Great post! Hopefully, we can raise the same question about the paucity of minority philosophy majors too. I make it a rule that most my courses are at least 1/5 women and people of color. I told this to a political scientist friend and she asked why so low. To be fair, when I teach anything to do with value theory, I make the split a lot more evenly. I was a bit taken back, but the reality is my own lack of exposure to women and people of color in philosophy (outside value theory that is), which has a lot to do with who formed the canon of western philosophy. I do think there are some great resources to remedy this problem like: http://diversifyingsyllabi.weebly.com/ and http://phildiversity.weebly.com/anthologies-and-resources.html and the Google spreadsheet with female authors and their works.

Really interesting and neutral analysis. Sadly, those people at UQAM will do shit with it, as usual…

It would be interesting to know what, if anything, faculty might do to overcome this initial reluctance to major in philosophy. For example, do more inclusive syllabi make a difference? If they do, then the two studies don’t really give conflicting explanations.

Hmm.. I have a few ignorant questions. Why is it the theory that women are more apt to take courses if they’re taught by female professors or have a majority of female created course material? Should this be encouraged? Teaching staff and course material should be chosen by merit instead of gender otherwise it would it not be deemed sexist? What is it which causes women’s sexist views towards male teachers or course materials created by males? Do we find the same phenomenon with males who take majors dominated by female students and/or teachers?

Kevin, I might be able to give a partial answer to your question, though others may be able to articulate the issue better than I can. I am a woman who was an undergrad phil major in a department with only one woman professor (who was not tenured). I loved philosophy (even though I don’t recall reading a single woman author) and I loved my professors (who were all men, throughout my four years). But when (from my perspective at the time) there are no women role models and none of the great philosophers are women, and when every time you open your mouth in mostly-male seminar or walk down the department halls with mostly men, you become hyper aware of your femininity, it becomes hard to imagine yourself being very comfortably a successful part of the discipline. (Also, it is an increased cognitive burden. I’d encourage you to read up on the notion of stereotype threat, in which anxiety about perpetuating a stereotype about one’s own group results in underperforming). Putting up with all of that takes a lot of determination, so it’s not surprising that women opt for majors where they feel like they belong. This dynamic changes in an academic space where gender parity is present, and it becomes more appealing to take intellectual risks and increase participation. (This may also have to do with philosophical style being combative versus collaborative in different settings, but I’m not really sure.) All that said, I really don’t think this is an issue of women students being sexist against men professors.

Well, Vincent Guillin, I’m not telling that the UQAM department do nothing, it is actually one of the most active department on that matter in the province of Quebec (after McGill I might say). Nonetheless, I mostly believe that those people don’t know how to do proper research for that matter. Maybe what this study suggests is that this it is a good thing that women keep a certain reserve on the domain. Maybe that’s not “man” or “woman” the problem, but the whole fake academic enterprise of philosophy itself. As when one rewrites the program just to change the names of the courses and some minor things. Women not wanting to pursue floating philosophy is a logical thing, they don’t want that because they know better, and frankly, I believe they’re right. I don’t think that this debate will be settle soon… but I’m always curious to see how this domain sees himself. That’s the first problem and it’s not only gender related ( far from that). Sorry for the UQAM call, I should not make fun of other university, even when we should call that one CEGEP[bis].

OK, Mathieu, I suspect I get where you wanna go with this. Since I am afraid I am still stuck with the false belief in the “fake academic enterprise of philosophy”, together with many of my students – irrespective of gender -, I will leave you to your thoughts, hoping that they will positively enlighten us regarding the matter at hand in that thread. And of course, your are more than welcome to attend any of the lectures we give at UQAM: you never know, you might even learn something…

Multiple surveys and research studies reveal that women are more likely to believe in god than men. This varies somewhat depending on age, what country you live in, etc., but overall the finding is pretty robust. To the extent that atheists and agnostics are more likely to seriously ask “why” than believers, this may have relevance in why females are interested enough in philosophy to want to pursue it as a career.

Religion historically also happens to be an area without a lot of women role models, yet it doesn’t dissuade them from believing in the scriptures. This could suggest some of the disparity is beyond feeling comfortable around those who look like me, and perhaps that there is a biological/neuroscience component to this.

One reason it’s so hard to have intelligent discussions on this topic is that people like Onion Man deliberately mischaracterize other people’s comments. When mhl says certain evidence “may have relevance” to an explanation, Onion Man pretends s/he said the evidence is “proof”.
I have no idea whether women are more religious than men, and I have no idea whether more religious people are less interested in philosophy, but it’s certainly worth discussion.

Not quite. I am saying that you cannot account for the entire disparity by pointing to a scarcity of female philosophy role models from which to learn.

If you think my religion counterexample is a bad one, you can just point out why it’s bad instead of being snarky.

gopher: There’s nothing mischaracterizing about it. That was the argument/hypothesis: women’s brains are wired not to ask questions, like believers’ brains are wired not to ask questions, and the proof (“evidence”) is that women are more likely to be believers. So we shouldn’t be surprised that there aren’t many women, or believers, in philosophy.

I fail to see how this is substantially less insulting that saying that womens’ brains are wired for taking care of people, like the brains of nurses are wired for taking care of people, and the proof is that women are more likely to be nurses. So we shouldn’t be surprised that there aren’t many women, or nurses, in philosophy.

mhl: Your religion counterexample is a terrible one. The idea that religiosity implies a lack of curiosity, and that atheists or agnostics are just constitutionally better philosophers (“because they ask ‘why'”), is the kind of statement that could only be made by someone who is both ignorant of and hostilely disposed toward “religion” (whatever you think that word means).

While we’re on the subject of disparities in the field, something like 80-90% of professional philosophers identify as atheist or agnostic. Now, there’s a self-congratulatory explanation, which is mhl’s explanation, i.e., “atheists or agnostics are more likely to ask ‘why.'” But there are a range of competing explanations, as well, most of which are not nearly so flattering…

Good. So we can stop obsessing about how terrible we are at retaining women, and advancing fanciful hypotheses about the prevalence of discrimination and harassment *within* the profession.

Thanks for answering, SN, and providing insight. I’ll check out Iris Young as she seems quite interesting. I’ll try and keep an open mind, though not so much that it falls right out. 😉

I’m not sure I’m quite getting your definition of sexism. I was using it in the traditional sense. That is, discrimination based on the sex of a person regardless of the discriminating sex. That is, women do not continue on with philosophy because there are too many men involved in it already. They find the men off-putting and assume it is not a place for women based solely on the abundance of men. Not on any factual or anecdotal evidence.

I may not be getting it, or am not ‘hip to the jive’, but the definition you’ve provided doesn’t seem to do with sex/race and has more to do with class/power? Perhaps I’m not quite understanding it? If a black woman owns a cafe in the united states and refuses to provide service to all white people and black males, this would not be racist despite the discrimination based on race because white people hold positions of power in the US? It would also not be sexist despite discrimination against sex because men hold positions of power in the US? Therefore she is justified in her discrimination. Where as, if the cafe were to be located in Nigeria, It would be racist because black people hold positions of power in that country but would still not be sexist because males hold positions of power? Or is your definition more to do with unconscious tribalism? (Which is a term I may have just made up or could currently exist but I’ll try and clarify what I mean.) So, Nursing is a profession dominated by females throughout the various hierarchies it has. Male nurses are by far the minority throughout the hierarchies. No matter the initiatives of the females, who have the power, to provide inclusivity to the male nurses, the female nurses will always be inherently sexist towards male nurses because they hold positions of power?

Kevin,

You’re right to note that my explanation for sexism and racism is about power structures and that’s because they are not separate. To paraphrase a line from the movie “Dear White People” women can’t be sexist because they lack institutionalized power, what you’re talking about is discrimination. There is some controversy about this issue, but I stand with the group that says sexism, racism, classism is intretwined with power dynamics. I think this largely because of things like opportunity hording: one group possessing opportunities and keeping those opportunities within the group, even if doing so is unconscious. An example of this is something like old boy’s networks. The discrimination based on sex done by old boys networks has a significant impact upon a person’s life that a woman who owns a cafe and refuses to serve male customers lacks. While the latter is a violation of the civil rights act and may force you to go down the street to get another coffee, the former (a) may hamper a woman’s social mobility, (b) can be (and is) done more covertly, and (c) has institutional impacts that are mimicked by other businesses. For example, say a woman takes a job in an office. Well, her boss is part of an old boys network and so sees women’s role as domestic so she is expected to fetch the coffee, clean up, etc. She doesn’t take part in other important administrative tasks. Her boss’ friend who runs a different kind of business hears about this and says, “you know, that’s a great idea. I’ll hire some ladies to do bland domestic work.” Now, because women are performing what these men might think is their natural role they aren’t even considered for advancement, they’re paid lower because they’re women and so not the bread winner (so their bosses think), etc. Hopefully, you see where this is going. These sorts of models of sexism replicate themselves in all kinds of industries and since men are far more likely to be CEOs of companies their own sexism has a serious impact on a woman’s ability to make a decent living, provide for her family, advance, stay employed (women and minorities had the toughest time during the great recession whereas white male unemployment was only around 6% then), etc. So, sure, the woman discriminating against men at her coffee shop is bad, but the real question (at least the one I’m concerned with) is are women and minorities and others being excluded from opportunities. The Nigeria question is interesting, though I would note that globally white people are far more likely to be wealthier and have more privileges and power than a random person from Nigeria. So, again, there’s that power structure that could be at play. Racism, sexism, etc. don’t mean a whole lot if there wasn’t that added power dynamic over opportunities and privileges that groups can horde. That’s what keeps others oppressed and helps feed into the stereotypes that become familiar justification for sexism and racism.

I would not disagree that “racist” and “sexist” can be properly ascribed to certain pernicious overt attitudes, Yet Another Anon Grad Student. But I think you will have a hard time defending the claim that *only* attitudes, and not also institutions, practices, and policies, can properly be identified as racist or sexist.

Thanks for posting this very interesting and important piece. It puts me in mind of a great presentation by David Heise at the 2015 Pacific Division meeting. Heise’s research uncovered a strong trend in women over men and an even stronger trend in non-white over white students to be concerned with how well majoring, minoring or just taking one course will equip them with practical skills for their careers. The fact that most laypeople think of philosophy as the epitome of a practically irrelevant area of study is probably having a serious effect here. Heise also initially wondered about the old speculation that women, and perhaps nonwhite students, might be turned off philosophy by its combativeness. But he reported that the claim that philosophy is too combative or confrontational was the one that members of all groups disagreed with overall on his survey. Combining Heise’s results with what Baron, Dougherty and Miller found about incoming female students being less confident about their prospects in philosophy, an interesting picture begins to emerge about what is getting in the way of sexual and racial diversity in philosophy and what we should be doing about it.

Here’s my first stab at a list of best practices for increasing the proportions of women and racial minorities in philosophy in light of this new information. Maybe we can modify the list together into something reasonable and see what we can do to implement it.

1) We need to start pretty far upstream. Since women are already walking in the door on their first day of philosophy class with less interest or confidence, we need to take seriously the effect of childhood and teenage socialization. Looking at the toys, activities, etc. that children are pushed into by sex, as Cordelia Fine explores expertly in _Delusions of Gender_ it’s not hard to see why girls would be less likely to think that a highly analytical discipline is for them. We need to combat this trend long before the students come to university.

2) Another extra-university problem for us to work on is the public perception of philosophy as impractical and silly. Public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Sam Harris are loudly perpetuating a hackneyed image of philosophy that, it appears, is exactly what will most turn off women and minorities the most. Ask someone on the street how he or she has seen philosophy portrayed in the media, and you’ll probably hear about a very negative picture. We need to get out there and fight for a positive image of philosophy as a way to develop and practice useful and relevant skills.

3) The first day students come to philosophy class, as Heise stresses, they should be presented with clear information on just how successful philosophy is at preparing students for life after college. The funny thing is that we are already doing just what many women and non-white students disproportionately wish we would do. We just aren’t promoting our achievements very well.

4) We also need to promote that same image with that same information across campus, so that students who would otherwise never consider a philosophy course will give us a chance.

5) Once we’ve made the promise that a serious engagement with philosophy will confer these benefits, we need to make sure we are delivering on our promises to get the students to come back. Students who can see that they are reaping the intellectual and other psychological rewards of the discipline, and who can see how they can apply these skills later on, will be more likely to return for more courses and do majors or minors. And we’re now seeing that this is particularly relevant with women and minorities. So we should aim to deliver, and we also should take the time to make the applicability clear.

6) If women (and minorities) tend to think of themselves as less likely to succeed at philosophy, then activities that bring them out of their self-constraining feelings will be helpful. Good teaching strategies that ensure all the students participate and join in the fun of doing philosophy (puzzling things out, analyzing arguments) rather than learning about philosophers are good things to aim for.

7) If your department has a disproportionately high number of male or white students, and you sense that this might be turning off some female or nonwhite students, then you can make a big difference by sending a personal note to some particularly strong female or minority students after classes end, telling them how much you enjoyed their work, and hoping that they do more philosophy. It can be helpful to add that you remember the student really enjoyed philosophy of X when it was covered in the course, and that phil of X will be the theme of a more advanced course coming up next term. These notes should always be sincere and make it evident that the student is not being recruited as part of a campaign to get more women/minorities into philosophy (how insulting!), but out of a genuine recognition of the student’s interests, hard work, and talents.

While I too would prefer not to get bogged down in terminological disputes, this does not mean that one party’s definition is simply to be granted as *the* operative definition in the face of genuine disagreement. When you say that ascription of racism is being “co-opted,” or that it “makes less sense” to describe a particular sort of education system as racist, you are begging the question in favor of your position. You end your comment by assuming that “the broader public” (as opposed to liberal academia) shares your view on this disagreement; but that is far from clear, and not argued for here. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that multiple publics share a common view on the proper ascription of racism (or sexism, and so on). Let us not simply assume absent compelling evidence that one view on this matter is the natural, neutral, unmarked position.

Ben A: it’s true that it’s an empirical question as to how people use the word. It’s also an empirical question as to whether most people think racism is a bad thing. It’s also an empirical question as to whether people use the words “the”, “and”, “it”, etc. frequently. I’m going off of my common experience with folk, who I find tend to speak as though racism, sexism, etc. were a matter of explicit attitudes. I suppose my entire experience with the word outside of academia could be innaccurate. To be blunt, when people do extend sexism/racism to things beyond explicit attitudes they tend to simply apply the terms to anything about race/gender that they disagree with. Most people are not terribly intellectually honest.

Sin Nombre: It seems that you’re saying that what makes racist/sexist attitudes bad is the fact that they are accompanied by structural inequalities, and inferring from this that racism/sexism only occurs as a result of structural inequalities. This is just a bad inference. It would be like me saying that theft is especially bad is when it is a rich person taking something from a poor person, and then inferring from this that a poor person can’t steal from a rich person. That’s not how it works. What makes theft bad is the fact that one is taking someone’s property. Likewise, what makes racism/sexism bad is the fact that one is making broad judgments about people without any evidence. It may be that racism/sexism is much worse when it is accompanied by structural inequalities, but what that shows us is that these structural inequalities are more pernicious than outright racism/sexism, not that racism/sexism only occurs as a result of structural inequalities.

I want to thank everyone for having these conversations, and to Justin for hosting them. As a young(er) man in the profession, I appreciate seeing what people have to say. I don’t want to butt into the exchange between Sin Nombre and Yet Another Anon Grad Student, but do I want to say a few words about at least this reader’s response to Sin Nombre’s position. I think of racism as a trait that is borne by institutions and individuals against other individuals (and their properties) on the basis of perceived and inferred racial identities, often (but not always) resulting in behaviors that target these individuals because of their race (where the explanatory force of ‘because’ often, but not always, involves the intentionality of conscious agency). As such, it would only make sense to say that one group of people could not be racist towards another if it were impossible for them to think about and act toward other people as members of different races. But it is clearly not the case, race relations being what they are in America today, that the black population (say) is strictly incapable of using the perception of whiteness (say) as a basis for targeting individuals in ways that are racist by this definition.

If something like that lies at the back of our notion of racism, then when Sin Nombre encourages us to consider “500 years of global white supremacy or how ever many millennia of patriarchy” as an explanation for why black people in America can’t be racist toward whites (for instance), she (or he) is not really giving us an explanation for anything. Instead she is participating in the kind of radical taxonomic reorganization that, while sometimes necessary for conceptual progress, can also leave its practitioners on the dust heap of crackpots and lunatics. And when it comes time for me to decide, in the everyday ways I must, how to think about and act on our problems of race relations, I am struck by how ineffectual it is to hold that racism is only possible in the context of certain power relations. There’s a theory here, I know. But our problems are far more prosaic, and anyone who has spent any time living in a lower income mixed race neighborhood in a large American city will have seen plenty of things that the person free from the grips of Sin Nombre’s theory would call ‘racism’. And so the attempt to redefine that term in such a way that we can no longer call what we all along recognized as racism is just going to butt heads with the fact that American English, together with details of American history, have already settled that racism is a feature of American life that crosses all sorts of boundaries irrespective of power relations. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that is trying to change the conversation; though they profess to be doing so, there is a real sense in which they are not talking about racism as a problem in America today (for instance). They’re talking about Racism as a force that is wielded by white people, almost always men, on the basis of “500 years of global white supremacy or how ever many millennia of patriarchy”. But that’s just not what anyone who isn’t already in Sin Nombre’s camp means by ‘racism.’ A similar point can be made about the attempt to use a narrative reconstruction to prevent us from calling certain behaviors by women ‘sexist’ towards men.

None of this is to deny that power relations are important for instituting racism or sexism, nor is it to minimize the extent to which it is right to say that America has many racist and sexist institutions and inhabitants. But the attempt to redraw the linguistic boundaries is a misfire, I think.

Race and gender relations are so horrible today that we clearly need to have a conversation about race and gender, and the more we talk about it the better. Thanks again to everyone for the willingness to have it out over this material. I hope we can continue to do so, and to do so more and more productively.

Enjoy the Fourth!

*were I to go to India* (damn auto-incorrect!)

Yet Another Anon Grad Student,
I see what you’re saying but those phenomena have their own particular histories and manifestations that are different from the American experience. That’s my fault for being American-centric. Sure, those can be called other forms of racism, though they weren’t always considered that since the history of racism is tied to the (now debunked) scientific idea that there are 3-4 races and European imperialism justified itself on that basis. Some people are more comfortable calling the phenomena you describe as tribalism and at the root of it, racism is a form of preferring one’s tribe over another’s. I’m fine with that, but again, racism has no teeth and isn’t really pernicious without the power structures differentiation so I don’t think it’s significant to talk about a woman’s discrimination against men as sexism since that’s not what makes sexism bad. Your examples provide only help further my view.

“racism has no teeth and isn’t really pernicious without the power structures differentiation so I don’t think it’s significant to talk about a woman’s discrimination against men as sexism since that’s not what makes sexism bad.”

I’ve already replied to this line of reasoning and you seem to have simply ignored my response. It seems we’re right back where we started. First of all, I didn’t really say anything about discrimination, which is a somewhat loaded term itself. I’m certainly not claiming that all affirmative action is a form of racism/sexism. What I’m saying is that a woman or other minority that hates all men/white people and believes generalizations about all men/white people is clearly sexist/racist because the presence of those attitudes are sufficient conditions for sexism/racism. I’m not claiming that affirmative action is racist/sexist. My whole point is that it depends upon the attitudes and reasons behind the policies. Indeed, I think those policies are NOT racist or sexist precisely because they are motivated by a desire to foster diversity and correct for systematic inequalities.

Second, making broad generalizations and having an intolerant attitude toward large groups of people is what is inherently bad about racism/sexism/etc. I completely agree that systematic power relations make the effects of racist attitudes a lot worse. A bigoted person can obviously do a lot more damage if society is structured in such a way that he/she has the power to make bigoted decisions regarding other people’s livelihoods. But one can easily accommodate this fact without saying that it is ONLY power relations that make these attitudes bad. You seem to want to deny this and say that it is ONLY power relations that make racist/sexist/etc. attitudes bad and because of this you think it only makes sense to think of racism/sexism/etc. in terms of power relations. This is why I and others think you are adopting a strange form of revisionism. Think of all the effort that has been put into eliminating these attitudes and promoting more tolerant ones in their place. On your view this is all wasted energy that should have been put into correcting systematic socioeconomic inequalities. Now, I certainly think that it would be wise to spend more energy on the latter than the former, but I also do not think the former is a total waste.

The whole bit about punching upward/downward appears to be an attempt to eliminate moral distinctions concerning types of actions and redefine right and wrong solely in terms of group-membership. If you want to see how well that line of reasoning works you need look no further than the various communist societies that arose in the 20th century.

To get evidence about what a word means you can look in a dictionary. The OED gives this definition for ‘racism’:

A belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior, or that other such groups represent a threat to one’s cultural identity, racial integrity, or economic well-being; (also) a belief that the members of different racial or ethnic groups possess specific characteristics, abilities, or qualities, which can be compared and evaluated. Hence: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against people of other racial or ethnic groups (or, more widely, of other nationalities), esp. based on such beliefs.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says:

the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
• prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior: a program to combat racism.

Hi Sin Nombre, thanks for the response. Unfortunately, you seem not to be reading me very carefully. So I’ll try to clear some things up.

First, I never speculated about your biography when I referred to what people experience living in lower income mixed race neighborhoods. Here’s what I wrote: “But our problems are far more prosaic, and anyone who has spent any time living in a lower income mixed race neighborhood in a large American city will have seen plenty of things that the person free from the grips of Sin Nombre’s theory would call ‘racism’.” Notice the phrase ‘the person free from the grips of Sin Nombre’s theory.’ Clearly that cannot refer to you, as you are fully in the grips of your theory.

Second, none of what I said conflicts with your remarks about “the historical context of racism and sexism.” Again, notice: “None of this is to deny that power relations are important for instituting racism or sexism, nor is it to minimize the extent to which it is right to say that America has many racist and sexist institutions and inhabitants. But the attempt to redraw the linguistic boundaries is a misfire, I think.” I’m not objecting to the analysis of racism and sexism as social institutions. But when you say things like “women can’t be sexist because they lack institutionalized power,” you aren’t offering us an explanation of anything. Instead, you’re trying to change the language. And the right response to that is to say ‘no thanks’ to the people proposing the change, and to exhibit by reasoned conversation (for anyone not in the grips of the theory) why the proposed change is crackpot.

Wow, that is a condescending, arrogant comment, Bunny Hugger!
It’s an argument about the meaning of the word ‘racism’. That’s an empirical issue, and dictionaries provide empirical evidence to answer it.
I wonder if you have anything constructive to contribute – maybe an argument or some evidence about what counts as ‘racism’.

If conceptual problems were easily resolved with dictionaries, we wouldn’t need so many philosophers, would we?

I’m baffled by the apparent relative lack of interest of females in philosophy before they even attend university. However, it seems like our best response is to make sure that we are publishing philosophy in venues likely to be read by females who have not yet reached adulthood. If we are to do so, we must make it clear that as a profession, we value such writing.