Philosophy, Especially, Should Welcome Demographic Diversity
“Philosophy is a dialectical discipline that thrives in the clash, reconciliation, and creative synthesis of diverse views; and our views are profoundly shaped by our cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Uniformity dulls our collective philosophical thinking. A fair and flourishing discipline would treasure rather than repel those who have historically been excluded.”
So writes Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) at The Splintered Mind.
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[art by Xomatok]
Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial souls that might continue to exist after we have died, about ethical issues such as war and human rights, about what’s worth pursuing in life, about when and how far we should trust scientific authority, about the best forms of government, about the origin and structure of the world? Nothing about these issues—and nothing about philosophy as a discipline devoted to the fundamental questions of human existence—should make it of more interest to one gender rather than another, one cultural group rather than another, or to the able-bodied more than to the disabled.
Yet academic philosophy in the US today lacks demographic diversity:
Study after study and testimonial after testimonial show that the culturally privileged are overrepresented in academic philosophy…
For example, the self-reported gender of regular members of the American Philosophical Association in 2025 was 70% male, 29% female, and 1% nonbinary/something else…
In 2025, 4% of regular APA members reported being Black or African American, compared with 14% of the U.S. population. The NSF data suggest no surge of new Black philosophers in the pipeline: the percentage among recent PhD recipients is also 4%.
The NSF data show no American Indian or Alaskan Native philosophy PhD recipients in 2024… and only one in past four years (among 1692 doctorates awarded), although Native Americans constitute nearly 2% of the U.S. population.
Another concern that has recently drawn attention is the linguistic insularity of mainstream Anglophone philosophy—that is, the neglect of work written in other languages. In 2018, three collaborators and I examined citation practices in leading Anglophone journals and found that 97% of citations referred to work originally written in English. Journals published in other languages were much less insular. We also found that 96% of the editorial board members of journals perceived as elite were housed in majority-Anglophone countries.
Professor Schwitzgebel then takes up the question, “Could a structurally just academic system nonetheless happen to produce such skewed results, always in favor of the already powerful?” See the full post for his answer.
If the goal is to increase the diversity of views, why not directly target that instead of using demographics as a means to that end?
For the simple reason that you can’t have a diversity of views if you systematically exclude communities that already face marginalization in wider society. I suppose you could argue that maybe a white, cisgender person could still represent views held by a black, transgender person. Sure. But it’s also quite likely that they came to those views by engaging with, and taking seriously, the voices of black transgender persons in their life. So why not take steps to open up the academy to them, rather than relying on intermediaries who may or may not be able to accurately represent those views and who are, in any case, conveying them to you indirectly?
Is the academy closed to them, though? I see no evidence of that. I have been on 7 searches in the last 20 years, and we’ve had, maybe, 2 black applicants. One reason we don’t have any black trans philosophers in my dept is that none have applied.
The academy may not be closed to them in the sense that they don’t put official barriers in place but that does not mean there aren’t other ways it is closed (or perhaps restricted is a better word). As just one example, it is much more difficult for someone without means to break into academia than someone who has means. Obviously this isn’t necessarily the fault of the academy but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things the academy can do to help rectify the issue.
Yes, I find it bizarre that people would judge the matter by the raw number of applicants when there are reasons that someone may not be in a position to apply in the first place, which are invisible to the person reviewing applications. It’s not as though they receive application forms saying, “I would seriously apply, but I note you have a well-known sex pest on staff, so I have declined to do so.” Although, if that were to make the issues visible, perhaps that’s the sort of thing people should start doing.
Have you *looked* for evidence? Or just, none has landed on your desk?
Have you considered asking *why* you’ve only had 2 black applicants? Or does your curiosity not extend that far?
As the OP mentions, one can think about this not just as a snapshot, but as a pipeline. Are black students being given the opportunities to pursue philosophy, before they get to your application process?
I’ve wondered why, but whatever the answer is, it wouldn’t be something _we_ can do anything about. If PhD-granting departments are discriminating against minority grad students, that’s horrible, but we have no choice but to work with the applicant pool we get.
Sure, that’s true—we can only deal with the applicant pool that we get. But the way the problem is framed here matters. Saying “none have applied” while holding that the academy is still open to them frames the problem as being with them; that, for whatever reason, they haven’t applied. Being curious as to why there are so few (or even zero) applications by itself might put into doubt how open the academy is. It might suggest that it’s not something we can simply take as a given. Because, after all, maybe the reason there are so few (or even zero) applications is because the academy is not as open as we thought it was. And that’s not something we can determine by just examining the applicant pool.
That definitely makes a lot of sense if you’re hiring full professors who already have established publishing records away from other institutions. But if you’re working on recruiting undergrads and grad students into the profession (which is much more relevant for diversifying the views and topics discussed in the profession as a whole, rather than making zero-sum gains for one’s department at the cost of another), then you don’t yet know for sure what views people will end up developing.
It’s not easy to know who to recruit to end up with more people defending idealism or the analytic-synthetic distinction, or working on the aesthetics of sound. But you can make a pretty good guess that, for philosophical topics that interact with the socio-cultural-economic conditions of life, you’re likely to get different distributions of views developed by people whose lives have had different socio-cultural-economic conditions.
Oh I’m sure all the venerable tenure-tracks are going to sound off their support in this comment section, but something tells me that when committee time rolls around they won’t be radically altering their approach.
Also, here’s another way to quickly diversify the viewpoints present in your department: Offer TT positions in an AOS other than “AI Ethics”.
Great work if you can get a university to fund such a line!
Nice job diagnosing the problem!
So you are going to give up your spot? Or ask others to pay for your virtue?
This is the very moment when the virtue signal overcomes every bad intention within the human soul.
if someone S is not going to do x in way y, then others in a position to do x in some meaningful way don’t have to take the reasons for doing x in some meaningful way seriously.
likewise or relatedly, if (a) someone S is not going to do x in way y and (b) offering reasons for doing x indicates to some that S has some positive trait PT, then S is asking others to do x in way y so that those others will compensate S for PT.
*Note this holds even if S has not argued that they or others should do x in way y.
this is very good reasoning.
Surely, this could have been written without variables. Surely. SURELY.
nope. this is the only way to communicate ideas……unless….UNLESS….
Well, just don’t let it happen again.
Schwitzgebel sn’t asking anyone to give up their spot. He’s asking us to stop collectively discouraging marginalized demographics from philosophy so we can take theirs.
This would probably be identified as a conspiracy theory if it came from a different area of the political spectrum.
I tend to agree. In fact, as someone from Latin America, there are changes that would hugely benefit us to be more in contact with the philosophical Anglophone world. I’ll list some of them:
(1) Publish in venues where the paper is easier to access/open-access or put the manuscript in the PhilPapers/PhilArchive.
Commentary: I have lost the track how many times I’ve contacted people because their papers were behind PDC paywall and I could not read it. After all, here in Brazil we do not have outlandish institutions with impressive library resources. This will take me to the next one
(2) Promote some sort of shared/integrated access to digital library with global south institutions.
Commentary: Although we do not have top-notch rank 1 professors here, our professionals are quite capable of developing good philosophy. Unfortunately, the lack of resources is a serious problem here and many institutions cannot support a library subscription to all sort of PDC papers, to the up-to-date monographs and papers digitally published by Cambridge, Oxford, or Routledge.
(3) Make Hybrid events
Commentary: I have heard the many comments that people don’t like them, that it’s complicated to mediate the in person audience and the on-line one without having some sort of gap between them. But the mere fact that I and many of my colleagues cannot even know what is being discussed by you guys in the other hemisphere is a serious drawback. I do not care about waking 4-5 AM for time-zone reasons, I just want to be able to participate.
At last, I’m totally open to all of the above suggestions being flawed in some way or another, as other suggestions are equally possible and maybe even better. But they are real problems that can be solved if people really care about diversity as they say they care.
Thanks so much for this comment! It’s such an odd segue from “philosophy should include diverse views” to “philosophy in the US does not reflect the diversity of the US“. Philosophy’s already being done in the rest of the world! And frankly, an American philosophy department is likely to get a much more different perspective from someone in a non-English-speaking part of the world than they are from someone in the US whose skin merely happens to be a different colour. (And I say that as someone who is the latter.)
Part of this is structural, setting aside for now the subtle (and at times overt) hostilities directed at marginalized demographics within philosophy, philosophy is only pragmatically available to people who have the money, time and exposure needed to know to pursue it.
It’s not known for being a highly employable discipline, so that will immediately cause anyone with financial strain to disqualify themselves (or strongly consider doing so).
Then there is the 5-7 years required to invest, again, making very little money, and usually expected to be pursued by people during the prime of their youth – when many want to start families, explore their interests, try other careers or simply acquire some financial security.
Then there is exposure to the discipline. I’m willing to bet most students exposure to philosophy is either Logic or Intro to Philosophy. Beyond that, it’s not common knowledge (believe it or not) that philosophy could be a career, or be useful to an alt-ac career (beyond Law), or is even a diverse canon of ideas that might be relevant to having a meaningful life.
I believe that this is an important discussion and I appreciate Schwitzgebel’s effort, especially the philosophical reasons he gives. Yet I believe that we need a much more fine-grained discussion about the issue, especially after a decade of EDI efforts. Here are some suggestions:
I believe that we need such detailed numbers and an open debate about how to interpret them. It is important to figure out how to truly diversify our community but we need the right instruments to achieve this goal.
I was really wondering if philosophical reflection was of interest to people of all body types. I’m glad Eric cleared that up.
One thing many philosophers have noted is that even if no one is wondering about something, making it explicit can sometimes be helpful to re-orient ways of thinking that are structured by covert assumptions.
I found it odd to include body types as a category next to cultures, races, classes, and social groups. I mean, why not ages, or shoe sizes?
But if we’re on the subject, what do you think those covert assumptions that structure our thinking might be?
These conversations are really interesting. They expose some of the underlying tensions in contemporary academic discourse.
The nature (and value) of diversity
Diversity is a deeply opaque concept. Discussions like this one today distinguishes between (but then runs together) at least two different kinds of diversity:
Viewpoint diversity: representing a number of contrasting positions
Demographic diversity: representing a number of contrasting identity categories
There’s a further claim here that runs these two together: to get viewpoint diversity one needs demographic diversity. I’ll say more about that one in the next section. For now, I’ll stick to the idea of diversity itself. Viewpoint diversity is a workable concept. To get it one needs to decide just how wide a net to cast for views (e.g., do we include those who argue for young Earth creationism among our Philosophy of Science faculty?) and then try to hire individuals who represent that space of positions (regardless of their US Census identity categories). This evaluative questions can be difficult to settle (why should we cast our net *that wide* and not wider or narrower?) but they’re not intractable.
Demographic diversity is a tougher nut to crack. First we need to figure out what the relevant demographic groups *are.* Often in these discussions people turn to US Census (OMB) categories: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, White.
Others have long pointed out the arbitrariness of these categories especially in the sense that these categories are often not how individuals who would be subsumed under them would self-identify (Latinos, outside of the US, don’t tend to identify most strongly with the overarching “Latino” category but instead with more local ethnic or national identities just as their “White” European counterparts often do). An additional problem is the now well-known “elite capture” problem which highlights class as a long neglected form of diversity. It’ neglected even in Eric’s post (in fairness the word “class” is mentioned four times but the overwhelming focus is on race/ethnicity/gender disparity – viewpoint diversity is never mentioned).
Essentialism vs. Intersectionality
A suspicious seeming assumption often built into these conversations is that assumption that members of specific American US Census Identity Categories hold, in virtue of being members of that US Census Identity Category, unique views that are (controversially) essential to their being members of that category. Consider the following example from this thread:
“I suppose you could argue that maybe a white, cisgender person could still represent views held by a black, transgender person…But it’s also quite likely that they came to those views by engaging with, and taking seriously, the voices of black transgender persons in their life. ”
We see in comments like this the idea that there is an intersectional essence that black trans people have, unique to them but also shared by them. In addition, that essence fundamentally informs their philosophical arguments. My understanding of third wave+ analyses of perception is that this is a controversial thing to say. While this is too in the weeds to really get bogged down into for a blog post, rejecting identitarian essentialism is often discussed as a foundational assumption in modern Western feminisms. There’s a tension then between saying that US Census categories like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “Hispanic or latino,” etc., don’t share essences (indeed with saying that gender, sex, and race are social constructions) and the claim that viewpoint diversity requires demographic diversity.
Perhaps the tension is not irresolvable but it is certainly present.
“The problem”
The last tension I see in these discussions is about what the problem even is and what the solution should look like. Is the problem “demographic misrepresentation”? Do we have a duty to ensure that the discipline (or every department) contains a proportional representation of all identity categories? Do we have a duty to ensure that all viewpoints are included that have been academically argued for?
When the rubber meets the road, do “over-represented” faculty (whether viewpoint or demographic) have a duty to retire, or turn down jobs, in order to make room for “under-represented” faculty?
I think you make some important points. Yet I find it important to consider that virtually none of us has a research-only position. We are hired by universities to teach. I think that the pedagogical purpose of philosophy bears on the discussion about the benefits of social diversity of our profession, separating it from the concept of viewpoint diversity you assume. I see at least two possible arguments here: First, social diversity among professors might have pedagogical value, given the social diversity of most student bodies. This is a two-way street: students might need both similarity and difference (hence, friction) to utilize their potential. Second, it is possible to set up a more charitable version of epistemic diversity. While a working class background might not bear on metaphysical questions, it exposes you to a certain kind of social experience. I see pedagogical value in having professors with such experiences, since most student bodies include first-generation students. It is more likely (not necessary!) that you can relate to their experience and share real-life advice. In addition, you might have gained a certain kind of social knowledge that guides your research, making it different from colleagues which do not share this background. Again two points here: pedagogical value and epistemic difference based on actual and relevant experience (which is different from essentialism).
I think you are reading too much into this example. It addresses a very specific question: How do those voices enter the academy? It does not assume that there is a unique set of views “essential to their being members of [a given] category.” Rather, it posits that structural inequities resulting in the exclusion of those voices means that their perspectives and experiences can only be mediated by someone else on their behalf—someone who does have access to the academy—rather than directly.
The example also does not assume that letting in one person who is a member of that category would be sufficient to represent “the views” of that category. If it did, then that would be an example of thinking that there’s a unique set of views “essential to their being members of [a given] category,” and that therefore this one person is sufficient to represent “the views” of the category. This is false. Which is why we’d want to open up the academy more broadly, and not assume that any individual can speak for the entirety of a category, which is in itself diverse.
This is also why, as I mentioned earlier, I think you’re reading too much into the example, while also assuming that the example means our task is simply to identify categories in the abstract and then seek out individuals who are members. I don’t think that approach is sufficient at all. The categories themselves are often constructed by government agencies, informed by the political, social, economic priorities of government. There are already views that have gone into constructing what the categories are, and those views aren’t necessarily ones that individuals placed into those categories would agree to had they been allowed to participate in their construction.
For this reason, I don’t think a standardized approach reliant on fixed categories, established by government agencies or other official bodies, will be sufficient. It’s an administrative-type solution that looks good on paper but which elides the decisions behind the categories’ construction and attempts to substitute the need for deeper community engagement with simple “targeted” measures that can be tracked on a spreadsheet.
@Felix: Right. Both a white man and a black trans woman can be a Marxist or an idealist or a gender eliminativist. But they’ll have different perspectives on it, different ways of looking at it, and different ways of teaching it, *in virtue of* living different lives and experiencing the world in different ways. This is important to cultivate in departments.
Hiring privileges non-white, non-males. The problem is the older generations. But there has already been evidence demonstrating that hiring is different now. The real question is about class privilege. We all know that the most privileged go to the best schools and they are the ones who get the jobs. If you want to diversify philosophy, then stop allowing the supposed top schools to dictate the philosophy market.
“Hiring privileges non-white, non-males.” Evidence for this, please. Thanks.
Lived experience
This is my lived experience. Since I began my first ranked professorial position in Fall 2002, my various philosophy departments at three different institutions conducted a total of five searches when I was there: four for TT positions and one for a multiyear rolling contract. I was a member of the search committee for four out of five searches, so I was aware of their deliberations. Results: four of these five positions went to white males and one went to a Latina. In my opinion, they all were wonderful but so were a number of other finalists. My lived experience is quite contrary to the claim that “hiring privileges non-white, non-males,” a claim that has the effect of stoking anger, envy, resentment, cynicism, etc. even among avowedly liberal members of our profession.
As said above already, we have to distinguish between different generations. You are right about hiring from 2002 to 2014. But after that the numbers are different in the humanities at large. You find evidence here: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
Here are some examples from the article:
“Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent).”
“White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).”
And for a discussion of these patterns among philosophers see here: https://leiterreports.com/2026/01/08/the-lost-generation-i-e-white-guys-who-couldnt-get-jobs-they-once-might-have-gotten-starting-around-2014/
Philosophy would have to be an absolute outliner in the last decade. But that does not match my lived experience.
This actually does not match my lived experience. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if philosophy is a significant “non woke” outlier here. Just to get a sense, I looked at four random departments in the top 15 ranked PGR schools and looked at the people who seemed like relatively recent hires (i.e., assistant profs, which won’t capture later career hires—though I actually suspect capturing them would only *increase* the proportion of white men).
60% of these recent hires were specifically white men. Only 20% were non-white. Overwhelmingly, assistant profs at these top schools were white, overwhelmingly, they were men. This tracks with my experience at one of these relatively high ranked programs, where we have zero (yes, zero) non-white faculty members, and our faculty is about 2/3 men. This is in a pretty big department (>20 TT faculty) that regularly hires.
I wonder if there’s ever been any studies about the rate of neurodivergence in the discipline, because anecdotally, I’d wager that neurodivergence is more represented in philosophy than most fields and the population at large.
Part of the problem with such a study is that I’m sure there are philosophers who are neurodivergent and do not know, and philosophers who are neurodivergent and do not say.
Hey. Uh, believe it or not, I’m a Hispanic disabled LGBTQ person who was interested in philosophy (read Wittgenstein in high school, took some classes in college, am applying for MAs after finishing an MS in Stats), and like…
To the amount of beleaguered cynical types, tired of hearing about DEI, the primary barrier is financial. My parents are not expected to contribute a single dime to my education. My grandparents did, by a stroke of luck, which is why I’m able to do this at all. That and scholarships and disability funding. The fact of the matter is, however, beyond that, is much like my other interest (math) philosophy is *incredibly* elitist. Structurally so, too. You’re not asking for people to go into a field with stable career prospects and visions of money, you’re asking them to work like hell to scramble for a position, in a field with no one like them around and literally no footsteps to follow. It’s lonely, and between the stipends that aren’t enough to live off of and the lack of any real representation, the problem feeds itself. I might not ever pursue philosophy. I was actually accepted to NIU, but funding unlikely, and like, what, I’m supposed to just start a GoFundMe? It’s dead in the pan.
Material conditions strike again!
It’s absolutely infuriating to watch people discuss things about culture and “meritocracy” when the blunt reality is that. Well, a couple of things.
Financial aid is pareto distributed. That is, it’s winner take all. There is a lot of attention devoted to seriously poor undergrads and very little dedicated to middle class edge cases like me. The only hopes we have of “academic elitism” is to go to HPYSM as an undergrad. Why is this the case? Be accepted to somewhere like Cornell, and your parents will have to sell a house to send you there.
Also, it’s just pareto distributed, again, in the jobs market in general, but doubly so for Philosophy. Wanna have a decent shot at TT? Well, better go to HPYSM, again, or somewhere similarly ranked.
It’s so pareto distributed thst traditional metrics (SAT Scores, GRE, etc) are practically useless in comparison to a good GPA, a writing sample which has been looked at by philosophers, and extensive research experience which is getting harder and harder to get if one isn’t “traditional stock”.
This game isn’t a meritocracy. Note that doesn’t imply that the people up there aren’t very smart and well-prepared for their positions. It’s just, it’s a lot easier to get there when you’re already entrenched, and I don’t see this trend reversing anytime soon.
I know this would probably be onerous to measure, but I’d be curious how citation practices differ by subfield. For example, it seems that there’s significantly more citation of non-English scholarship in ancient than in non-history subfields, but even that varies a lot by individual and topic (I work in Hellenistic, where recent scholarship in European languages is essential). Of course, it’s hard to have any large-scale approach to increasing non-English citation without building it into grad training, which would be difficult given the increasing pressure to publish sooner…