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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Some Questions about Philosophy Department Hiring Practices and the Role of Race and Gender (Leiter)

Brian Leiter

A new assistant professor writes:

PGR has now guided me through grad school and two market cycles. Thanks for the all the hard work.

I wanted to mention that I’d witnessed/heard of a lot of discussion-worthy practices related to demographic attributes of candidates, especially gender and race.  (Demoralizing example: office assistants in the cubicle next to mine trying to guess the ethnicity of candidates from their surnames, which they appeared to be recording in the candidates’ dossiers.)

I’d love to know both people’s considered views and actual practices, particularly concerning whether departments should/do (a) ignore non-academic demographic attributes, (b) consider them in order to pursue/encourage applications from certain demographics, (c) weight demographic attributes but only as a tie-breaker, (d) weight demographic attributes so that an academically superior candidate might be turned down in favor of one with certain demographic attributes, or (e) weight demographic attributes so that a candidate who would normally not be viewed as sufficiently qualified is hired anyway because of demographic attributes.

I will, as usual, give strong preference to non-anonymous comments, though given the sensitivity of these topics may permit some anonymous postings.  Post only once; comments may take awhile to appear, even if approved.

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50 responses to “Some Questions about Philosophy Department Hiring Practices and the Role of Race and Gender (Leiter)”

  1. Brian Weatherson

    There may be various laws in various places preventing this (and I think people should follow the law) but insofar as it is legal I strongly prefer option (d).

    I think that having a demographically diverse department is just as important as having a department that is diverse in terms of area coverage. Every department turns down academically superior candidates in favour of ones with certain area of interest attributes, so it isn't as if we always select the strongest candidate.

    And I think having a department with no women, or no non-white philosophers, is just as bad, from an educational perspective as having no ethicists, or no historians. Perhaps it is worse, because non-ethicists and non-historians can fake it for the purposes of undergraduate teaching. (I've taught both ethics and history classes, and they were I think some of the best classes I've taught.) But faking not being a white male is harder. And I think this matters, at least to undergraduate education, and to providing an environment where all students feel encouraged to do philosophy.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    There is also (f) weight ‘demographic attributes’ in such a way that white men are effectively excluded from the process. I was on the job market for several years in the US in the nineties and I know for a fact that this went on all the time. Usually it would be a matter of deans telling departments, in effect, that they simply wouldn't be allowed to hire anyone unless it was a woman or a minority. Since such a condition on hiring is blatantly illegal, it couldn't be advertised or even hinted at, with the result that there were many jobs for which qualified white men were applying, going to the APA for interview, and even going for an on-campus interview, even though unbeknownst to them they had no chance whatever of getting the job.

    Obviously this all took place against the background of many years during which many women and minorities were effectively excluded from the process. Yet one was naturally led to wonder whether the legitimate aims of affirmative action might be achieved in a way that didn't infect the entire appointment procedure with bad faith to such a grotesque extent, especially since the people doing the deans' bidding were characteristically the older white male philosophers responsible in part for the exclusion of women and minorities in the first place, and so infected with guilt as a result that they would do almost anything to atone — short of giving up their own jobs.

    Conversely, if Brian is right then it's hard to see why it should be illegal to refuse even to consider white men for quite a lot of philosophy jobs — just as it's not illegal to refuse to consider an aesthetician for a logic job. The fact that many people would have misgivings about this, on grounds that are prima facie legitimate, suggests that Brian is not right.

    Reply
  3. Christopher Pynes

    To Brian Weatherson:

    If you think it matters at least to undergraduate education, you must, I feel, think it matters even more at the graduate level. Where do ugrad profs come from? Graduate programs. If mentors of the same sex or race are important for educational perspectives, then the pull at the grad level is really important.

    I don't have an objection to (d), but what strikes me as odd is why is diversity of gender and race most important? What about diversity in the following ways: sexuality, first gen college student that becomes a professor, being from the south, Europe, or a Republican?

    I am all for diversity, but not for diversity's sake. I think the debate about the types of diversity is far more important than things like quotas and the like. An upper middle class black PHD that went to Harvard and Princeton and has no student loan debt has less in common with most students (I have) than the poor white PHD that went to say, Louisville and Southern Illinois and has 50K in student loan debt.

    Before any question of preferential treatment can be answered, I think an answer to why it is important for educational purposes has to be answered. They haven't as far as I can tell, so I don't know what to think about some of this stuff.

    I do know that a very active Affirmative Action office made two hires I was involved with very difficult. I cannot really say more than this, but let me just say that one person that was interviewed didn’t really satisfy the AOS and stated that they weren’t interested in doing it. This wasn’t enough for the AA office the first two times we told them. They really wanted us to bring this person to campus. It was a serious effort to avoid a case like (e). You might wonder why someone that didn't satisfy the AOS even got a conference interview. Well, this person was part of an under represented group in the perfession. But that's all I can say about it.

    Reply
  4. Margaret Atherton

    Reports, like the one by Anonymous, about the exclusion of while males from hiring in philosophy have been circulating since the 70's. Yet, throughout all this time, the percentage of women in philosophy, unlike most other humanities disciplines, has scarcely changed. It has been well documented, moveover, throughout this period, that the women who are hired are concentrated in greater numbers in part time employment and in far fewer numbers in departments with PhD programs. I am curious why, in light of these well publicized facts, that the view expressed by Anonymous still persists.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    With regard to the exclusion of white men from searches, I was not "expressing a view" so much as reporting knowledge, acquired via personal testimony of members of quite a few search committees. Even if the percentage of women in philosophy has scarcely changed since the 1970s (does anyone have a source for this?), this would clearly not be incompatible with what I reported as known by me to be true; so Professor Atherton's curiosity is misplaced.

    Reply
  6. Brian Weatherson

    I agree with Margaret Atherton entirely about the discrimination against white males in the profession. If this were widespread, it would show up in the stats. (Or even in casual perusal of APAs and department websites.) But it doesn't. Maybe there are isolated cases. But with the stats the way they are, I'm not going to believe stories that don't name names and provide details.

    I don't really want diversity for diversity's sake, though I don't think that's a terrible thing. But what I do want is a profession that attracts and keeps the best minds it can. And right now we don't do this. I'd like to have better stats on this, but my impression is that the white-male bias in philosophy has become quite pronounced in most places by the upper undergraduate years. As a rule women and, especially, non-whites don't enrol in analytic philosophy courses in the first place, and when they do they don't stay to take upper level courses. (Or at least such is my impression, based on a reasonably wide range of observations. If there is data casting doubt on this, or better still showing that it is wrong, I'd very much like to know about it.)

    Would this be different if we had analytic philosophy departments that looked more like the student body? This is something that would also be good to know, but I can't imagine it would be worse. It would be interesting to test the few departments that do 'look like America' (or Britain or Australia or wherever they are) to see whether they do better at keeping majors other than white males.

    If increasing diversity of the faculty helps attract and retain non-white male students, and I think the probability is high that it does, that's to me a very strong argument for diversifying departments. The current departments simply can't adequately teach philosophy to a huge percentage of the student body. That we should be able to teach philosophy to the student body as a whole seems like a pretty reasonable factor to me to consider in hiring.

    Reply
  7. anon (but known to Leiter)

    I agree with Brian Weatherston's remarks. My own experience suggests that there are ways of doing this. The college where I work is a small but selective women's liberal arts college. The dean's office was extremely supportive of affirmative action; our department was deeply divided on the issue of affirmative action in hiring. In the end, we adopted a slightly different policy than those described above. Our approach was to be flexible about our preferred AOS and AOC so as to attract more excellent women and non-white candidates. The result was that we were able to interview some excellent candidates who did not quite fit the AOS we were looking for, but we also did not have to hire, or even interview, anyone who seemed to us to be less than outstanding as a scholar and a teacher. If we had interpreted our advertised AOS narrowly, there would have been very few qualified candidates who were not white and male. As a small college with no graduate students to supervise, it is less important for us to cover specific research areas than it is for us to be able to offer a robust set of undergraduate classes. So perhaps we were able to be more flexible in our search than some graduate programs could be.

    Does this process mean that "academically superior" candidates were discriminated against? I don't think so, but it depends on what one counts as part of academic superiority. If AOS is understood as a purely academic qualification, then we are guilty. But if academic superiority is understood in terms of the quality of scholarship and teaching, we are not.

    Reply
  8. Martin Lin

    It would be nice to have a more diverse profession, if for no other reason than to assure us that we weren't discriminating unfairly against anyone. But I don't really share Brian's confidence that having a more diverse faculty will lead a more diverse group of students to study our discipline. Look at art history. There most of the students are women and most of the faculty are men. It seems to me that the factors that explain this sort of thing are likely to be very complex and hard to manipulate. Surely they are not well understood by anyone.

    Reply
  9. Christopher Pynes

    Faculty looking more like the student body:

    When Brian Weatherson asks for this, it makes me think, why and in what sense? What is the reason we need this. Clearly we don’t want 10% of the faculty to be functionally illiterate. Should diversity mean that we have good lecturers and some very bad lecturers?

    It seems to me that philosophy departments don’t discriminate as much as people self select out of philosophy. For example, why are the following groups over represented in philosophy?

    (a) Non-republicans
    (b) Non-religious
    (c) Non-meat eaters

    What are we doing to promote theses groups? I would say that philosophy is doing nothing to promote them. Lest we agree with Leiter about certain things: the better arguments are winning.

    Should we have diversity in political views, say more Republicans: Like Horowitz desires.
    Should we have more diversity in Christianity hiring. Plantinga and others seemed to make being a Christian philosopher cool.

    Do we need a brilliant charismatic black (Cornell West?) to make black students study philosophy? What about a female?

    It seems that there are lots of reasons that people self select out of philosophy. US culture of value = $$$ and you cannot make a lot of cash in philosophy might explain it. Philosophers are good at lots of stuff and many of them could make a lot more money in the open market doing other things. Maybe women and other minorities are more concerned with trying to deal with economic inequities that philosophy doesn’t seem to fill that bill. In many ways I agree with Martin Lin, there are lots of factors, and it is hard to tell why it is the way it is.

    But if we agree that there has been a concerted effort to remedy these inequities and there has been no change, according to Margaret Atherton, then perhaps this is evidence that there isn’t a bias at all. What I want to know from Weatherson and others that share his view. Why is diversity good for education? I learned geometry from a black man in the 8th grade. The Pythagorean Theorem was no more or less impressive because he was black. I was thunderstruck by truth. Those, I argue, are the people that philosophy should seek. And the best way to do that is to get good teachers, whether black, white, male, republican, female, or vegetarian.

    Reply
  10. Anonymous

    This is rather strange. Am I the only person to have known of several cases since the early nineties where a dean or equivalent has effectively made it clear (not in writing, obviously) that a dept won't be allowed to hire unless the successful candidate is a woman or approved minority? Have I been living in a parallel universe? I mean, I just *know* of quite a few cases, so to have my report denounced as a "view" discredited by statistics, or merely a matter of "isolated cases," with no-one reporting similar experiences, is starting to freak me out. It's not as though you're outing yourself as a foe of affirmative action by admitting that this happens.

    And could somebody please give sources for these "stats" that people are referring to as showing that women are no better represented in the profession than they were in the 70s? (Margaret Atherton called this a "well-publicised fact".)

    Reply
  11. Adam

    Brian Weatherson said:

    "As a rule women and, especially, non-whites don't enrol in analytic philosophy courses in the first place, and when they do they don't stay to take upper level courses. (Or at least such is my impression, based on a reasonably wide range of observations. If there is data casting doubt on this, or better still showing that it is wrong, I'd very much like to know about it.)"

    I'd like to know about it too. But I'm especially curious about whether it is, as Weatherson says, *analytic* philosophy courses in particular that show low non-white, non-male enrollment. Do courses in Continental philosophy or pragmatism get better NW/NM enrollment? What about problems-based classes that don't take an obviously analytic approach? I realize there isn't a clear line of demarcation here, and that any evidence is likely to be anecdotal, but I'm still curious.

    Reply
  12. Margaret Atherton

    There is currently a report to the Committee on the Status of Women about the number of women in the philosophy profession available on the APA Website. It estimates that while women have been for some time recipients of about 27% of PhDs, they have in 2006 climbed to about 21% of the professionally employed. Thus women in philosophy are both underrepresented and underutilized.

    Reply
  13. white male grad student

    Hmm…

    I feel like some of this thread has already digressed down the Affirmative Action yay or nay debate, rather than to the particular issues in philosophy.

    As someone who is pro affirmative-action, let me just quickly offer why someone like me does not buy into the "republican-vegetarian-skateboarder-etc." argument.

    Women and minorites (blacks in particular) were discriminated against as a matter of law for centuries in this country, as a matter of unanimous convention for decades after that. And while much of this behavior has been criminalized over the past 20 years(or is it 30 now?) there is no question that the effects of these policies are still felt and that many in power continue to have and act upon attitudes about the inferiority of women and blacks. Given this state of affairs, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that there should be active measures in place to help women and minorities reach a more equitable level in the workplace.

    Now that I've made my brief defense of affirmative action. I want to add a thought about why it is worthwhile to encourage the hiring of women in philosophy (I'll leave the argument for minorities to someone else).

    It strikes me that in a workplace as profoundly overbalanced by men as ours, that there is too much opportunity for "group-think" about treatment of women. This operates all through our profession it seems to me. At an innocuous level, philosophers like to "give each other a hard time", something that is more familiar for men I think (given schoolyard behaviors of young boys).

    At a less harmless level, I think having a 80%-90% men to women ratio (is this accurate? just a spitball from personal experience) makes it harder for female graduate students. The intimacy of the advisor-advisee relationship, and the often small amount of oversight given to the grad student/ professor relationship (vs. the highly protected undergraduate) makes it more likely that female graduate students might be victims of varying degrees of sexual harassment. (while I'm not making any accusations, I can say that one of my friends because she felt uncomfortable about here treatment by some professors)

    Having a more balanced workplace would work against that environment, as I believe it has helped to in many corporate environments.

    Reply
  14. anon grad student

    This is so Anonymous at 4:03PM doesn't freak out. In the last four years I've been on the student observer side of four different hires. (split across three institutions) In three out of the four cases there was strong pressure from the dean to hire a woman. In each instance there were men interviewed at the APA, and there were men invited for on campus interviews. I was troubled by the fact that these men's expectations were raised, and that their time was wasted, when everyone in the department knew we were looking to hire a woman. I'm not troubled by the fact that departments feel the need to hire minorities, though I am troubled that they often need to be pressured to do so. What troubles me most is the fact that the process seems so dishonest.

    Reply
  15. white female professor

    In general, I am not a fan of affirmative action; I think that it ultimately hurts the person who is hired and the group that he/she is from. However, I have come to believe that in educational settings, having a diverse faculty is simply a matter of good educational practice.

    Most people who are against affirmative action do think that changes need to be made in the way that we educate people; i.e., that there is educational unfairness that shows up later as hiring unfairness. So, what if having an undiverse faculty contributes to educational unfairness? Shouldn't we fix it?

    Many of "us" don't understand why, e.g., someone who is black can't learn from someone who is white. Indeed, for some people it doesn't seem to matter. But, "rightly" or "wrongly," it does seem to matter to many. I have seen this first hand. I was in a department where a black professor drew far more black students into her philosophy class than any of the white faculty did. When a white faculty member had to take over her class, many of the black students dropped the class.

    On a personal level, I have had a number of women tell me that they appreciate being taught by a woman and that I assign readings by other philosophers who are women. They say that it makes them feel as though they can do philosophy, too. Some of "us" can ridicule this, and say that they "ought" to feel more self-confident. Perhaps they should. But the fact is, they don't. It helps to have role models out there.

    Again, on a personal level — while my own advisors were male, and wonderful people, there definitely were times when having a female advisor would have been much less awkward. I wouldn't have gotten strange looks from anyone's wife, wondering about this female grad student who was spending so much time with her husband. I would have been able to spend a night at my advisor's house without anyone thinking that something funny was going on. A woman could have given me advice about what it was like to be a woman in philosophy. Etc., etc.

    If we can teach more minority students philosophy — if we can rectify educational deficiences in more students — by having a more diverse faculty, shouldn't we do it?

    (it=option d, by the way)

    Reply
  16. Erica Roedder

    A really excellent source of information regarding the number of women in philosophy can be found at:

    http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html

    Reply
  17. anon

    I actually think that the question of which aspects count as legitimate aspects of diversity is a very interesting one. The main argument pro diversifying the faculty seems to be that minority students would feel encouraged to pursue their studies if they had faculty from a similar background (both because they would have some role models that are similar to them in important respects, and because they would generally feel more comfortable in such an environment). Let’s suppose that’s true. But if so, I suspect that religious students really do feel similarly uncomfortable in a mostly atheist community, and so do students from a poor background in an environment of people from a rich background. Another criterion of diversity that interests me is that of being gay. No department seems have an affirmative action hiring policy in favour of openly gay faculty (is there some legal reason for this in the US?). But I am guessing that this is just as important for a gay student’s feeling comfortable as gender and race are. Moreover (just to address white male grad student’s comment above) gay people were – and probably still are – legally discriminated against.

    Reply
  18. anon34523

    "There is currently a report to the Committee on the Status of Women about the number of women in the philosophy profession available on the APA Website. It estimates that while women have been for some time recipients of about 27% of PhDs, they have in 2006 climbed to about 21% of the professionally employed. Thus women in philosophy are both underrepresented and underutilized."

    Clearly, it does follow that women are underrepresented in the profession, but it still may be that current hiring practices are fair or even biased in favor of women. The underrepresentation may simply be a byproduct of past unfair hiring practices and the slower turnover rate in academia. More data is needed than what we have seen here to draw any conclusions.

    Reply
  19. Anon.

    As a recent (successful) first-time job candidate, I felt significant pressure regarding the minority/non-minority status issue because of the possibility of (b) – (e). This pressure came primarily from hearing of cases similar to those reported by Anonymous. Even if these cases have little substance to them, the fact that they are a possibility promotes two things:

    1) They promote the idea that getting a job is less about the ability of a candidate and a candidate's "fit" where "fit" is just departmental needs regarding AOS/AOC which can be controlled by the candidate and more the satisfaction of some further requirement outside of the candidate's control, namely their minority status.

    2) That successful job candidates who have minority status are successful because of ability and things they can control, but only in addition to their minority status.

    I've often heard both of these themes bitterly discussed by other graduate students; both those having minority status and not having it. Those without minority status are frustrated at a system which might select candidates based on aspects outside of a candidate's control. And those with minority status are frustrated at a system which has the potential to devalue their success because it devalues their abilities and fit. In other words, if the hiring system runs on principles (b) -(e), or is even rumored to, it harms all job candidates, even those it is meant to help. Thus, I find that (b) – (e) is a harmful correction to the lack of diversification in philosophy departments. Is this correction worth the harm? I suppose that depends on how important you take the correction to be. I, for one, don't think that the correction is worth the harm.

    Reply
  20. Brian Leiter

    I've permitted more anonymous comments than usual, because they have seemed to me largely substantive, adding something to the discussion. However, from here on, I am going to ask anyone who wants to post anonymously to e-mail me the comment first, so that I, at least, can confirm that the commentator speaks from personal knowledge. Those posting under their own names can post directly to this thread. Thanks.

    Reply
  21. Jamie Dreier

    First, I am in no way against affirmative action (my CV includes an op-ed defense of it). And I think 'white male graduate student' at 6:28 is right that having a *very* small number of women professors does make things more difficult for women graduate students. Still, I don't think that means we desperately need 50-50 philosophy departments; what we need is *enough* women to reach some kind of critical mass. And I don't know exactly what that is, but I do know it has seldom been reached in a major philosophy department.
    Second, my university (Brown) has very strict affirmative action rules for hiring. For complicated historical reasons, we have to pass every hire by our affirmative action monitoring committee. This is somewhat onerous, but we're on the whole happy to do it, and the committee has been very reasonable, accepting the reasons we've given when we've hired men, so I'm not complaining about this. It's important.
    Finally, though, I think that when crunch time comes and you have to choose whom to hire, there are going to be a lot of competing considerations. And even if hiring women is one of your goals, I suspect it is very, very often going to get swamped by other considerations. We need someone who can teach early twentieth century philosophy of language to graduate students, for example; or, of the four finalists one man really stood out in the on-campus interview; or a man's recommendation letters are just that much more impressive; and so on. Having more or less decided to prefer a woman other things being *nearly* equal, I believe my department has never actually concluded that other things were nearly equal. (We have, though, managed to hire several women, including this year.)

    Reply
  22. Margaret Atherton

    Both the term "under-represented" and the term "under-utilized" are technical terms. "Under-represented" means there are fewer members of a particular population in the job pool than in the population at large. "Under-utilized" means that there are fewer members of a given population hired than are in the job pool.

    Reply
  23. Mark van Roojen

    Much of the potentially onerous nature of affirmative action in the educational setting is due to the court cases that restrict the rationales that can be used. The Supreme Court has held that diversity can be a rationale for using aa in educational institutions, but I find this rationale less compelling than compensation for actual discrimination. As it was explained to me by the affirmative action officer a diversity rationale basically amounts to an OK to use membership in an under-represented group to break ties, and that is a pretty weak form of affirmative action. I believe that under certain court rulings an institution can only legally use affirmative action to compensate for the effects of past discrimination if it admits to having discriminated in the past. Since this opens the institution up to lawsuits, it is highly unlikely that any institution will admit that its current lack of representation is in part due to past discrimination, though in fact it likely is. So officially membership in an under-represented group can be used to break ties and that is about it.

    These legal concerns mean that the form of an open and unconstrained search has to be followed even when some people in on the process (Deans or whoever) have a decided preference for members of an unrepresentative group. As a result some candidates not in that group may be applying for jobs even when their chances are not what they would like. It would be much better if making up for discrimination were able to be openly admitted as one of the goals of a search. (No department is going to see it as the only goal, since departments want work that is much better than competent from their members and won't generally compromise on that.) But the current state of the law makes that option unlikely, so it is hard to see how to give notice to those who might not apply if they knew that diversity was to play a role.

    How high is the cost to male applicants? Well, I suspect that those who are worried are overestimating the effect on the average white male's prospects. People often use affirmative action as an excuse when explaining to people why they were not selected, but that may just reflect that that is easier on a person's ego than other sorts of explanations. Philosophers are as susceptible to confirmation bias as the next person, so that those who are convinced that less qualified women are getting jobs due to affirmative action are also likely to notice the cases that confirm their views than those that don't. This is why anecdotal evidence about how things work should be regarded with some skepticism if the statistical evidence does not back it up.

    Finally, the conscious thought by those hiring that hiring a member of a discriminated against group would be a good thing might actually counteract bias among faculty. Study after study shows that people will rate different CVs differently based on race and gender. I would doubt that philosophers are much different than the average person in that regard. So some preference for members of discriminated against groups might be needed just to counteract actual bias by those hiring, let alone to counteract the effect of bias on people's prospects when we factor in opportunities to get equally good education and training.

    Given the current state of the law there is no chance of a perfectly fair or costless system, but I think that on balance it would be better to consciously aim at increasing minority representation than to ignore the real effects of our shared history.

    Reply
  24. Jonathan Weinberg

    We might perhaps want to distinguish between the question of attracting students from different demographics on the one hand, and facilitating the success of the students that we do already attract on the other. Part of what is especially worrisome about the gender imbalance in philosophy is the evidence (some of which is already referenced above) that not only are there radically fewer women than men attempting philosophy grad school, but moreover the ones who do make the attempt drop out in larger numbers, have a longer time to degree, and have less success with landing a job once they do complete the degree. And I find the latter the much more worrisome problem — I don't know that we have any particular duties towards those who never choose to try to join our profession, but surely we have significant obligations to those who _do_ so choose. And a small amount of decidedly preferential hiring is perhaps a legitimate part of trying to satisfy those obligations.

    Now that I've written this, I see it maps on to the distinction that Prof. Atherton was just clarifying for us. In that vocabulary, then, I am suggesting that underrepresentation is perhaps not, in itself, so great a problem; but that underutilization really is.

    Does anyone know of any parallel data on ethnic, religious, political, socioeconomic, sexual orientation etc. minorities in the profession? (Where here "minorities" should be construed as relative to the profession, so, e.g., theists would perhaps count as relevantly a minority.)

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  25. Kenneth Brown

    "A really excellent source of information regarding the number of women in philosophy can be found at:

    http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html"

    That would be interesting data, if it were accurate. I checked the university which which I am most familiar (UCI) and found out to my surprise that it lists a measly 11% of women in its faculty (2 out of 18). However, the link to UCI on that website takes one not to a proper list of faculty affiliations, but to an automatically generated list of faculty profiles. Apparently Bonnie Kent (at UCI since 2001) and Margaret Gilbert (since 2006) haven't set up their faculty profiles, and so neither are counted. Proper data would show three women out of 13 non-emeritus faculty in the Philosophy Dept (23%), and one out of eight in the Logic and Philosophy of Science Dept (12.5%). Perhaps the rest of the list is accurate, though. I haven't checked.

    Reply
  26. Mark Engleson

    What difference does all this make to teaching? I can relate one recent anecdote, from a peer in a related field, who had an undergraduate degree in philosophy, who complained of not being taken seriously in philosophy classes, largely because she is a woman.

    Reply
  27. David Hunter

    Adam said:
    "I'd like to know about it too. But I'm especially curious about whether it is, as Weatherson says, *analytic* philosophy courses in particular that show low non-white, non-male enrollment. Do courses in Continental philosophy or pragmatism get better NW/NM enrollment? What about problems-based classes that don't take an obviously analytic approach? I realize there isn't a clear line of demarcation here, and that any evidence is likely to be anecdotal, but I'm still curious."

    In my limited experience (mainly teaching in New Zealand) it wasn't analytic vs non-analytic that marked the divide. There was a noticeable bias towards males in Metaphysics and a noticable bias towards females in Ethics. Continental Philosophy in contrast seemed to have about a fifty/fifty mix.

    Speaking as one of the rarest minorities (Know any other Cook Island Maori's in philosophy?) my feeling is often getting students to enroll in the course is the hardest part, particularly if the students come from a disadvantaged background. The very precise language that philosophers like to use when teaching often puts off these students because they don't have the resources to translate it. At the University of Auckland where I was fortunate enough to tutor for a time, we arranged extra tutorials for students with a polynesian background which for awhile I tutored. The main difficulties they had was not with grasping the concepts it was in translating what the Professor was saying into concepts that they would use, once this was achieved the students for the most part went well, and indeed more than usual carried on.

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  28. Robert Gressis

    Regarding Jonathan Weinberg's question, "Does anyone know of any parallel data on ethnic, religious, political, socioeconomic, sexual orientation etc. minorities in the profession? (Where here "minorities" should be construed as relative to the profession, so, e.g., theists would perhaps count as relevantly a minority.)", something that may come close is "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty", by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte. I found an abstract to it at http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss1/art2/, along with a response to the article and a response to the response. I don't know how reliable the article is, but the conclusion is that Republicans, practicing religious, and women are all underrepresented in academia; I think they have specific data for philosophy, but I can't access the article from my home computer. Again, I should stress I don't know how reliable the article is.

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  29. john doris

    When I was on the job market, in the late nineties, I had several experiences like those recounted by Anonymous; while being rejected for a job, I would recieve informal communication to the effect that "heavy pressure to hire a woman" figured strongly in the outcome. FWIW, I eventually concluded that in my case these performances were typically a function of social pressure to "soften the blow"; some people at hiring departments seemed to find it easier to attribute my failure to political pressures than to intrinsic limitations of my candidacy.

    In any event, it is important to remember that the figures quoted by Atherton are in fact quite compatible with reports such as Anonymous'; famously, evidence of a statistical nature may exist side by side with a body of "contravening" anecdotal evidence. And famously, the import of anecdotal evidence may become grossly exagerated in our thinking on social issues, with unfortunate results.

    –Doris

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  30. another anon (but known to Leiter)

    I was recently on the job market and was told by a faculty member at a prestigious institution that even though I was highly qualified I had no chance because they "had" to hire someone with certain demographic characteristics (which they did). Maybe this is mere anecdotal evidence, not statistically generalizable etc etc, but it sure felt crummy to be told that I need not apply because of my group membership. (Surely it's illegal as well?) But like other posters, I was also struck by how badly this serves the person they hired. I and many others know this person and how they were hired, and obviously it affects our attitudes.

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  31. Christopher Pynes

    To white male grad student:

    My point about the over representation of certain groups (democrats, atheists, and vegetarians) is a point about trying to find a principled reason to have preferential treatment for those people that are “like our students” which is the principle Weatherson seems to favor.

    You have misunderstood my point. Weatehrson and people like him aren’t arguing for preferential treatment in hiring of women and blacks because in the past they were discriminated against, but as a matter that the faculty should reflect the student body as much as possible. It is this reasoning that I cannot seem to figure out. You conflated in your “Republican-vegetarian-skateboarder” example the following: under represented, over represented, and irrelevant to representation. In essence, you missed my point entirely.

    My question is a serious one: What kind of mirroring of the student body should we take into account when hiring? If the “mirror principle” for lack of a better term is right, then we need more Republicans, Christians, and meat eaters in my department, and I suspect a whole lot more departments.

    I think there is a lot of self selecting going on in philosophy, and that might be *part* of the explanation. But don’t lose sight of the main claim: Faculty should mirror the student body? I just don’t see why this is? If we want more good philosophy students, then we need good lecturers and scholars that make philosophy come alive and show how it is relevant. At least that’s what I try to do for all my students independent of their demos.

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  32. ms

    If we’re trotting out anecdotal evidence of how particular people have been put at a disadvantage by ‘considerations external to their merit’ during the hiring process: I’ve been part of, and heard of, hiring processes during which a female candidate’s family situation/couple-hood (or lack thereof) was ferreted out and used against her; during which the fact that a female candidate was pregnant was cited as a reason to worry that she would not be productive; during which a senior faculty member actually wondered aloud whether most women were just not cut out to live in a way required to produce good philosophy regularly; etc. etc. etc. (By the way, most of my female friends and acquaintances in the profession have stories of being dismissed and belittled by male members of the profession at every stage in their education and professional life, as well as stories of being singled out and praised by a male member of the profession who, it later turned out, was not actually interested in their work, but something else entirely. Hard to believe that such attitudes haven’t regularly played a role in how the overwhelmingly male professoriate responds to and evaluates the women candidates in their applicant pools.)

    Horrible anecdotes can be brought out from the male side, I’m sure. Somehow, though, the fact that many departments now, or in the recent past, have had no, or perhaps only one, female faculty members, suggests to me that philosophy is a man’s world, with an overall advantage to the man. If it takes a meddling dean telling a department: “Look, you HAVE to get a woman in here somehow” to get a woman in, well, maybe that’s just life. I of course am not addressing the original question, of which option among (a)-(e) we should pursue; I’m just responding to the supposed outrageousness of all those episodes in the ‘90s in which men were pushed aside for women.

    And, in closing, as one who knows that she was hired into a department who was given the “get a woman NOW” directive, I’m not so bothered. I’ve made it this far; I do good work; my department and the profession are the better for my presence.

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  33. Julie Van Camp

    I appreciate Ken Brown's concern about the accuracy of data about women in the profession. The APA Committee on the Status of Women and other groups have worked long and hard to obtain better data, and I hope this issue is addressed in the coming years. I understand that the APA surveyed departments a few years ago to gather this data, but the response rate was so poor that the results were almost meaningless.

    The list Ken cites originated out of my frustration at the lack of data on women in philosophy departments. It relies entirely on the accuracy of the web sites of individual departments, and some are more up-to-date than others. I update the list two or three times a year, and I always include the date of the recent update. Currently it says: "Calculations based on the information on each Department's own faculty listing on the Web, as linked above, as of 1/20/07." No doubt the list becomes increasingly inaccurate with the passage of time, as departments update/revise their web sites.

    I currently link to this page at UCI, which lists only two women:
    http://www.faculty.uci.edu/Scripts/UCIFacultyProfiles/humanities/philosophy/
    Next time around, I will look for another list on the UCI site, as Ken suggests. But this discrepancy on the UCI site just further illustrates the difficulty getting accurate information about a philosophy department.

    I include at the end of my site data on the percentage of women receiving Ph.D.s in philosophy, another issue raised in this discussion. Currently, the data are compiled by the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, under Federal contract, so presumably it is very accurate. I include links back to their on-line reports so people can review the complete data for themselves.

    I encourage people interested in particular departments to study those web sites for themselves for the most up-to-date information. I encourage departments to keep their web sites up-to-date to assist everyone in this process.

    Most importantly, I hope our profession can find ways to gather data that are as accurate as possible and to disseminate it widely. Many of us have attempted homespun data gathering to fill this void. I, for one, hope this is a temporary project that will be replaced by reliable, accurate data gathered by the APA.

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  34. Matt Weiner

    Following up on ms's comment, now that two people have expressed concern about the effect of affirmative action on successful underrepresented candidates, I wonder whether the harm here is really done by the affirmative action or by discrimination that uses it as a pretext. That is, if people didn't go around whispering "So-and-so is only an affirmative action hire" would it be an issue. A test case might be male spousal hires; they haven't been hired strictly on their own merits, but do they face the same sort of attitudes as supposed affirmative action hires? If not (and my limited impression is that they don't), then maybe the problem is not with affirmative action but with the attitudes.

    [A fairly useless anecdote: In between college and grad school I got a job in a workplace where the vast majority of my co-workers were women. After a couple of months someone mentioned that the (male) boss had said that it would be nice to hire a man, so the workplace wouldn't be all women. This did not crush me; I was happy to have the job, and I thought I did good work. My guess is that most aa beneficiaries would rather have a job than be drummed out of the profession, especially considering the sort of obstacles they face; see ms's comment again.]

    Also, perhaps it shouldn't shock the conscience too much if not all applicants have an equal shot at a job. We all know of cases where a department that advertises an open job really wants someone with a particular AOS; it's certainly the case that some departments give APA interviews knowing that they're not likely to invite some of the candidates for campus visits, because other candidates seem stronger; and I imagine that the same holds true for flyouts. It's best that the hiring process be as open as possible, but the harm done to someone who gets an interview when the Dean doesn't want to hire them is fairly minor compared to the harm done if members of underutilized groups wind up with inferior jobs or no jobs because of discrimination.

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  35. Zena Hitz

    I would like to call attention to the assumption in the thread that only white males are harmed by this sort of pressure from deans etc. to hire minorities. Furthermore, the pressure affects all stages of the hiring process. One effect of the pressure from deans and AA offices mentioned above can be to increase the number of women interviewed, even if it does not affect who is actually hired in the end. I suspect that this is part of the cause of (anecdotally) women philosophy job candidates getting a disproportionate number of interviews. Some of these may be cases where gender takes a file over the borderline. But it is extremely likely, given the pressure, that women will get interviews at places that are not actually interested in their work. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to suspect that one is being interviewed because of one's gender and not the quality of one's work. Whatever standards are chosen by a department, one ought to strive by any means possible to avoid justifying that suspicion. This also means not writing reference letters, like ones I have read, where a candidate is praised relative to their gender or race as if it were their area of specialization. And, obviously, to be actually hired by a department where no one is interested in one's work is that much worse a prospect. If one wants to drive down the numbers of minorities in the profession, one way would be to denigrate their actual interest in philosophy by treating their race or gender as more important than their work. This means, I think, avoiding (d) and (e) above, and the offensive reference letters, not for the sake of the white males, but for the sake the minorities one is supposedly trying to support.

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  36. Iain Martel

    I tried posting yesterday, but apparently it got lost in the ether….

    Let us suppose that all of the anecdotal reports AND the APA statistics are correct. That is, let us suppose that there is, on average, a bias towards hiring women in each hiring decision. (I have no idea if this is true – unconscious bias may well cancel out all of the cajoling of Deans.) And let us accept that, overall, women are underutilized in philosophy. How could this be so?

    Recall the oft-cited Berkeley discrimination study. There, supposedly neutral policies in each department still produced an overall appearance of bias. The explanation was that women tended to apply to departments with lower admission rates. (The perils of mixed populations.) I propose that the same thing is going on in philosophy.

    In my experience, most female philosophers end up working in areas such as applied ethics, continental philosophy and history, rather than in supposedly "core" areas like analytic metaphysics. Yet the top departments are becoming increasingly full of analytic metaphysicians. Ethics courses are far more likely to be taught by part time instructors, or by metaphysicians "faking it", in the words of Brian Weatherson. If this is right, then a female ethicist could indeed be more likely to get an ethics job than a male ethicist, and so too for the metaphysicians. But the end result will still be a largely male faculty, because most of the jobs are in the male dominated sub-disciplines.

    Now, the Berkeley case is often cited as one where apparent bias was entirely misleading. But I don't think my hypothesis would in any way exonerate philosophy. Two serious problems remain. First, the very fact that departments dominated by white male metaphysicians are determining that what they do is more important, and so more deserving of new hires, than what their female colleagues do, might itself be a kind of structural discrimination. Second, the fact that few women end up in analytic M&E itself suggests discriminatory practices.

    I have known a number of female philosophy students who were very interested in analytic M&E, but unltimately did not pursue it. Often, they end up in a different area of philosophy. Why? Often, the atmosphere is hostile: the field seems especially prone to highly competitive pissing matches, and women are often given to believe that they aren't cut out for this kind of work. Also, even in a relatively balanced department, the female faculty tend to be working in the supposedly "softer" areas, and so female students may find such areas more comfortable, even if they are not their main interest. Finally, women seem to be more likely than men to regard the latest hot puzzle in metaphysics as the irrelevant diversion that it probably is.

    How to increase the number of women in philosophy without resorting to aggressive affirmative action policies? Make your next five hires in applied ethics, rather than in the latest hot metaphysical puzzle, and hire the best candidate each time. Chances are, she's a woman.

    Note: I write this as an unemployed white male specializing in the metaphysics of physics!

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  37. anon (black) philosopher

    Apparently, I must be the one living in a parallel universe. Where are all of the women and, even more mysteriously, the underrepresented minorities that philosophy departments purportedly have been pressured to hire?

    A glance at the websites of PGR-ranked departments certainly does not substantiate anecdotal suggestions about a widespread bias against hiring white men. There is no need to worry about "quotas" that would favor the "upper middle class black PHD that went to Harvard and Princeton and has no student loan debt." As a philosopher who fits that profile, I can assure affirmative action skeptics that departments aren't especially interested in achieving racial/ethnic diversity. In fact, the "dishonest" hiring process in philosophy departments standardly involves trying to encourage minorities to apply for jobs in order to satisfy equal opportunity administrators, so that departments can then hire whomever they really want. (This is not conjecture: I have been told it in effect by search committee heads in two, top-15 departments.)

    Affirmative action as announced by philosophy departments, at the hiring level, with regard to underrepresented minorities is often an exercise in bad faith that evinces no serious interest in hiring or even interviewing the minority candidates who were encouraged to apply. So affirmative action skeptics can save their inflated grievances, their concern for allegedly stigmatized minorities, and their diversionary or reductio tactics for another occasion.

    There is nothing all that complicated about why there aren’t more underrepresented minority students in philosophy. Apart from the core content, which tends to seem particularly alien and unmotivated for such students, the word has been out that the discipline and more than a few of its practitioners have race (and gender) issues. My own view of the sociology of the profession is such that I cannot in good conscience advise black students to pursue a career in philosophy.

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  38. Brian Leiter

    I share Professor Van Camp's hope that the APA might gather systematic data on the topic of women in the profession, since she has shown herself by her past conduct not to be an honest broker on this subject. See the discussion here:
    http://tar.weatherson.org/2004/07/28/female-friendly-philosophy-departments/#comments

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  39. female philosophy grad student

    Like many others, I think that, all other things being equal, it is better (for many reasons) to have gender- and ethnicity-balanced philosophy departments. However, I am far from convinced that gender should be used as anything other than a tie-breaker. This is the lesson I've drawn from experiences like the following:

    As a woman undergraduate philosophy student, while trying to decide whether to continue on to graduate school, I attended a small philosophy conference near my university (it was the first conference I had ever been to). Most of the speakers were male, but there were two women. During the first day of the conference, while listening to the talks given by men, I was fascinated, enjoyed them thoroughly, and imagined that one day I, too, could give talks at conferences, publish in the best journals, etc. It didn't occur to me to think that the fact that I was a woman made any difference to my chances of being a successful philosopher.

    The next day, however, when I saw the talks by the two women, I was shocked to see that they were obviously much inferior in quality to those given by men. It was clear that their papers had been accepted just to have at least a few women at the conference. For the first time I began to wonder whether something about being a women made one less able to succeed in philosophy. Why were these women so much worse than their male counterparts at the conference? Might I share some trait with them that would somehow prevent me from becoming a good philosopher? I quickly dismissed these ideas, but the fact remains that it was a very unsettling experience, and the first time that I seriously considered not going into philosophy. It was clear to me that I would rather not be a philosopher at all than be a woman philosopher clearly worse than my male counterparts; and, my experience at the conference made me wonder if that was the only kind of philosopher I could aspire to be.

    This is clearly a case, I think, in which it would have been better to use gender merely as a tie-breaker. True, the result would have been an all-male conference, but I think that would have been better than having the two clearly inferior women. Of course, the optimal situation would have been to have some women that were just as good as the men. But since there just weren't women like that in the applicant pool (I assume), the next-best thing, it seems to me, is not to have a few much-inferior women, but rather to have no women at all.

    So I am by no means convinced that gender should be used as anything more than a tie-breaker.

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  40. J. Bogart

    This thread would be more useful if it included discussion of the salient demographics (e.g., distributions of populations in the relevant institutions and with the relevant credentials, stratifications (e.g., economic), comparisons to comparable activities and professions, etc.) Almost none of that is here. The closest is Atherton, who provides useful first level information, but not sufficient to draw conclusions from. (We need to know area information and economic information at a minimum, and some set of comparables to consider. By way of example of the point: women leave a wide range of professional activities at higher rates than counterpart men do in part for reasons of choice about family arrangements. Do we have good reason to think this is not at work in philosophy as well?) One would also like some sensible discussion of the problems connected to the generally small size of departments and the very long tenure of faculty. The thread seems to have fallen in an unhappy mid point between a discussion of policy preferences and practices, getting neither particularly clear.

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  41. Mike DePaul

    Just a small point. Unless I missed something, all the comments so far posted regarding the possible educational benefits of having female and minority professors focused on the effects this might have on female and minority students. Unfortunately, I think that racist and sexist views (admittedly of diminished intensity) are still sufficiently wide spread in the US population that there is something to be learned by many white males from the experience of studying under a female/black/hispanic/… superior. And I think it is also more than merely possible that people who attain a college degree without ever being taught by a woman or member of a minority "learn" some things from this experience that most of us, I think, would rather they did not "learn."

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  42. Ralph Wedgwood

    In case anyone reading this long thread is interested in hiring practices outside the USA, perhaps it might be helpful for me to say something about how these things work in the UK.

    In the UK, the Race Discrimination Act and the Sex Discrimination Act have long been interpreted by the courts as making affirmative action illegal: that is, under British law, a candidate's sex and race may not be considered in any way as relevant factors in deciding whether or not to hire that candidate.

    More recent legislation has placed a positive duty on universities, in carrying out all their functions, to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between different racial groups. What this means in effect is that we are supposed to encourage applications from a diverse pool of applicants; we are also supposed to do a careful (but anonymous) monitoring, by reference to sex and racial group, of the whole hiring process; and every hiring decision is supposed to be justified by explicitly formulated selection criteria, which have been publicly advertised in advance of the decision.

    Unfortunately, several academic disciplines in the UK (including philosophy) have remained stubbornly dominated by white men. Still, it's not obvious to me that philosophy is much more male-dominated in the UK than in the USA. So, in view of how little has been gained by affirmative action in the US (at least in the last 15 years or so), perhaps the UK policy is preferable at least for avoiding all the ill-feeling that US-style affirmative action seems capable of generating.

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  43. Alex Guerrero

    Let us assume that there is no causal or other intrinsic relationship between the following two properties: (1) being of a certain gender, race, or ethnicity, and (2) having the intellectual potential to be a professional philosopher.

    Given that assumption, we might well want an explanation for the following: the people working as professional philosophers are disproportionately male, white, and non-Hispanic. (This disproportionality claim is true even if we restrict our attention to those working as professional philosophers who went to college in the 1980s and after, and even if we take the relevant class of people to be the class of people who received undergraduate degrees, rather than all people in the US. Since the 1980s, women have made up roughly half the people graduating from undergraduate institutions, with women now overrepresented; the percentage of graduates from undergraduate institutions who are African-American has been around 10%; and the percentage of graduates from undergraduate institutions who are Hispanic-Americans was around 5% and is now around 10%.)

    We might want this explanation because we want to be sure that the best minds possible are working as professional philosophers. Personally, I doubt we should be that concerned with this, since it’s not clear that there are good reasons to want the best minds working on philosophy, though on some level I suppose we all would like to believe that there are.

    We might also want this explanation because, as Brian Weatherson suggested, we have some antecedent desire for the professoriate to reflect the student body in some relevant regard. Having the explanation might then allow us to correct for it to achieve this end. I think there is some value in this, but it’s not clear that this is the fundamental issue.

    I think that the real reason we should want this explanation is because we think that such facts cannot simply be brute facts, and because we worry that the explanation will bring to light current sexism or racism, or current effects of historical sexism or racism, and that we might play a causal role in either (a) eliminating the current sexism or racism or (b) eliminating the current effects of historical sexism or racism. After all, what, if not something of this problematic sort, could be the explanation for the fact that the people working as professional philosophers are disproportionately male, white, and non-Hispanic? Given that we might play a role, it seems natural to think that there is a moral requirement to play such a role, though this requires argument.

    The concern is that there is no completely unproblematic explanation for this kind of fact.

    This isn’t true in the case of the overrepresentation of vegetarians in the profession. There is a completely unproblematic explanation of this fact: there is a causal relationship between the following two properties (1) being able to see the truth of ethical vegetarianism, and (2) having the intellectual potential to be a professional philosopher.

    Some might say similar things with respect to ‘being non-religious’ and ‘being non-Republican’, but perhaps that’s not right, and perhaps we should also be worried about the lack of diversity along those lines. One reason to think that the absence of these kinds of diversity is less troubling is because we can at least see a non-racist, non-sexist explanation for this absence. (Where ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ explanations need not require conscious, intentional racism or sexism on the part of anyone making the relevant decisions today.)

    Among the problematic explanations, some might be more or less problematic in that they might be more or less the fault of the philosophical community, somehow construed. They also might be more or less problematic in that they stem from more or less troubling forms of prejudice and malice.

    These explanations might take a number of different forms.

    (1) Is there something about philosophy, as a subject matter, that turns away or does not appeal to female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals? If so, is this something we could or would want to change?

    Possible explanations along these lines: (a) many sub-fields in philosophy are detached from ‘real world significance’, and people from historically subjugated and oppressed groups don’t want to spend their life engaged in something detached from ‘real world significance’; (b) historically, what counts and is valued as ‘philosophy’ has been determined by male, white, non-Hispanic individuals, and this leads people to self-select towards and away from philosophy.

    I think that (a) is a possible explanation, of a sort, and this might be the sort of explanation which, at the end of the day, seems relatively unproblematic. I am wary of explanations like (b), in part because they can, incautiously taken, be seen to rely on some sort of essentialist claims about what people of different genders, races, and ethnicities will value and be interested in. Obviously, there are social explanations for these interests and values that are non-essentialist. We might suspect these sorts of concerns are a large part of the explanation if we were to learn that there simply are disproportionately fewer undergraduate philosophy majors, graduate student applicants, and eventual graduate students who are female, non-white, or Hispanic. I don’t have data on this.

    (2) Is there something about philosophy, as a profession, that turns away female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals?

    Possible explanations along these lines: (a) female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals have financial or familial concerns not shared by male, white, non-Hispanic individuals, and which are less well addressed by a career as a professional philosopher than as some other available option; (b) conscious or unconscious sexist and racist prejudices in undergraduate evaluation, graduate admissions and evaluation, and hiring evaluation and decisionmaking; (c) success in philosophy requires a certain kind of networking, which is more difficult for female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals than for male, white, non-Hispanic individuals, whether because of financial or other logistical constraints, or because of more subtle social networking biases, etc.; (d) the mentoring/comfort point: people tend to gravitate to careers in which they can identify and connect with the people currently in those careers, and the dearth of female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals in professional philosophy makes this career seem less promising, less desirable, or less possible for students from those groups.

    Personally, I think that of these four, (a) and (d) are most likely to be part of the explanation here. It is quite possible that (b) is an issue as well, but I think that it is also true that there are a number of mechanisms in place, including affirmative action style mechanisms, to help counteract whatever ills (b) might bring about. Because there are so few non-white or Hispanic philosophers, it is hard to see (c) as being part of the main explanation. And to the extent that men and women like to interact with mixed company, in a moderately non gender-skewed environment, networking of a certain sort might actually be easier than women than for men. (Lots of important caveats here, since there are real worries about sexism, sexual harassment, and other subtle ways in which the social networking might not help women as much as men, even if it is more available to them in some sense.)

    I think that (d) has to be at the heart of the explanation. I think a main reason to support something like the original suggestion (d)—to weight demographic attributes so that an academically superior candidate might be turned down in favor of one with certain demographic attributes—is simply to help stop the self-perpetuating problem described in my (d) above. Once the number of women and minorities working as professional philosophers is roughly equal to their proportion to the whole, this problem will be rectified, and the problems identified in (1)(b) and (2)(b) may well be improved. At that point, we have reason to think that policy (d) might be abandoned.

    Why should we care about or be invested in this? Because the main reason that (d) is a problem is because of past sexism and racism, and we should be morally committed to eliminating the effects of past sexism and racism when it is relatively painless to do so.

    And it does seem relatively painless. It is hardly as if hundreds and hundreds of female, non-white, and Hispanic candidates are flooding the job market, making it impossible for any particular white, non-Hispanic male to get a job in a given year. It is a gradual process, and its effects are largely gradual as well. Given how many white, non-Hispanic men get jobs (and very top jobs) every year, I just can’t believe that the main explanation or even a significant part of the explanation why any particular white, non-Hispanic man fails to get a job is because we have (or might have) a policy like (d).

    And the argument that a policy like (d) will somehow significantly devalue the work of all members of the ‘benefited’ classes seems to require confusing (d) with a policy like (e). This is another reason to be completely clear about what exactly the policy is. Honestly, anyone who knows women or minority professional philosophers probably knows that they have already had more than enough unmerited ‘devaluing’ of their work because of racist and sexist attitudes and assumptions. I for one would happily pay this small price to move closer to a world in which these attitudes and assumptions could not be supported by pointing to the lack of professional philosophers from traditionally underrepresented groups.

    I do think that the transparency point bears stressing. Everyone should know, up front, that we have adopted a policy like (d), and everyone should know why. There is no need to hide or obscure that fact. Job candidates can decide that they’d rather turn down a fly-out from a place that has implemented policy (d) if they want to. Importantly, there is no need to engage in any kind of charades just because one adopts (d). Charades are only required by a very different kind of system, one that requires crude quotas in interviewing, or something of the sort.

    One final thing in this overlong post. Consider the following kind of explanation:

    (3) Is there something about philosophy, as a culture, that turns away female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals?

    I’m not sure that philosophy has a culture, exactly, but I do know that many people in the relevant camps have suggested to me that something like this is at least part of the issue. It’s hard to characterize what about the philosophy culture is the problem, but it would be something about the combative, adversarial, intellectually aggressive, non-concessive, non-emotional, impersonal, unrelenting nature of the discipline, at least in some of its elements.

    Of course, these aspects are not unappealing to all female, non-white, and Hispanic individuals; nor are they appealing to all (or even most) non-Hispanic white males. Anecdotally, it seems that some members of those groups who end up in philosophy thrive on the opportunity to engage in argument in this manner, perhaps precisely because the more general socialization processes at work tend to discourage members of those groups from being aggressive, assertive, and argumentative in the way that philosophy at the ‘highest’ levels can seem to require. It is liberating, in a way, to be in an environment in which that is not only encouraged but required.

    But the worry is that white men have been socialized to be assertive, domineering, combative, non-emotional, and aggressive in a way that women and non-white and non-Hispanic men have not been, and that students starting out in the field (and even many years along in the field) are the products of these kinds of socialization processes.

    I think the fact that some departments are known for being good places for female graduate students (as attested to by the women who are there and who choose to go there) suggests that there is something to this tone idea. I do not think that it is a coincidence that whether a department has a good ‘tone’ in this regard appears to be correlated with the gender balance at the faculty level—-in terms of junior, senior, and ‘active’ faculty members.

    I also think that even if one is unconvinced that one has an obligation to support and employ practices that will counteract the effects of past sexism and racism, one might support a policy like (d) simply because a more balanced professoriate would be a better professoriate. Better not just from an intellectual perspective, but from something like a 'human' perspective. One of the best things about philosophy is that it gets us to critically examine our beliefs about the world, and our perspective on it. This critical examination and reflection would seem to be more genuine and effective (truth-unearthing) if it involves a full span of people, with a full range of approaches and styles, rather than just those people and tones that are selected for by the socialization processes that stem from and continue to perpetuate white male dominance.

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  44. Brian Leiter

    This is peripheral to the actual topic of discussion, but I can't let pass Alex's observation about "the overrepresentation of vegetarians in the profession. There is a completely unproblematic explanation of this fact: there is a causal relationship between the following two properties (1) being able to see the truth of ethical vegetarianism, and (2) having the intellectual potential to be a professional philosopher." Surely an equally good explanation is that philosophers, more than most people, can convince themselves of almost anything, no matter how bizarre!

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  45. John Turri

    This is also peripheral to the actual discussion topic, but I can't let pass Brian L.'s alternative explanation for the disproportionate number of vegetarians in professional philosophical circles. I think if Brian's explanation were correct (or as good as Alex's), then we should expect there to be a disproportionate number of philosopher-cannibals!

    And, Alex, thank you for that post–I found it thoroughly enlightening.

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  46. Stephen Young

    I guess it's harder to see the truth of ethical vegetarianism down in Texas …

    I can't resist pointing out that if you look at NYU's faculty website, since they are kind enough to post pictures, it is easy to scan down the page and see that at NYU, so far, "diversity" equals two white women.

    http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/page/people

    I don't mention this to take a cheap shot at NYU, as I'm sure that they are as interested as the next world-class philosophy program in having a more diverse department, and I suspect that the faculty rosters at other top-ranked PGR departments are similar. If they are, are lower-ranked or unranked departments "better" (in terms of diversity), or are programs at all levels in the rankings doing poorly with respect to diversity?

    Assuming that top-ranked schools have an easier time hiring the best available talent, if they were at least interested enough in diversity to take demographic considerations as tie-breakers, then top-ranked schools should have the most minorities and women on their faculties. If many top-ranked schools are about the same as NYU with respect to diversity, then it looks like philosophy, at the elite level, anyway, (A) is not interested enough in diversity to take demographic considerations as tie-breakers, (B) is not attracting and producing many highly talented minority candidates, (C) has a hard time seeing minority candidates as highly talented, and/or (D) tends to rank faculty quality as better at schools at which there are few minority faculty members.

    Of course, I'd like to say that the answer is A, B, or "none of the above," but I believe I've read some hints in the posts above that C and/or D could be lurking nearby.

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  47. Rachel McKinney

    Just a thank-you to Alex for his excellent comment, and a note on the "tone" of graduate programs and faculty balance.

    As a female prospective graduate student, I have to say that the demographic climate of the departments I visited played more of a role in the decision-making process than I would have thought. I made visits to two departments that "look" very different — one in the Pacific Northwest and one in upstate New York — and though finances and rankings ended up carrying the most weight, I was amazed at how refreshing it was to spend just an afternoon in a philosophy classroom with other enthusiastic, confident and competent women.

    If encouraging young women to be interested in philosophy at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels is a serious goal of professional philosophers (and I, for one, think it ought to be), then professional philosophers have to work to create and sustain supportive and dynamic environments for them. And part of doing that includes thinking seriously about how departments (and hiring committees themselves!) look now, and how we would like them to look in the future.

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  48. Brian Leiter

    As a native New Yorker, let me note that the non-truth of ethical vegetarianism has been clear to me for a rather long time. But I don't think there are any ethical truths, so this is not a knock against vegetarianism (even if the arguments for it are particularly bad)!

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  49. Zena Hitz

    I find Alex Guerrero's post helpful, but I'm unconvinced that a policy like (d) is acceptable. Part of the difficulty is that talk about more or less "qualified" candidates does not fit with my experience on search committees. My experience–and it is not extensive, but it does include three institutions–is that our decisions about whom to bring to campus and whom to hire are only rarely about who is more qualified. At that stage of the process (and often earlier, when narrowing down a list of APA candidates), we are generally looking at people who all have good degrees from good places. What drives decisions more than anything else is how well we connect with their work–how excited we are about it and how easily we can talk to the candidate about it. (I should add that these are research institutions–teaching institutions may well operate differently.) Anyway, this practice is a good thing, because that is how you build strong department communities where people are enthusiastic about each other's work, respect one another and are helpful to one another. Concern with race and gender (beyond tie-breaking) shortcut this process and interfere with this goal. It's wonderful to be in a department where people are enthusiastic about your work. It isn't to be in a department where people are enthusiastic about your gender or race and lukewarm about what you are working on. And that is the likely outcome of applying (d), even under the optimistic assumption that all members of the department enthusiastically endorse (d).

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  50. ken

    Let me note that some top-ranked departments are more diverse than others, at least gender-wise. At Stanford, we currently have seven women on our faculty: Helen Longino, Rega Wood, Debra Satz, Graciela Depierris, Krista Lawlor, Tamar Shapiro, and Agniezska Jaworksa. That's roughly a third of our department. That does not seem to give us any particular advantage in recruiting female graduate students into our program pver the competition. Nor does it seem to have significantly affected the proportion of women in our undergraduate major. Though I haven't done a statistical sampling, I doubt we differ much from national norms on either of those scores.

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