophical ability.

Another factor is unconscious bias where we evaluate a persons performance on a taskmore negatively if they belong to a group that is stereotyped as being bad at that task.

What to do? On the one hand, we need to try to change the stereotype. We can do this bycreating gender-balanced reading lists for our courses, by ensuring that there is a genderbalance in the rostrum of speakers at our conferences, in our seminar series, and on the



boards and committees of our journals and learned societies.

We also need to mitigate the eects of unconscious bias by anonymising where possible,whether it is in undergraduate grading or in hiring procedures, and by training all sta inthe known ways of reducing bias.

Male philosophers must become more involved. If the burden of combating the under-representation of women in philosophy is borne disproportionately by women, this willdeprive them more than is fair of the time they have to devote to their research andteaching, which is how philosophers build their careers. Men must be equal partners incombating the problem.

Dr Meena Dhanda, reader in philosophy and cultural politics, University ofWolverhamptonWomen in academia, generally speaking, are up against the usual pressures keepingfamilies together and looking after students. Many tend to nd their voice later in lifethan men. Finding the right words and the right milieu within which to express ourphilosophical thoughts is a dicult task.

Much of mainstream philosophy is tame and taming, precisely because it is engaged inreproducing privilege.

Feminism and anti-racism are only supercially incorporated within the language ofcultural politics. Perhaps thats why the position of black and minority ethnic women inphilosophy remains annoyingly low. Few think that anything needs to be done to undothe eects of continuing implicit gender or racial biases within the curriculum, in hiringpractices or in the progression of teaching sta.

My recent interdisciplinary and collaborative study for the Equality and Human RightsCommission, UK, entitled Caste in Britain, which outlines the implications of makingcaste as an aspect of race in the Equality Act 2010, uses philosophical tools, withoutnaming any philosophical theories.

It will not be seen as a philosophers work, given the orthodoxies entrenched in oursubject. I know this; but still think that if philosophy were to become more open towomens insistence on thinking through the implications of our embodied existence anexistence enmeshed by identity markers such as gender, race, caste or class then manymore similar projects need to be undertaken.

The thorn of racism is so deep in the esh of philosophy that it is no longer visible fromthe surface. It hurts. We need more black philosophers, women philosophers adventurers and heretics, unruly, rigorous and untiring thinkers, committed to makingphilosophy respond to the world we inhabit.

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