MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 5–SEE UPDATE, BELOW
The NY Times item is here. (Bizarrely, the Times piece includes a photo of the hack philosopher Ayn Rand, who would indeed be unemployable in any serious philosophy department!) The comments on the Times piece are a curious mix, though do see the comments of Benjamin Hellie (#22). Others adduce another hack, Judith Butler, as evidence that the "analytic" bogeyman drives away "talented" [sic] female philosophers. Perhaps they should read what a competent female philosopher and scholar has to say about Butler.
The original item that inspired the Times piece is here, which quotes some female philosophers in the U.K. suggesting that the aggressive, argumentative style of philosophy drives women out. A female philosopher, who found this latter explanation (quite correctly) demeaning to women, calls my attention to a discussion of the issue of women in economics and in philosophy by a sociologist here.
UPDATE: Helen Beebee (Birmingham), one of the philosophers quoted, kindly wrote to clarify her remarks:
There is nothing intrinsically aggressive about philosophy. It is sometimes (particularly in seminar situations) pursued in an aggressive style. So it was not 'the aggressive … style of philosophy' that I was suggesting drives women out, but the aggressive manner in which philosophical discussion is often carried out. Indeed, part of the point was to make that very distinction: to be good at philosophy, you have to be prepared to tolerate (and indeed welcome) robust criticism; that's not at all the same as being prepared to tolerate people presenting said robust criticism in an unnecessarily aggressive way. This latter may — *may* — be something that women tend to have a lower tolerance for than men do. I don't see that there's anything demeaning to women in that suggestion; it seems to me that an aversion to unnecessary levels of aggression is an entirely healthy and desirable character trait. (And of course neither I nor the other women quoted in the original article meant to suggest that other attempts to explain the absence of women in professional philosophy are all false; doubtless there are many factors at work and so many non-competing but individually incomplete explanations.)
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