This is a wonderful project. I will offer one small suggestion, which is to cull mentors who went to a broader range of PhDs programs and that teach at a broader range of institutions. As far as I can tell, the mentors are nearly exclusively from Leiter top 20 programs and teaching at fairly elite, almost exclusively R-1 PhD programs. These philosophers might not have experiences that can fully represent the schools candidates are coming from and the institutions where they will be interviewing.

Dear Anon, thank you for raising this excellent point. It is an issue that the team is very sensitive to. To some degree the set of pilot mentors reflects who we were able to personally recruit on short notice this year. In future years we would like to expand the pool of mentors for just the reasons you identify. So we would be very grateful if you and others could forward this announcement to all women faculty you know who have landed a permanent job in the past 6 years, asking that they get in touch with the project team. By the time the project fully launches next year, we’d like to have assembled a pool of mentors that covers a wider range of institutions.

Dr Greene, are you saying that you will divide mentors and mentees into separate classes by pedigree?

“Recruiting a broader array of mentors and then establishing a mechanism for mentors’ drawing on each other’s knowledge may be more effective than any scheme to match mentors to candidates who are similar on some dimensions.”

I still don’t see how this will, in practice, be different from mentor-streaming by pedigree level.

Oh I see. Not how this group operates, going by their own description.

Mortimer: You seem to be saying that mentoring young women in philosophy would not contribute to diversity in the field (or, at least, not the kind of diversity philosophy “needs”). You are entitled to your opinion, but you should at least explain why you hold it. Why wouldn’t philosophy benefit from having more female voices? Why should we rest content with its being a mostly male dominated enterprise?

Mortimor and skeptic: You both also imply or state that we members of the steering team are unqualified to mentor, or to start up this program of mentorship, because we have attended certain undergraduate institutions. This is a strange argument. You are either saying that we are too privileged to help anyone (because successful people should clearly never help anyone else achieve success!), or you are saying that we’ll only help those who are as privileged as ourselves. The first argument seems ridiculous, and the second relies on extremely uncharitable assumptions about our characters and motives. Neither is remotely justified.

But let’s address some of your assumptions. Speaking for myself, I went to a large state school because that’s what I could afford and was within my reach (my family is solidly working class, my father a forklift operator, my mother a third grade teacher). I stuck with philosophy despite the fact that I often felt alone and isolated as a female major. While I don’t claim to be a victim, I’m also hardly a poster child of privilege, and I certainly have faced my fair share of uphill battles to get where I am. Moreover, I hardly consider IU-Bloomington a bastion of elitism. I mean, I’m a proud Hoosier and all, but that institution is hardly pumping out the next generation of the ruling classes. But suppose I did go to Harvard or Yale, and suppose my parents were enormously wealthy. This would still not prove that I am unqualified to help others attain success on the job market, nor would it show that I should not try to help them.

Finally, market boost does not pretend to be a magic fix to the discipline’s longstanding problems with diversity. We are a pilot program that hopes to expand in the future and broaden its reach, but we recognize that what we do (while important) is limited. Like Amanda, I am aware that we could provide mentors from a broader range of institutions beyond R1 schools, and that is precisely the reason we are advertising our program: in order to get more volunteers to mentor, so that we can reach a broader range of women on the market. We do hope that if our program is successful and attains broad support, it can be a model for other programs that address other needs, including addressing problems of diversity that go beyond gender.

P.S. In a nutshell: gender diversity bought at the expense of class or race diversity is not worth buying.

Matt Drabek says, “Thus far, this looks like a program that will not be of value to the folks most underrepresented in the philosophy profession (e.g., black philosophers, women who are not white and from top programs, disabled philosophers, intersections among these groups, etc.).”

This strikes me as false. If women of color, disabled women philosophers, women who are not from top departments, etc., seek out mentorship through this program, the program is likely to be a big asset to their readiness for the job market. (I do think that the program needs to take explicit measures to address the specific intersectional challenges that some women will face.)

My worry about signaling (in comment 6 above) is about whether women who are not white and are not in top programs and/or not primarily seeking R1 jobs will infer, based on the way the program is presented and who is heading it, that the program is not for them. It would be good to take specific measures to counteract that. But I think that if they do get the signal that the program is for them, it will likely be of great benefit to them. Having someone to help you prepare your materials, be interview-ready, troubleshoot issues that come up along the way, etc., can be a huge asset, especially to someone who is in a department without a strong placement program.

It strikes me that there is a kind of confusion going on in this thread that needs to be addressed. First, because we focus on gender, this does not mean that we are discriminating against other factors that are included in diversity. The fact that we have focused on gender issues does not mean that we believe that only gender matters to diversity, nor is it even good evidence that we think this. As a woman who has been through this process twice already, I am well aware of the unique problems and pressures that women on the market face as women, and so I am in a position to help other women develop strategies to address them. Women do face certain gendered assumptions and expectations that work against them on the job market. This is a fact, and our program seeks to help women navigate these issues; there are other issues that affect other groups, and hopefully there will be other philosophers who are well qualified to address those issues who can attempt something similar to what we are trying to do. As it stands, we welcome and are actively soliciting all female mentors, from all types of programs and backgrounds. The reason we are advertising our pilot program is to broaden the range of both mentors and mentees.

Because the steering committee is white does not mean that all the mentors are white (they are not, just look at the list), or that we are only mentoring white women (we will not release that information, but we are mentoring an ethnically diverse group of young women). The only qualification is that a mentor be a woman who has recently been on the market, who can help other women prepare for that experience. This allows for plenty of intersectionality should the relevant volunteers come forward.

The idea that we should not have a program until it is perfect is worse than strange, it actively works against positive change in the profession, which is our goal. If we were to attempt to make a better and more expansive program, we need funding and commitment from a broad range of philosophers. We launched a website in order to generate support for funding and commitment from a much broader range of philosophers than we have currently assembled.

Why not a “market boost program for underrepresented groups in philosophy”? Seems to me the concerns of Matt, Mortimer, Anotheranon and others above would thereby be resolved.

Another way to look at this: a group of apparently very privileged white women sets up a program to help a group of hand-picked women whose identity they won’t disclose get jobs. And we’re supposed to be relaxed about it, because there are plenty of jobs out there for everyone, right?

I am getting a bit worried by the direction this discussion is taking with respect to privileged white women. There are different kinds of privilege, and someone can be subject to male privilege yet suffer from class privilege. Similarly, a woman can find it difficult to obtain the sort of mentorship that men easily get from male senior professors, yet enjoy class and white privilege. This project seems to me a great way to help women overcome such problems.

I have read the comments that people have posted and I’m completely taken aback. I am a black woman who is on the market for the second time and I think this is a fabulous idea and wish that I knew about it last year. On the market women face challenges that men cannot understand just as I cannot understand what it is like to be a white male on the market. When you are faced with a completely sexist question from your interviewer and you know that answering appropriately, meaning not in a way that explicitly tells your interviewer that you think he is sexist, is the difference between a job and not a job, preparation matters.
Luckily, I had female advisors that prepared me for these kinds of questions, but none of my male advisors prepared me for this. They had the assumption that my gender would not matter, only my merit. They were wrong.

To attack the organizers of this group for their privilege (which largely seems to be a big assumption on the part of the commenters because all we know is that they have the privilege of going to a great school, we have no information about the work that it took for them to get there and to get in their current respective positions) is to say that privileged people cannot and ought not to help an under-privileged group, which is just ridiculous. This group seems to be a big step for a neglected situation in philosophy. As a black woman philosopher I do not feel neglected by this group, nor do I support the idea that this group should change it’s focus to “all under represented groups.” Targeting one group is not unheard of in the world and has some merit because there will be some overlap (there are racial minority women, racial minority women LGBTQ, racial minority disabled philosophers). Some times individual groups need individual mentors, and that’s okay.

A lot of the backlash that this organizers are receiving seems to be the same backlash that women have always gotten when we try to help each other. The “what about me” or the “now me, the formerly advantaged group (white males) will become the disadvantaged group and now I’m afraid” sentiment is prevalent in this thread. The backlash from white male academics is something that I’ve had to deal with since forever and I have no response to it because I have yet to figure out how I feel about it.

However, to the organizers, you are in great company because what woman in academia or woman trying to change the world hasn’t faced this? So to the organizers, I appreciate your work. I think you are doing a fabulous thing for the profession that many others aren’t willing to do and I would suggest that you just stop reading the comments (after mine of course).

I am not sure why this effort should even be controversial. The main concern seems to be that the success of women will come at the expense of other underrepresented groups; why not found a similar organization for them? I would support any such group, just as I support this one. But this isn’t a reason for thee organizers of this group not to do what they’re doing, nor do I see how they, in particular, could have done anything else. Should the people who founded this one have decided instead to start an organization to help mentor people *whose specific job market problems many of them have not encountered*? Of course not. So are they supposed to wait until all the other unrepresented groups’ problems have been addressed before they address the problems women face? Why would this strike anyone as a good idea?

Why not just pitch in, each with the advice and support they have to offer, and try to solve as many problems as we can?

I am really excited to learn about this project–I will get the word out about it to all my students.

Reading this thread makes me incredibly depressed about the profession. Why is philosophy so conservative? Any well-meaning attempt at change is met with such vehement resistance that it makes me wonder whether we will ever be able to evolve past the navel-gazing certainty that the way we do things cannot be improved upon. First, it is incredibly unhelpful to assume that because someone went to an elite school that person is immediately disqualified from contributing to diversity in the profession. As a first-generation minority woman who went to elite undergraduate and graduate programs, I am deeply offended by that implication. Second, job market mentoring cannot make up for lack of qualifications. As a search committee member, I can assure you that no amount of mentoring will make up for a lack of publications, a shoddy writing sample, etc. Mentoring is a form of additional support for those candidates who have the requisite qualifications but due to other factors face additional hurdles in the job market that other candidates don’t face (i.e. discrimination). Finally, we can see this is a pilot program that supports positive change in the profession or as an inadequate solution to all the problems that plague philosophy. Perhaps I am being naïve, but I’d rather see it as the first. Seeing it as the second just seems to amount to whiny complacency.

Wow, the women on the mentor list whom I know personally are a wonderful bunch, from a variety of backgrounds, cutting across quite a few sub demographics, teaching at very different institutions, and having taken different paths to and through grad school and beyond. The idea that their collective wisdom and experiences are applicable only to a narrow group of “privileged” women just doesn’t ring true at all. And they are a busy and productive bunch, while still taking time to work with others. That reminds me, I’ve got to cut this comment short and get back to that article on malicious pleasure in Plato’s Philebus.

Anonymous prof is right. I took it from the original post and the early discussion (much of which was done by trolls, as several people point out) that the steering committee constituted the entire mentor list. The actual mentor list is far more diverse in several different ways than the steering committee, and it looks like the steering committee has in fact done much of the work I was calling for them to do. So they deserve to be commended both for creating the program and for working to diversify it.

Keisha, I think a lot depends on the results of empirical work into underrepresentation. What we know from the current work is that women are underrepresented (many studies) and that this underrepresentation tends to get exacerbated in the US at the undergraduate major stage (study by Paxton et al. in Hypatia) and at other stages in the UK (I’m a little less familiar with the name of the study offhand…I’d have to look it up).

Unfortunately we don’t know a lot about how that breaks down by other demographics. We do know from a study (I believe Kristie Dotson has commented on it in her work) that black women are even more underrepresented than women as a whole. And there’s plenty of speculation that the same is the case among disabled women, Latinas, queer women, et al. Until there’s more detailed empirical work here, we don’t really know whether a program aimed at the advancement of women qua women would be better than a program aimed at the advancement of black women qua black person, or black women qua black women (and et al., for other folks), or any person qua philosopher. We also don’t know whether there are any groups of women who *aren’t* underrepresented. My suspicion from the research I’ve seen is that a particular sort of woman (white, from a top grad program, working on mainstream analytic philosophy, cisgender) in fact isn’t underrepresented in philosophy relative to her presence in the class of folks who have PhDs in the field. But that’s a story that the research hasn’t yet told.

None of this is to say that programs shouldn’t go forward. They should, and I’m glad they are. But they ought to go forward under the knowledge that a lot more work is still needed on how underrepresentation intersects with identities, and which sorts programs might be most successful. Indeed, they help contribute to that work!

I think much of the controversy could have been avoided by not calling this a “market boost”. First, Carolyn Dicey-Jennings’ data (http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/06/job-placements-2011-2014-first-report.html) shows that women who got tenure-track jobs had, on average, half the number of publications that men had. Second, Dicey-Jennings’ data shows that women are getting TT jobs at a higher percentage than they are getting PhDs. And third, many jobs are earmarked specifically for women, whereas none are (at least explicitly) solely for men. Based on these, some men think that women are already get a substantial “market boost”. But of course women face many difficulties on the job market, difficulties that male faculty members know nothing of, and so some sort of mentoring is natural and beneficial. But to explicitly state that it’s intended to give women what many men will consider yet another boost for the job market is bound to raise some hackles.

I don’t think anything that you have said in the first paragraph is relative here. As you mention in your second paragraph, none of that matters about how this program advances. I think it’s simple. There’s a need, we address it. This does not mean that there aren’t other needs, or that the other needs are less important. We can’t expect this group of philosophers to address all of the problems of philosophy. I’m sure the organizers aren’t not blind to the many problems of philosophy. I give them more credit than that. What programs for other groups might be successful ought not to be a particular concern for this group as long as they can foresee success for this program, which I’m sure they do. They see a need, they’re addressing it. Simple.

As someone participating in MarketBoost as a mentor I have to say that I don’t give much weight to the snarly negative comments that were posted early on. I have more faith in our professional community than to think that’s representative. But it is alarming how successfully those comments were able to shape the tone, content, and orientation of the ensuing discussion. Justin, it would seem appropriate to me to block all comments from anyone who is caught in the act of trolling, especially on this particular issue in our profession at this moment. If people have the guts to sign their real name to nasty, negative, misleading, obfuscatory things they say on the internet, then I would be most happy to allow their comments to stand so that others can evaluate them on their merits.