Women’s Share of US PhDs in Philosophy Increased by about One-Third Over Past Decade (guest post)
Women earned 37% of US Philosophy Doctorates in 2024, up from 28% ten years ago. But what explains the change?
Here with the data and analysis is Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside).
(A version of this post previously appeared at The Splintered Mind.)
[Giorgia Lupi, “24 Preludes”. Click image for more info]
Women’s Share of US PhDs in Philosophy Increased by about One-Third Over the Past Decade
by Eric Schwitzgebel
For about 25 years, from the 1990s to the mid 2010s, the percentage of women earning PhDs in philosophy in the U.S. hovered around 27%. In the late 2010s, the percentage began to rise. Newly released data from the National Science Foundation show women earning 37% of philosophy doctorates in 2024.
Here are the data since 1973. The red line is the year-by-year data; the black line is the five-year floating average. (For more details about the data see this note [1].)
Due to the noisiness of the data, it’s hard to tell when the change started exactly, but around 2016-2019 is a good guess.
The increase is not just chance variation. From 2020-2024, the NSF reports 2144 PhD recipients in philosophy, classifying 704 (33%) as female. For 2015-2019, they report 727/2424 (30%; p = .04 by the two-proportion z test). For 2010-2014, it’s 686/2419 (28%, p = .001, comparing 2020-2024 with 2010-2014).
Bachelor’s degrees show a strikingly similar pattern. From the late 1980s to the early 2010s, with stunning consistency, women earned about 32% of bachelor’s degrees in philosophy. Starting around 2017, the percentage of women philosophy Bachelor’s recipients began to increase, rising to over 40% by 2023.
Here’s the chart for Bachelor’s recipients from my analysis last year:
![[chart showing an increase in share of women earning BAs in philosophy in the US, starting around 2017]](https://dailynous.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/schwitz-women-ba-phil-us-2022-data-2.png)
Across the university as a whole, the percentage of Bachelor’s degrees and PhDs earned by women has not dramatically increased since the late 2010s. These recent increases are a philosophy-specific phenomenon, as far as I can tell.
If the increase in women PhDs were mostly a pipeline effect, we should expect the increase in percentage of women earning philosophy PhDs to occur about seven years after the increase in percentage of women earning Bachelor’s degrees. That would reflect approximately seven years on average between receipt of Bachelor’s degree and receipt of PhD, with the students of the late 2010s receiving their PhDs about now. But that’s not what we see. Instead, Bachelor’s and PhDs increase simultaneously.
This leaves me a little puzzled about the cause. If it were that women were increasingly attracted to philosophy, for some cultural reason or some reason internal to philosophy, that would probably show up as a pipeline effect, with a delay between the undergraduate bump and the graduate bump.
One possibility is a decrease in attrition rates for women (relative to men) starting in the late 2010s, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Although I don’t have systematic data on this, I’ve seen various patchwork pieces of evidence suggesting that attrition rates out of philosophy may be, or may have been, typically higher for women than for men.
If attrition rates have decreased specially for women, why? One possibility that could explain the synchrony in decreasing attrition rates for women would be a general improvement in the climate for women in philosophy departments, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. Anecdotally, it strikes me that it was in the 2010s that the climate problem for women in the discipline began to receive broad attention. If so, perhaps this led to some effective positive changes (of course not everywhere and not perfectly).
However, this is to string one conjecture atop another atop another, in total leaving me with a confidence significantly less than 50% that this an adequate explanation (though it might be one factor among several). I’d be curious to hear alternative conjectures.
[1] Methodological note: The SED attempts to collect information on all PhDs awarded in accredited U.S. universities, generally receiving over 90% response rates. Gender information is classified exhaustively as “male” or “female” with no nonbinary option. The classification of “Philosophy” has shifted over the years. From 2012-2020, a separate subfield of “ethics” was introduced, which has been merged with “philosophy” for analysis. (It was always relatively few degrees.) Starting in 2021, two new categories were introduced: “History/ philosophy of science, technology, and society” (formerly “History, science and technology and society”) and “Philosophy and Religion, not elsewhere classified”. I have excluded both of the latter categories from my analysis. Both are relatively small: 58 and 67 degrees total in 2024, respectively.
A fair amount happened in 2014 that may have signaled to students and to faculty advising them that things relevant to the treatment of women in the profession were improving. My observations here are probably somewhat epistemically and self-servingly biased, as 2014 was the year Daily Nous began, so take this with a grain of salt. But recall that 2014 was the year a good chunk of the profession, motivated by cases involving the hostile treatment of women, banded together to try to make a change. Remember?
Uh, I remember THIS.
At least at the PhD level, I think there is a potential cause that is more obvious and direct than attrition, signalling or climate.
1) From around 2010 (and increasingly over the 2010s), every US PhD program I know of started openly saying that it wanted to increase the percentages of women in the program.
2) Faculty have very high, in many cases almost total, control of who they make offers to, and hence a very large level of control of who they recruit.
3) At least until the SFFA vs. Harvard judgement in 2023, it was legal under US law to consider the overall mix of your student cohort, including sex (and race) diversity, as a legitimate factor in admissions.
US Philosophy departments wanted to increase the percentage of women in their PhD programs; they were legally permitted to do so; they had the tools to do so. It’s then scarcely surprising to find that the percentage of women getting PhDs did indeed go up; indeed, it would have been surprising to find otherwise.
This seems obviously right to me and I think people are kidding themselves if they don’t at least consider it as a possible explanation.
And insofar as it is the explanation, there’s nothing bad or unreasonable about it – this was an intellectually and morally defensible policy, pretty openly stated, and (at the time) probably legal.
It’s certainly possible that there was a jump in affirmative action for PhD admissions around then, perhaps connected with the more widespread realization of the climate issues in philosophy. But that wouldn’t seem to explain the simultaneous increase in percentage of BAs earned by women, at least not with some further hypothesized mechanism, right?
Agreed, it doesn’t explain the percentage BAs. And I agree that the synchrony of the two is interesting. But it also would be extremely odd if widespread, openly stated policies didn’t lead to a change in grad numbers. Plausibly it’s not monocausal.
(I don’t think I’d exactly say ‘affirmative action’, though, and that isn’t the legally-justifiable rationale. You can consider holistically ‘what shape class shall we admit’ and think it’s better to have one that’s more diverse on various axes, including gender.)
But this raises the question – why did the gender ratio among undergraduate majors start changing at the same time? Faculty generally have very little, if any direct control over who enrolls in a major. Schwitzgebel’s analysis of the timing of changes in undergraduate and graduate enrollment suggest that neither one could be a cause of the other, but I think the proposal Justin raises in the other comment thread (changing attitudes and an explicit focus on gender equality signaling things to students at all levels) does a better job of explaining why both might change at once, while the mechanisms you mention would only apply at the graduate level. (Though perhaps this is a contributing factor to why enrollments at the graduate level changed by a bit more than enrollments at the undergraduate level.)
If AA was involved it obviously would have had to start around 2010 or so. The completer-data shows up in the late teens. But, the grad students are TA-ing early in their graduate careers. More women philosophy students have women instructors, and this yields more majors at about the same time.
Just a guess.
I’m not old enough to have any good insight into this, but did philosophy become less adversarial over this time? My impression is that this was a feature of philosophy classes that turned away undergraduate women at a higher rate than men, and it’s plausible to me that motivations for (1) increasing representation of women and (2) fixing the climate problem would also lead departments to manage discussion in undergraduate classes differently
A possible explanation for (part of) the increase at the undergraduate level is that nonrenumerative majors were increasingly disparaged and this might have had a different effect on men than women. Pure speculation.
It would be interesting to find grad school admissions data. Has there been an increase in applications to PhDs by women, or an increase in acceptance rates for women, or something else?
I’m inclined toward the reduced attrition hypothesis. I don’t necessarily believe that much, if anything, is needed to be done for women (or anyone else for that matter) to become interested in philosophy. My experience is that we are sometimes actively discouraged (intentionally or unintentionally) from pursuing it and when those discouragements are reduced, it has a predictable effect.
I also wonder if there could be a network effect as well. The department I’m in has a fair number of women, both in faculty and in the student population. It certainly made me feel more comfortable applying and generally reduces any feelings of stereotype threat. Even when I am accidentally stereotyped, the impact (for me personally) is lessened by the sheer fact that I’m not the only one here.