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

“Gender and Philosophical Intuition”

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 27:  COMMENTS NOW OPEN

Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers) have posted this remarkable paper on SSRN:

In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term ‘intuition,’ and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.

If I may summarize a bit too crudely from the paper's very careful discussion of these matters:  if female undergraduates tend to have intuitions about standard philosophical puzzles that differ from the "official" intuitions sanctioned in the literature, then it is perhaps not surprising that the females pursue philosophy (at least intuition-driven philosophy) at lower rates than their male counterparts.

Perhaps after folks have had a chance to actually digest the research and the analysis, we'll open a thread to discuss the paper.

UPDATE:   I hope those interested have had a chance to read and think about the Buckwalter & Stich paper–Wesley and Steve will try to respond to comments and questions over the enxt few days.  Comments are open, and signed comments are far more likely to appear.  (For some reason, the link to the paper on SSRN no longer works, not sure why, and I can't seem to find the right one.  But I know close to 1,000 folks downloaded the paper while it was there.)

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36 responses to ““Gender and Philosophical Intuition””

  1. L.A. Paul

    It might be worth separating out history of philosophy from non-history or contemporary philosophy. I suspect intuitions play a different role when one is doing the history of philosophy, and I would bet that if one looked only at contemporary philosophy (a) the gender contrasts would be even starker, and (b) the explanation about the selection effect would be affected.

    Reply
  2. ben wolfson

    For what it's worth, I was able to download the paper from SSRN just now.

    BL COMMENT: Thanks, does now seem to be working, not sure what happened earlier.

    Reply
  3. Matt Drabek

    One thing that made me doubt the data collected in the experiment is the potential asymmetry between the classroom environment and the environment created by the study. Presumably when one encounters philosophical thought experiments in the classroom, the person is affected by being surrounded by other students and the instructor. The student also has some degree of rapport with the instructor and other students (a certain background familiarity with them). I presume that the Buckwalter-Stich study removes much of this prior background (do correct me if I'm wrong about this).

    To me, this translates into the following worry. If Buckwalter-Stich hope to apply their data and results to the actual classroom environment, then they need to make sure the intuitions drawn from the respective domains are similar. If not, then it casts doubt on the work done in sections 3 and 4 of the paper. Perhaps students draw different *sorts* of intuitions when presented with thought experiments in isolation than in the classroom (where it seems quite likely that intuitions would tend to conform to the loudest of one's fellow classmates, or to the instructor).

    Reply
  4. Mats Volberg

    You can watch prof. Stich present an earlier version of the paper here: http://www.cohnitz.net/Frege/Stich2010/presio3/index.html

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Birch

    Has there been any empirical research into whether philosophers actually tend to regard intuitions as evidence? Buckwalter and Stich assert that this is a majority view, but is it? I suspect there are a lot of intuition-sceptics out there.

    Reply
  6. Margaret Atherton

    There has already been interesting discussion of this paper on Feminist Philosophers as well as some other blogs. One frequently expressed view is that the n's are too low in the work reported by Buckwalter and Stich to support much in the way of interesting conclusions. I'd be happy to hear reactions to this.

    Reply
  7. Matthew Smith

    Some inchoate thoughts on the relevance of the study to the question at hand (the question being: What explains the gender imbalance in analytic philosophy?):

    1. So what if there are different intuitions? The real issue is: why should *that* fact shed *any* explanatory light on the gender imbalance in analytic philosophy? The tests done by Buckwalter and Stich give us no new information about how to answer that question. All we get is conjecture based on information most of the rest of us already have or could get without looking at the data produced by these experiments. B&S are open about this, of course.

    2. If B&S's study is more or less immediately germane to the question at hand, we must assume that having intuitions that tend to differ from a discipline's norm makes a difference in a student's experience of analytic philosophy (B&S assert that it probably does). In particular, we must assume that the difference is negative, in the sense that having "non-standard" intuitions is sufficient to generate or contribute to a negative response to the discipline. But, the following question immediately arises: "What explains *that* negative response? They can't say, "Having different intuitions just *does* generate a negative response." And they don't say that. But, what they also *don't* say is that there is nothing inherent in the methods of analytic philosophy that would make having intuitions different from the disciplinary norm something that is inherently unpleasant.

    3. It must be, as B&S in fact claim (although they primarily emphasize intuition's role as evidence), the way analytic philosophy is *taught*. But, they do not consider the following: suppose teachers and the classroom environment signaled that *any* intuitions *could* be reasonable and that students just should be prepared to make the case for their intuitions, whatever they are. In this case, would those who have intuitions that differ from the disciplinary norm have the negative experience that contributes to their desire not to pursue the discipline? Probably less so.

    4. But, now here's the kicker (and I suspect where Stich, at least, would disagree): Isn't analytic philosophy committed to subjecting all positions to rigorous scrutiny? Isn't working hard to make the case for what seems right to us – including our intuitions – exactly what we are supposed to do in this discipline? So, if people are teaching philosophy well, then intuitions that differ from the disciplinary norm should *not* play a major role in making people feel less apt to study philosophy. In fact, if philosophy is being taught right, the prevalence of intuitions that differ from the famous people should inspire students to challenge the big names, not bow down before them. Analytic philosophy is at its best when analytic philosophers are not engaged in hero worship.

    So, it turns out that the problem is not differing intuitions at all. Bad instruction turns out to play the crucial role, at least with respect to the significance of intuitions to the gender imbalance. That there supposedly are these differences in intuitions really shouldn't matter.

    5. One might respond as follows: Perhaps the problem is that too many men are *already* in the discipline and so women are constantly confronted by instructors with different intuitions. How alienating!

    First, see #4 above.

    Second, and more importantly, the issue now is not differing intuitions but the history of sexism in the discipline. Historical and presently institutionalized sexism is the problem. And that is something altogether tremendously bigger and different than what B&S have purportedly uncovered.

    So, it turns out that the real issue has nothing to do with differences in intuitions. The real issue is that old bogeyman – and yes it's a man – rampant historical and institutional sexism.

    6. How do we deal with this sexism? Well, that's a big and important question, but I am pretty sure that running tests to try to discover "differences" in how women think from men is not where to start. Better instruction on how to be an instructor and perhaps regular diversity trainings for graduate students and faculty might be a place to start. Endowing graduate fellowships for women might help for a while, although I imagine that some might see that as counterproductive.

    I don't want to deny the gee-whiz interest that this study merits. And, I do not want to deny that it may have identified a minor *proximate* cause of the relative absence of women in analytic philosophy. But, it also, ultimately, seems to miss the point. The problem is institutionalized sexism, not B&S's claim that there are differences in intuitions between women and men (ugh: the gender essentialism lurking in this study merits serious philosophical interrogation itself). Oh well, if it takes the glancing attention of experimental philosophy to galvanize the powers that be in analytic philosophy to make some sort institutionalized effort to confront sexism (see suggestions above), X-phi has accomplished more than it ever set out to accomplish.

    Reply
  8. marc moffett

    Unfortunately, I don't have time to read through the whole paper. Nevertheless, two points struck me concerning the S&F results. First, the vignettes are stated in such a way as to allow for differences in background filling. Specifically, in each case it might be possible to read the cases as involving "luck" or not depending on how one understands the theif's need to replace the item with a cheap version. If one understands the cases so that it is just as likely that thief would have left w/out leaving a stand in, then the cases are quite similar to standard Gettier cases. On the other hand, if one understands the cases so that it is no accident that a stand in is left behind, then one might be more inclined to treat them as satisify some form of anti-luck constraint. In short, the cases are somewhat more open to interpretation than one would hope.

    Of course, this does not "explain away" the differences in response (being quarrelsome I will refrain from calling them intuitions!). However, but it does point to the possibility that the differences arise, not from differences in intuitions per se, but differences in how males and females tend to interpret the vignettes–w/the females perhaps being more inclined to read them as satisfying the anti-luck condition. And this is important b/c gender differences in the latter case are quite different from differences in intuitions regarding the same case, understood the same way.

    The second point, one which I made about another paper on my blog years ago, is that the qualifiers "really" and "only" are, IMO, deeply problematic/confounding. In particular, I think that it is fairly reasonable to treat "only believes" on a par w/"merely believes". If your choices are "really knows" and "merely believes", I don't think it is at all implausible to think that "really knows" is the best answer of a bad set of choices. And maybe there are just gender differences in how one resolves that choice or gender differences in idiolects, etc.

    Anyway, interesting and thoughtful issues. Thanks.

    Reply
  9. Alan Nelson

    An anecdote: Early in my studies in Philosophy, I sometimes found my lack of intuitions discouraging. I'm glad I stuck with it, but I still have no intuitive mental faculty!

    Reply
  10. Bernard W. Kobes

    I agree with Marc Moffett's concerns about the S&F vignette. Why did the thief replace the watch with a cheap version, subjects may have wondered. Moreover, one way of filling out the background of the watch vignette suggests a case like those discussed in Clark and Chalmers, "The Extended Mind". I developed this worry in comments on the post of Buckwalter and Stich's paper at the blog "Experimental Philosophy".

    Reply
  11. John Schwenkler

    I'm not sure I see the force of Matthew Smith's complaints. I've not yet read the paper very carefully, but from what I understand nowhere is it being suggested that differing intuitions are *themselves* "the issue" when it comes to gender imbalance in philosophy.

    Rather, "the issue" is the *combination* of (1) gender differences in intuitions with (2) a methodology that, at least in many quarters, still tends to give intuitions a lot of weight (not least by calling them "intuitions"!), as well as (3) natural inclinations which, no matter what we say, frequently keeps us from subjecting philosophical positions to the degree of truly open and rigorous scrutiny we claim to be committed to and moreover often lead us to scrutinize such positions *by relying on intuitions*, (4) methods of teaching and styles of argumentation that – as Smith suggests – may make those with unpopular intuitions feel marginalized or unintelligent, and (5) a profession whose make-up is already quite male-heavy and likely prone to engage in predictably human patterns of behavior when its members encounter (what they perceive as) "minority" views.

    Can (1) be changed? Likely not; and in any case there's no reason why that would have a point, so surely the intuitions themselves are not "the issue" that B&S are identifying. But each of (2)-(4) can be addressed directly, and (5) can be indirectly, both by – if B&S are right – addressing (2)-(4), and also by doing the usual sorts of things we've hopefully already been doing to improve the situation of women in the profession. The key point is that whatever we thought beforehand about the merits or demerits of intuition-driven philosophical methodologies, we likely had *no idea* that things like (2)-(4) might be contributing to the paucity of women in professional philosophy. This is a startling finding, which deserves empirical scrutiny but, if it holds up, deserves to make a serious difference in how philosophers go about our business.

    Reply
  12. Victor Kumar

    It’s natural to think that B&S are attempting to explain the gender gap in philosophy by appealing to gender differences in intuitions. They say so in the very first paragraph. They offer narratives that exemplify that explanation on pp. 28-30. Leiter glosses the paper in this way in his post. But the authors eventually admit not just that they have no evidence that women are less likely than men to share the “official” intuitions (32), but also that gender differences as such are not part of the explanation: “what is doing the work in our Dweck-inspired hypothesis is not gender differences in intuition but differences in intuition tout court” (34).

    The Dweck-inspired hypothesis is roughly this. From Dweck we get that women are more likely than men—perhaps, women with high IQ are more likely than men with high IQ—to be discouraged in the face of perceived setbacks. (Roughly.) So, even if women are no more likely than men to find that they have the “wrong” intuitions, when they do they are more likely to react by disengaging from discussion, not enrolling in any more philosophy courses, etc. But if this is the explanation then it is no longer specific to philosophy. Women are more likely than men to be discouraged in the face of perceived setbacks in all subjects, presumably. So, this Dweck-inspired hypothesis explains gender differences in philosophy as much as it does in (ahem) psychology.

    The authors may think that women and men are more likely to face perceived setbacks in philosophy because of adversarial teaching styles more common there, but then it’s not clear that differences in intuition has much to do with the explanation.

    Or, the authors may think women and men are more likely to face perceived setbacks in philosophy because there is a lot of diversity in the concepts that are the target of philosophical inquiry. Further, they may think that one person’s concepts are just as good as another’s, that what we want to know is, for example, what “our” concept(s) of MEANING is (are) and it doesn’t matter much whether we have one that is descriptivist or referentialist. But that is a very controversial account of the role of intuitions in philosophy. It’s just as plausible that the “official” concept of MEANING reflects an understanding of how, say, scientific terminology is profitably used. If so, conceptual diversity is not benign; it’s not true that people who do not have the official intuition just have a different but equally good concept—they (often) have the wrong concept. (It would be nice if there were studies that examine whether differences in intuition correlate with differences in cognitive ability, a la Stanovich and West on heuristics and biases.)

    One reason to be troubled by B&S’s paper is that there are other more plausible reasons for the gender disparity in philosophy, especially implicit and explicit sexist biases among professors, fewer female professors to serve as role models, and overt sexual harassment by male professors and male students. B&S say that their explanation is compatible with explanations that cite factors like this. But are we in need of the further explanation that the authors seek? Might it distract us from more important and more urgent factors?

    B&S’s paper at the very least succeeds in showing that the methods employed by experimental philosophers can potentially be used as tools for socio-political critique of philosophy, for achieving feminist and other political ends in the discipline. That’s certainly a coup for X-Phi.

    Reply
  13. Brian Leiter

    I do not think it is B&S's hypothesis that the primary explanation for the relative dearth of women in academic philosophy is that intuition-driven methods of philosophy tend to select for intuitions that are more common among males than females. I take it they think, plausibly if their results are correct, that it is a contributing factor. We all know (I hope we all know) that selection effects explain a lot of the intuitive consensus (to the extent there is one) in different areas of philosophy, just as it explains why Kantians can increasingly only talk to other Kantians, and so on. What B&S document is that the selection effects may also have a gendered dimension, and that's a striking result.

    Reply
  14. Dustin Locke

    I agree with the first two paragraphs of Victor Kumar's comment. For the reasons he states, I found the paper somewhat odd. The thesis at the beginning is that gender differences in intuitions partly explain the gender gap in philosophy. The thesis at the end is that gender differences with respect to fixed-intelligence/flexible-intelligence mindset *plus* differing intuitions amongst individuals (regardless of whether they divide along the gender line) partly explains the gender gap in philosophy. Of course, these two hypotheses are completely compatible with one another. But the authors seem to write as if they are ultimately abandoning the first hypothesis (for lack of data to support it?) in favor of the second.

    But perhaps I'm missing something here. I hope the authors will correct me!

    Reply
  15. J. Edward Hackett

    I have only a few questions concerning B&S's paper.

    Does this paper assume gender essentialism by assuming that there are differences in the intuitions of thought-experiments?

    Is the predominant dearth of women in analytic philosophy partly due to the historic situation of AP to construe wildly outrageous thought-experiments that don't pertain to their lived-experience? Swampman, Robo-Mary…

    Reply
  16. Christopher Hitchcock

    Some comments, especially in response to Matthew Smith and Victor Kumar:

    1. No doubt sexism in its traditional forms is part of the explanation for the under-representation of women in philosophy. I suspect also that problems balancing work and family life, inadequate child-care resources, tenure clocks that demand high levels of productivity around the time many want to start families, and so on are also significant factors. These are factors that affect all areas of academia. So a natural question is, to what extent are women under-represented in academia generally? A quick web search gives some examples: According to catalyst.org, http://www.catalyst.org/publication/327/women-in-academia, women comprise 46% of assistant professors, 38% of associate professors, and 24% of full professors in the USA. According the AAUP, http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/63396944-44BE-4ABA-9815-5792D93856F1/0/AAUPGenderEquityIndicators2006.pdf, women make up 40.9% of full-time tenure track faculty, and 25.8% of full-time tenured faculty, at Ph.D. granting U.S. universities. In colleges that grant only Baccalaureate degrees, the numbers are 47.4% of FT TT faculty, and 36.1% of FT tenured faculty. There is room for improvement in these numbers, but the numbers in philosophy are substantially worse than these numbers for academia generally. So this suggests there is some specific problem in philosophy. Buckwalter and Stich have an interesting hypothesis about one such philosophy-specific problem.

    2. It is a subtle question what role intuitions play in philosophy. But I suspect their role is somewhat less subtle in the over-simplified presentations that are often given in the classroom. (Think of Gettier examples, or standard counter-examples to utilitarianism.)

    3. I agree that to the extent that there is a problem, the problem needn't be with intuitions per se, but with the way they are used in the classroom. We all know that there are differences in innate philosophical ability. I have often heard people talk about so-and-so having or lacking the 'philosophy gene'. The studies reviewed by B & S indicate that we should not treat reactions to Gettier examples and the like as diagnostic of philosophical ability. Indeed, I suspect that making teachers aware of these differences in intuitions (and related differences based on cultural background, and socio-economic status, as reported e.g. in a 2001 paper by Weinberg, Nichols and Stich) will go some way to alleviating the problem. One possible solution would be to have students read some of these experimental results along with, e.g. Gettier's paper, and talk about it.

    Reply
  17. Jennifer Nagel

    Further to Margaret Atherton's concern: even if on individual studies, we do have enough participants to find a statistically significant contrast, once we are looking at a series of studies, we face the multiple comparison problem: if you are looking at a lot of comparisons, you can expect some of them to show significant contrasts as a product of chance, and if you focus on the strongest contrasts without taking the relevant population parameters into account, you'll think the groups being compared are more different than they really are. As Chandra Sripada put it on the xphi blog discussion of the B&S article: "When a researcher conducts a large number of statistical tests, the cumulative probability that at least some tests come up positive by sheer chance rises linearly with the number of tests conducted. Indeed, if we assume the null hypothesis is true and there is no difference between groups whatsoever (and given the standard “alpha” used of p<0.05), a researcher who conducts 100 tests should expect 5 positive results that are purely spurious."

    So, if we scan reports of Gettier intuitions actively seeking out some on which men and women respond differently, we should expect to find some by sheer statistical luck (and more still if the relevant experiments are not well-designed to test gender variance). If we want to be responsible about it, we should only start describing Gettier cases as the *sort of thing* that men and women process differently if the overall *proportion* of cases tested comes out appropriately high, and the quality of the individual tests is acceptable. Here I'm bothered by the extent to which B&S downplay the fact that Starmans and Friedman have tested a further series of cases on which there were no gender differences; it's also worrying that they don't examine top-quality work like Jennifer Cole Wright's on intuitional stability (Cognition 2010:115, 491-503) showing no gender differences in a series of core epistemological cases, including Goldman's "Fake Barn" Gettier case.

    Doubtless there's some explanation of the difference in responses on the original Starmans and Friedman story. I'd venture a guess that the content of the story wasn't terrifically well-chosen as a test of gender-neutrality. Hey, the S&F story starts out with someone getting undressed to take a shower, and then it's about a deviant causal chain that makes no narrative sense, burdening working memory (why exactly is the thief leaving a cheap plastic replica of a watch on the table after he takes the watch?). To make matters worse, S&F ran this as a casual pen/paper poll in a public place (student centre), rewarding their subjects with a piece of candy. If there was anything women might have found weird/irritating about being asked by a stranger to evaluate this particular story, it's possible that this had some impact on their performance (which is not to say that the results point to any underlying difficulty in women's competence with ordinary Gettier cases).

    It's somewhat sensational to posit that men and women have fundamental cognitive differences, differences that would explain our unequal representation in the profession. But most psychological gender differences are close to zero, at least according to Janet Hyde's spectacularly exhaustive meta-meta-analysis of the issue (American Psychologist 2005: 60, 581-592). Hyde's article also includes a nice discussion of the costs of overinflated claims of gender differences in the workplace and elsewhere.

    B&S conclude their official discussion of the Gettier case issue by suggesting that more work needs to be done, but I worry that by focusing on the (in my view atypical) S&F case they might have succeeded in generating the impression that men and women generally tend to differ in Gettier case recognition more generally. Later in the paper (p.28) B&S characterize a woman's failure to get an (unspecified) Gettier case intuition as being an instance of a general pattern displayed in the Starmans & Friedman study (What general pattern? It's not as if the S&F test of that one story could be taken as a reliable measure on its own).

    I think we have very good reason to believe that neurotypical men and women would process Gettier cases in exactly the same way: past the age of four, mental state ascription tasks do not seem to exhibit significant gender variation (on this point see Charman, Ruffman and Clements's "Is there a Gender Difference in False Belief Development?" — Social Development 2002:11, 1-10). But is that rather boring fact going to be as memorable as B&S's surprising claims about differences?

    Reply
  18. Anne Jaap Jacobson

    It was pointed out on feministphilosophers.wordpress that almost all the comments here are by men. Margaret Atherton's brief comment is the sole exception. (I could have sworn there was a longer one that made some of the points I'm making, but it seems to have disappeared if it was there.)

    I am not sure why women haven't participated, and I hesitate to interpret "women's intentions". However, there's a useful conjecture that has some informative background. The background is: (1) until recently, the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering had numbers close to or worse than philosophy's. (2)There's been a great deal of work uncovering the causes, but the bulk of them amount to the creation of a climate very adverse to women's full participation in the field. (3) It is a very reasonable hypothesis that many and perhaps all of these negative factors are operational in philosophy. (4) They don't have to do with a different in philosophical intuitions. Ergo, what? Well, the topic of different intuitions may not seem central in our lives. MANY of us have experienced so many slings and arrows, we may be wary about having a central cause be said to be the fact that we are (only very slightly, if you believe the analyses of the S&B paper showing up on feministphilosophers) different.

    Many women in philosophy experience these factors on a fairly frequent basis. A very recent blog has started; it provides anecdotes about women's life in philosophy; most of them are sobering. The new blog is here: http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/

    BL COMMENT: The new blog is, indeed, quite striking. I would caution that, as always, with anonymous postings, there are reliability issues. Perhaps a centralized collection of such horror stories (or mostly horror stories) will now facilitate a systematic study of how common such misconduct remains.

    Reply
  19. Natasha Millikan

    I have a point: It sucks to be a woman in philosophy. perhaps my mother, Professor Ruth Millikan, will have a more interesting comment to make if she makes a comment after I send this to her. But what I know is that she has encountered, nay, lived through such rampant sexism that it's an absolute miracle that she survived. It wasn't that long ago that a man who wrote a book in her field had not one female source in the bibliography even though there were two women in the field, one of whose husband he did cite. It wasn't long ago that the Dean of UConn was refusing to give her tenure because he considered her a housewife because she worked part-time. Of course it's easier in 2010 than in it was in 1968.

    My suggestion is to ask professors, especially women professors, what gender differences they notice in the classroom. I think that would be far more to the point than studying how women react to questions in a sterile environment without discussion. You might even start by asking how many women there are in the beginning courses. After all, if women never try it, their thought patterns are irrelevant. On the other hand, if women do take beginning courses, Do they do worse? Do they seem to have less fun? Why don't they go on?

    I was in college in the early '90s in Linguistics. I was the only woman in all of my classes. The men were quite assertive, and if I hadn't had my mother's spunk, I would have stayed quiet and therefore not had my questions answered and done more poorly. As it was, I was the best student in every class I took. Imagine if I had been the average student. Women get ignored in the classroom. There are dozens and dozens of studies showing this. Male professors are likely to call on men. Even women in lower levels of school treat boys far differently than girls, giving boys verbal rewards for correct answers while they accept answers from girls, when they call on them, which is less frequently, and when the girls raise their hands, which may be less frequently as well. Often boys shout out answers as well, which girls generally don't do. Every professor was male. To continue my own experience, I then went to UConn for graduate school in Linguistics. There, unlike probably most other graduate programs, half the students were women. Women were encouraged. One professor in particular, the only woman, tried very hard to keep women in the program, but so often life and family considerations got in the way. I was the best in my classes there as well, and continued to be very outspoken as opposed to the other women. Discussions often didn't include other female voices. I also did not finish the program, for life reasons.

    Perhaps my experience and my impression of my mother's experience will be somewhat enlightening to this project.

    Reply
  20. Natasha Millikan

    She was in grad school in 1968. The problem with tenure may have still been in the early 90s. I'm afraid I don't remember.

    Reply
  21. Anne Jaap Jacobson

    Natasha, didn't your motheer share a position, in effect, with Margaret Gilbert well after her first (and important) book came out?

    To the studies Jennifer Nagel mentions, we might add Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. She provides strong arguments against any neurally based difference between men and women. Her article in a forthcoming book, Neurofeminism,(Palgrave Macmillian), aruges in greater detail against those contending otherwise, such as Baron Cohen. The volume is edited by Bluhm, Jacobson (= me) and Maibom.

    Fine, who is the daughter of Kit Fine, does allow for culturally induced difference, as well we might want to. So I'm puzzled a bit by Jennifer's comments. For example, there are patterns of behavior that women exhibit that probably aren't helping their careers; e.g., women tend to follow their husbands and take a lesser job to stay in the same geographical area. It's hard to see how this would occur without some cognitive differences.

    Perhaps we need to say explicitly that decisions over Gettier cases are much more like those over false-belief tasks than the are like highly contextualized personal decisions. Catarina Novaes has an argument of the sort needed here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2010/09/gender-and-philosophical-intuitions.html. The conclusion is powerful: philosophical puzzles engage cognitive resources that are less apt to be influenced by socially constructed gender cues.

    Concerns like these and others expressed here might make us wait before accepting that much of the problem lies with the women, who just are different.

    Reply
  22. Stephen Stich

    First, thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments. Wes Buckwalter and I posted our “Gender and Philosophical Intuitions” paper in the SSRN Working Paper Series in the hope of getting feedback and criticism from many perspectives. That, obviously, has been a great success. Since there are quite a lot of comments, I will divide my responses into several postings. In this one, I’ll focus on some of the important points raised by Jennifer Nagel.

    Professor Nagel begins her comments by setting out a very important methodological issue. To explain the somewhat technical point, she quotes a characteristically clear comment that Chandra Sripada posted on the Experimental Philosophy blog’s discussion of our paper on September 27. Here is what Nagel says:

    "As Chandra Sripada put it on the xphi blog discussion of the B&S article: ‘When a researcher conducts a large number of statistical tests, the cumulative probability that at least some tests come up positive by sheer chance rises linearly with the number of tests conducted. Indeed, if we assume the null hypothesis is true and there is no difference between groups whatsoever (and given the standard “alpha” used of p<0.05), a researcher who conducts 100 tests should expect 5 positive results that are purely spurious.’"

    This is a serious concern that had been raised by a number of people in discussions of earlier drafts of our paper. Buckwalter and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and we believed that it could be addressed. Thus, within a few hours of Sripada’s posting, Buckwalter posted a long response on the X-Phi blog. He followed that up with several additional posts, responding to related methodological concerns posted by Justin Sytsma. The next day, both Sripada and Sytsma posted comments indicating that their concerns had been addressed. Sripada’s post began as follows:

    “Your responses to my comment and especially to Justin’s were indeed very helpful (and detailed). I think it allays a good bit of my concerns that pool of studies you are drawing on is so large that we should expect to find at least a few significant differences by gender in this huge pool. I think you are right that the pool is not all that large after all, since most existing data sets did not study the right kinds of cases (cases taught in first year philosophy classes) or did not collect the gender data at all.”

    Readers interested in the details of our response to this methodological concern are urged to check out the discussion on the X-Phi blog.

    Since Nagel does not mention the extensive follow-up discussion on the X-Phi blog, I assume that either she has not read it or that she found Buckwalter’s responses unconvincing. If that’s the case, then it would be very welcome indeed if Nagel were to say *why* she does not find Buckwalter’s replies convincing. Without knowing that, we simply do not know how to respond constructively to Nagel’s concerns.

    One important lesson that I have learned from the comments on the Leiter Blog is that Buckwalter and I need to be clearer and more emphatic about what we are claiming and what we are not claiming. In her comment, Professor Nagel observes that “It's somewhat sensational to posit that *men and women have fundamental cognitive differences,* differences that would explain our unequal representation in the profession” (emphasis added). This suggests that Professor Nagel thinks we were making this posit in our paper. Actually, we tried to make it clear that we were *not* positing that men and women have fundamental cognitive differences. But it seems that we did not succeed. Here is what we said:

    “A natural question to raise at this point is: What is the *explanation* for the gender differences in philosophical intuition? On our view, however, it would be premature to venture an answer. We will need to know much more about gender differences in intuition (and behavior and choices) before making a serious attempt to explain them. Are these differences pan-cultural, or are they culturally local, or are some local and others pan-cultural? At this point, we do not know. *Do the gender differences in intuition reflect deep cognitive or affective differences between the genders, or do they arise from relatively superficial semantic factors, or pragmatic factors, or local norms of self-presentation – or from something else entirely? Once again we do not know.* Are there different explanations for the gender differences in intuition in different parts of philosophy? Is the explanation for the gender differences in moral intuitions different from the explanation for the gender differences in metaphysical intuitions? Indeed, is the explanation for the gender differences in one sort of moral intuition different from the explanation for the gender differences in another sort of moral intuition? Once again, we do not know. We believe that all of these questions are addressable using the techniques of contemporary cognitive science, and that this sort of experimental philosophy should be high on the agenda of philosophers interested in understanding their own discipline and explaining why men and women sometimes have different philosophical intuitions. Much more work will be needed before we understand gender differences in philosophical intuition.” (26-27, second emphasis added)

    Our view is that “there are significant differences between men and women *in intuitive responses to some philosophically important thought experiments”* (26, emphasis added), and that these differences “might be part of the explanation for the gender gap in academic philosophy” (27). The hypotheses we offer about how differences in intuition (both those that are correlated with gender and those that are not) might contribute to the gender gap do not depend in any way on men and women having “fundamental cognitive differences.” To repeat: We did not say, and we do not believe, “that men and women have fundamental cognitive differences, differences that would explain our unequal representation in the profession”. But obviously at least one very acute and careful reader was misled about this. In the next draft of the paper we will try to be clearer.

    In the paragraph in which Nagel makes the comment about “fundamental cognitive differences,” she goes on to say:

    “But most psychological gender differences are close to zero, at least according to Janet Hyde's spectacularly exhaustive meta-meta-analysis of the issue (American Psychologist 2005: 60, 581-592). Hyde's article also includes a nice discussion of the costs of overinflated claims of gender differences in the workplace and elsewhere.”

    A visitor to this blog who had not read our paper might infer that we were unaware of Hyde’s important paper. However, that is not the case. We both cite it and comment on it. Here is the relevant passage:

    “It is important to note that in a variety of other domains psychologists have either failed to detect gender differences or have detected only very weak gender differences.[fn. 34] However, we do not think that the absence of strong gender differences in many areas of mental processing provides plausible grounds to doubt the variance in philosophical intuitions that has been our concern. Instead, we think, it shows that the differences between men and women are subtle, complex, and – for the moment, at least – often quite unpredictable.
    [fn 34: See, for example, Hyde’s paper, “The Gender Similarity Hypothesis,” (2005) which offers a meta-analysis in defense of the claim that on many different psychological variables, men and women are quite similar.”] (26)

    In the immediately preceding section (3.8), we cited several review articles cataloging recent work on gender differences in experimental economics. We also presented an example, a study by Rigdon and her colleagues, which we believe should be of considerable interest to philosophers, since it suggests that in some economic games women are more inclined to prosocial behavior than men, and that the difference disappears when there is even the slightest hint that the men are being observed! There is, of course, no incompatibility between Rigdon et al.’s finding and Hyde’s meta-analysis. The fact that *most* psychological gender differences are small is entirely consistent with there being *some* that are both large and robust.

    Of course, it can sometimes be the case that social institutions and practices make mountains out of molehills. The hypotheses that Buckwalter and I propose in our fourth section (and let me stress, as we did in the paper, that at this point they are only hypotheses) suggest that the practice of using intuitions as evidence in philosophy, along with (i) a subtle and complex pattern of gender differences in intuition of the sort that we have reported, and (ii) the pattern of gender differences in “mindset” reported by Carol Dweck and her collaborators, might be a significant factor in producing the egregious gender disparity that we face in our profession. We think these hypotheses are plausible enough to merit further study, and that nothing in Hyde’s important work suggests otherwise. Perhaps Nagel disagrees. We also think that *if * our hypotheses are true, they are important. And it’s hard to imagine that Nagel would disagree with that.

    Two of the six paragraphs in Nagel’s posting are devoted to raising concerns about the Starmans and Friedman (S&F) Gettier study, which is one of the 13 studies we report in which gender differences have been found. (In fn 23, we cited, but did not describe, a 14th study.) Here is what Nagel says in her third paragraph:

    “Doubtless there's some explanation of the difference in responses on the original Starmans and Friedman story. I'd venture a guess that the content of the story wasn't terrifically well-chosen as a test of gender-neutrality. Hey, the S&F story starts out with someone getting undressed to take a shower, and then it's about a deviant causal chain that makes no narrative sense, burdening working memory (why exactly is the thief leaving a cheap plastic replica of a watch on the table after he takes the watch?). To make matters worse, S&F ran this as a casual pen/paper poll in a public place (student centre), rewarding their subjects with a piece of candy. If there was anything women might have found weird/irritating about being asked by a stranger to evaluate this particular story, it's possible that this had some impact on their performance (which is not to say that the results point to any underlying difficulty in women's competence with ordinary Gettier cases).”

    It is true that at the beginning of the S&F vignette that we quoted in our paper, the male protagonist decides to stop reading and take a shower. However, as we noted, S&F also used a second Gettier scenario, and in that one the protagonist is female and no one gets undressed. She discovers that she is out of dishwashing soap and goes out to get some. As we reported, the gender difference in that case was actually a bit *larger* than the difference in the shower/watch case. In both cases, the intruder leaves a cheap substitute for the object he has stolen and this “makes no narrative sense” – a fact which might indeed burden working memory, as Nagel suggests. But I confess that I’m a bit puzzled about why Nagel thinks this is likely to be relevant. Is she, perhaps, suggesting that women and men react differently to burdens on working memory, and that this explains the large gender difference found in both cases? Leaving this aside, Nagel is surely right that the unmotivated behavior of the intruders in both S&F cases makes them less than ideal. The fact that the female protagonist in the second vignette is engaged in a stereotypical female task is also potentially problematic. So, yes, better vignettes are needed. Nagel’s warning about generalizing from these two cases to other Gettier cases is spot on, and very helpful. As we reported at the end of our discussion of S&F’s study, “We are currently beginning a series of further studies of Gettier intuitions in student populations. It is clear that there is still a lot to learn” (7). Stay tuned.

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  23. Brian

    The thread at the X-Phil blog to which Professors Nagel and Stich allude is here:
    http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2010/09/gender-and-philosophical-intuitions.html

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  24. Karen Margrethe Nielsen

    Stich writes: "As we noted, S&F also used a second Gettier scenario, and in that one the protagonist is female and no one gets undressed. She discovers that she is out of dishwashing soap and goes out and gets some". Dishwashing soap!!! That does it for me. If the one case involving a female protagonist is one having to do with doing the dishes, I would be so annoyed that my mind would start fuming right there. I would not be particularly motivated to respond to the questions in a thoughtful way since the choice of examples is insulting, playing at it does to the association between females and housework like cleaning dirty dishes. Dishwashing soap! I can't believe it!

    Initially I was sceptical that Nagel had a point, but now I'm convinced that she does. Irritation at belittling stereotypes in the Gettier examples may have made female subjects less inclined to think carefully about the cases. No wonder that the gender disparities in this scenario were *larger* than in the others. I take that as support for Nagel's view. If the dishwashing question showed up early in the test it may have influenced women's answers on subsequent questions as well.

    Let's not start thinking that the egregious gender disparity in the field might be explained to a significant extent by gendered intuitions just yet, shall we. I think that would be overlooking some equally plausible, but more disconcerting explanations. In fact, it may be that the very reliance on such scenarios – which frequently reveal the stereotypical associations of their creators – make female students feel alienated in the classroom, adding to the extra load they are already carrying.

    Dishwashing soap!

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  25. Brian

    Professor Stich noted the stereotype at work in the second Gettier case, and explicitly acknowledged that this might vitiate the utility of the resuls. The Gettier cases, however, were just one of 13 different kinds of studies in which gender disparities in intuitions were found. I do think it would be useful if folks commenting actually read the paper. Some have, but some have not.

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  26. Karen Margrethe Nielsen

    Brian,

    I did notice that Stich noticed the stereotype, but I think he underestimates its significance. The order the cases were presented in does matter – if a stereotypical one appears before the others it influences one's willingness to think carefully about them.

    I admit it's been a while since I read the paper, but that doesn't alter this fact. And I'm open to the idea that there may be some differences in intuitions between American female and male undergraduates, though more skeptical that this is a significant factor in explaining the lack of women in the field.

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  27. Brian

    Just to clarify my own view: I share Karen Nielsen's skepticism that the gendered differences in intuitions are "a significant factor in explaining the lack of women in the field." I do read B & S to claim that it may be a factor. I would think it is already well-known that certain intuition-driven debates in philosophy thrive because of selection effects, with those with the "wrong" intuitions giving up early or, if they persist, being marginalized. What B & S show is that there is a gendered dimension to the selection effect. That's a pretty alarming result in my view, even though the sexism and sexual harassment documented, e.g., on the new blog about being a woman in philosophy, is surely far more damaging to women's prospects in the field than the selection effects that are central to most intuition-driven philosophy.

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  28. Natalja Deng & Daan Evers

    As Dustin Locke suggests, it does seem as if by the end of the article, what remains is the idea that philosophy students of either gender may find themselves at odds with 'the dominant intuition', and that women are more discouraged by this than men. That's of course interesting, but it is not about gender-related differences in intuition. Presumably the authors also think women's intuitions run counter to 'the dominant intuition' in most of the cases considered, but as they seem to acknowledge, there is insufficient reason to think this.

    We take it that notwithstanding their final claim about widespread disagreement in intuitions, the authors think one intuition typically dominates among philosophy instructors and male students. But, even if that is so, it is not clear how much this matters (here we agree with Matthew Smith's point 4). After all, even the most superficial classroom discussion will quickly go beyond a show of hands on who has which intuition, to a discussion of the philosophical question at hand. And then it soon becomes apparent that a variety of answers is defended, and that philosophical work involves questioning one's gut response and engaging with (e.g. explaining) the opposite response. All the introductory textbooks we're aware of discuss a variety of views on any given issue, some of which entail the falsity of 'the dominant intuition'.

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  29. Anne Jaap Jacobson

    There seems to be a lot of evidence that using stereotypes can affect behavior on tests and, presumably, surveys. A leading researcher here is Claude Steele; his recent book, Whistling Vivaldi, describes some of the research.

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  30. K. Pogin

    Following up on some of the concerns noted above. I’m wondering, questions about whether or not the results outlined in the paper are statistically significant to show gender differences totally aside, if supposing they do show gender differences in intuition, are those difference significant enough to assume they’re not a product of stereotype threat or the interference self-objectification can have with intellectual tasks (of particular concern when questionnaires are administered in public spaces)? Were there attempts to control for this (if there were, I don't remember reading so in the paper)? When there are, is the gender difference the same?

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  31. Jennifer Nagel

    First, thanks to Brian for linking to the discussion over at the xphi blog, which I'd very certainly recommend as a source of thoughtful criticism of Buckwalter and Stich's draft article. Justin Sytsma's comments there are I think particularly useful, and I think I share his sentiment that Chandra Sripada's original worry has not been resolved, exactly because B&S do not provide adequate evidence about the range of possibly relevant studies from which they are selecting studies that show gender differences. And no, I didn't find Buckwalter's responses very compelling, quite the contrary.

    Buckwalter stressed that he and Stich chose to look at a very limited pool of studies within xphi, many of them "hypothesis-driven" studies intended to find effects of gender. B&S further restricted their pool to studies involving participants with little or no philosophical training, which might sound like a great idea given that they were interested in what happens with female students early in their education, but might not in fact be such a great idea if there are no systematic differences in intuition between students with and without philosophical training (see Jennifer Cole Wright's Cognition article for some evidence that training does not make much difference). So I'd be worried that B&S don't have the statistical power they need to execute their project, or frankly, even to persuade me that their project is really very promising. Let a thousand flowers bloom, if they want to pursue it, great–but I'm somewhat concerned that the paper launches a number of suggestions that may have very little evidential basis, but may for sociological reasons get taken up in our philosophical culture in ways I'm sure S&B themselves would not welcome. Let's hope no one reading this blog is inclined to assume that women don't "get it", on the Gettier case, or to suggest to their classes that women tend not to get Gettier responses. If I had to choose between following Chris Hitchcock's suggestion that we circulate papers about gender effects and talk about them, and spending that class time working through something like Linda Zagzebski's classic paper on the inevitability of Gettier cases, I know how I'd decide. (But I might go the other way if we did in fact have strong empirical evidence of a difference here.)

    When class discussion gets into gender differences, we face a problem that there is a lot of false information broadly circulating socially. Many of my students will take it for granted that women are much more empathetic than men, for example, when our best available research does not support that conclusion.

    Several critics who posted on the blog expressed surprise at the strength of the conclusions B&S were willing to draw, not least because these critics (e.g. Feltz, Huebner) reported that their own experimental work did include gender checking and hadn't uncovered any statistically significant gender differences. Again, we need to stress that if men and women have similar intuitive responses we should expect some studies showing men outperforming women, some showing women outperforming men, and many more studies showing no statistically significant differences.

    I should say that the xphi pool has some further features that might be problematic for B&S's purposes. For better or worse, many practitioners of xphi have been interested in identifying potential difficulties with the philosophical method of cases, and they've zeroed in (reasonably enough, given their purposes) on cases which are unstable or problematic. Whatever the results concerning those cases, if we are interested in ecological validity we should also think about the vast range of relatively unproblematic cases routinely used in undergraduate education in philosophy. Plato convinces us that morality/justice is not simply a matter of repaying one's debts by inviting us to contemplate the case in which a temporarily insane friend asks for the return of a borrowed weapon. That sort of clear case may or may not pattern with the Starmans & Friedman cases to which so much attention is devoted.

    To get over the problem of fishing in a small and perhaps contaminated pool, we'd want to canvas the largest available body of relevant work on intuitive judgment. Why restrict ourselves to xphi, or worse, largely hypothesis-driven xphi? There is an enormous literature in psychology on responses to problems in moral reasoning and mental state ascription, most of it showing (as Hyde's meta-meta-analysis indicates) very little gender difference. B&S take themselves to be acknowledging such work by making such remarks as the following: "It is important to note that in a variety of other domains psychologists have either failed to detect gender differences or have detected only very weak gender differences."(26) I'm very puzzled by the suggestion that psychologists are looking at "other domains". When I read psychological work on mental state ascription I'm pretty much convinced that psychologists are looking at the same domain I've been looking at as an epistemologist who is interested in the intuitive ascription of states of knowledge and belief. (I should say I'm restricting my attention to Gettier cases mainly because I know more about them than about the other cases B&S discuss.)

    Professor Stich notes that the fact that most gender differences are small is consistent with the possibility that some are robust, and I wouldn't want to dispute that claim. What I'd want to dispute is the suggestion that we've got any reason to believe that our responses to the cases used in philosophical education are coming from a different place, or generated in a special way that would make them an exception to the known general rules of gender similarity. I think that B&S's position would be more compelling if it came with a line about what the mechanism would be that would generate special differences in responses to philosophical cases (if indeed there are any such differences). I note that in the continuation of Chandra Sripada's gracious post (quoted by Stich above), the absence of any suggestions about such possible mechanisms is presented as grounds for "lingering doubts as to the reality of these effects."

    I think that many of those who have posted above have been right to worry that there may be differences between the kinds of responses we get with xphi participants and the kind of responses we get in the classroom. In particular, conditions of motivation and attention in the classroom should be expected to produce more consistent results, with less noise. On this point, I'll refer readers to an earlier discussion on the xphi blog: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2010/01/is-the-armchair-sexist.html

    On the question of whether B&S are positing a genuine cognitive difference between men and women: I'd say that they seem to me to be doing just this, despite their protestations to the contrary, in suggesting that women and men respond differently to Gettier cases (it wouldn't necessarily amount to positing a genuine cognitive difference to observe that some particular story generated a different response in men and women). If men and women compute the relationship between knowledge and JTB differently, then that would be a genuine and deep cognitive difference.

    I'd agree with earlier posts that there is something strange about the dialectical structure of the paper (Victor Kumar's remarks are particularly well-taken). In adddition, I'd add that the paper seems to vacillate between presenting (what might be fairly selective) evidence in support of gender difference, and claiming that we really don't know yet whether there are any differences, "stay tuned". So we are told "Much more work will be needed before we understand gender differences in philosophical intuition," (27), where I don't think it's been very well established that "gender differences in philosophical intuition" is a referring expression. Or elsewhere: "A natural question to raise is, 'what is the *explanation* for the gender differences in philosophical intuition?" Then it's suggested that the question is premature. There, I have to agree.

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  32. David Wallace

    Reading this debate, I feel rather as I would if someone published research noting that (say) women have fewer philosophical dreams than men, and so (since dreaming of X is evidence of X) this partly explains the underrepresentation of women in philosophy. On reading *that* research, one's response would be not to question the details of the research but to bemoan the fact that philosophy treats information in dreams as in any way truth-tracking, and to note that quite apart from the *epistemic* absurdity of regarding dreams as evidentially relevant to anything, regarding them as such might be bad for the profession in other ways.

    Put another way, those who think having the intuition that X is any reason at all to believe X should (I guess) worry about whether this kind of research says something about women's different innate capacity as philosophers, or whether it's methodologically flawed somehow. Those who think it's ridiculous, in most bits of philosophy, to take any notice whatsoever of one's intuitions should react somewhat differently.

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  33. Matthew Smith

    This has been a fascinating discussion. I have found the links to the various blogs to be useful and the discussions there excellent. I've learned a lot. One thing that this has revealed to me is the relative naïveté of experimental philosophy: how strange it is for X-phi people to think that doing one of their characteristic survey-driven experiments would reveal anything particularly meaningful about something as profoundly complex as gender inequality!

    Perhaps recognizing that there are so many confounding factors associated with gender inequality, B & S and Brian Leiter have, in effect, defended the study's significance with comments along the lines of:

    "Well, this study shows that something like intuition differences could have a small influence on the gender inequality in the academy."

    I grant that B&S and Leiter may be correct – if the methodology of the study survives scrutiny (I am no judge of that!). But this sort of defense of the relevance of the study suggests that the appropriate response to the study is:

    "Well, so what then? Clearly, there are much bigger engines of unfair discrimination at work."

    As if we needed more evidence of the trivial significance of the conclusions of the study, Leiter has helpfully shared a link to a blog containing anecdotes about sexism in the profession. And, then we have the testimonial of Ruth Millikan's daughter. After reading all that, one begins to wonder whether B & S's study should be understood as itself unintentionally contributing to sexism within the discipline. That is, it is sexist insofar as the study and the effort put into its promotion obscures the significance of the broader sexist mechanisms within the discipline.

    Furthermore, there is the additional worry that the study tacitly recommends instructors viewing women as somehow outside the mainstream and therefore as subjects who must be accommodated. This is not at all what B&S claim. But, we should hardly be surprised if people move from "gendered differences in intuitions" to "women are different from men in their intuitions" to "women are different in their intuitions" which presupposes that what women aren't is what is normal. If B&S deny responsibility for how people construe their study, then I don't know what to say to that.

    I emphatically am not asserting that either B & S or Leiter are intentionally sexist or unintentionally sexist. I am only suggesting that facing up to the discrimination experienced by women in the academy, and in our discipline in particular, is complicated and must be done with eyes wide open. Narrowly focusing on a single feature – a supposed difference in intuitions between men and women – invites exactly the kind of tunnel vision that facilitates the dismissal of proposals for broader institutional responses to an injustice that can only be resolved institutionally.

    As I suggested above, more diversity training, more institutional programs to promote women in philosophy, much more training in instruction, and so on, are all remedies that we might consider and even promote.

    BL COMMENT: I find really quite astonishing the allegation that scholarly research into gendered selection effects for intuitions about certain textbook problems could be thought to somehow obscure problems of sexual harassment, explicit or implicit bias, and other prominent causes of the gender disparity in academic philosophy.

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  34. Stephen Stich

    On Gender Essentialism and WEIRD People

    Once again, my thanks to everyone for your continuing comments. They have been enormously helpful in locating things that Buckwalter and I should have said more clearly, things we should have said differently, and things we should not have said at all!

    In this posting, my focus will be on gender essentialism, an issue raised by Matthew Smith (in his comment on Oct. 7), by J. Edward Hackett (in his comment on October 8) and also, I think, by Anne Jaap Jacobson (in her first comment on October 10) – though Professor Jacobson talks about “neurally based difference” and does not use the term “essentialism”. (My apologies in advance if I am misinterpreting you here, Anne.) Mr. Hackett raises the question I want to address most directly. “Does this paper,” he asks, “assume gender essentialism by assuming that there are differences in intuitions of thought-experiments?” The answer is: No it does not. Though on re-reading our paper with Mr. Hackett’s question in mind, I was struck by how poor a job we had done at making this clear. So let me try to make amends.

    Both ‘essentialism’ and ‘gender essentialism’ are hotly contested terms. Different writers use them in different ways. The core idea of the sort of essentialism that I think Smith and Hackett have in mind, at least as I understand it, is that certain traits or properties are essential features of a kind or category. Gender essentialism maintains that there are traits or properties that are essential to being a female or to being a male. The traits that are essential to a given gender are traits that all members of the gender (or perhaps just all “normal” members of the gender) must have. Without them, the individual in question would not *be* a member of that gender. It is often assumed that those traits are biologically or genetically based. This is a very rough characterization of the view, of course. But for current purposes, I hope it will be sufficient.

    So in asking whether our paper assumes gender essentialism, I will assume what Mr. Hackett is asking is: Do we think that the gender differences in intuition found in the thirteen studies we review arise from the fact that all females have some genetic or biological or psychological trait (or cluster of traits) and that all males have a different cluster of genetic or biological or psychological traits. The answer is a resounding NO. Indeed, in light of recent work on cultural variation in behavioral and psychological traits by Richard Nisbett, by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, and by many others, I think we would be *daft* to infer from data like those we report to the existence of essential or universal or pan-cultural gender differences. And because I think we would be daft to infer this, it simply never crossed my mind that what we say in the paper might be interpreted in this way. But please don’t misunderstand me here. This is not intended as a criticism of Mr. Hackett, Professor Smith, Professor Jacobson or anyone else who might have read us in this way. The fault is entirely mine. I have been so immersed in the fascinating and important literature on cultural variation in cognition for the last decade that I was simply wearing interpretative blinders.

    Why do I think it would be daft to infer from our data to an essentialist conclusion? Perhaps the best way to answer this question is to say a bit about a recent paper by Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan (HH&N), called “The WEIRDEST People in the World” (available on line at http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf ) The paper begins by documenting the unsurprising fact that the vast majority of experimental participants in behavioral science experiments in a recent 5-year period were WEIRD – which is HH&N’s acronym for people from cultures that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Moreover, a majority of the WEIRD subjects were American, and a majority of these Americans were university undergraduates. The upshot is that “a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4,000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside the West.” (HH&N, Sec. 2.1). Until the recent flourishing of Cultural Psychology, there had been very few studies done using non-WEIRD participants, and even now the data base on non-WEIRD people is disconcertingly thin.

    What HH&N do next is survey a large range of psychological and behavioral phenomena for which reasonably reliable cross cultural data are available. The patterns they find are stunning. In a large number of cases, including aspects of visual perception and spatial cognition, categorization and inferential induction, fairness and cooperation in economic games, conformity motivation, aspects of moral reasoning, and more, WEIRD people are unusual – indeed they are often global outliers. On many psychological and behavioral dimensions, WEIRD people are weird! Moreover, in the few studies where data are available, Americans are outliers among the WEIRD people. In a number of domains, American university students are outliers among Americans, and in some domains, contemporary American students seem to be more extreme outliers than their predecessors a few decades ago. So in many studies using contemporary American students as participants, the subjects are outliers among the outliers among the outliers! HH&N note that there are also a significant number of psychological and behavioral domains in which WEIRD people seem to be quite similar to people in small scale and non-Western societies. And there is no obvious pattern here – without doing the relevant empirical studies, there is no known way to predict when WEIRD people will turn out to be outliers and when they won’t.

    This brief summary does not even begin to do justice to the HH&N paper, which is quickly becoming one of the most influential papers in the behavioral sciences in the last decade. I strongly urge all readers of this blog to read it for themselves. But perhaps I have said enough to explain why I think it would be completely unwarranted to draw any essentialist conclusion from the data that Wes Buckwalter and I have assembled. All the subjects in the studies we cite are WEIRD. Indeed, all of them are American or Canadian. And in four of the 13 studies we review, the participants were WEIRD American or Canadian university students. In light of the HH&N findings, I think it would be just plain silly to infer that the gender differences in intuition that we found would be found non-Western societies. Indeed, I don’t think there is any reason to believe that the same differences would be found in countries in Western Europe. They might. They might not. It is an open empirical question and the only way to find out is to do the study!

    The bottom line, here, is that the gender differences in philosophical intuition that Wes and I have tried to document are gender differences in contemporary Americans and Canadians, many of whom are university students. There is no reason at all to assume that the same differences would be found in other populations. We are entirely agnostic on that matter. But for the purposes of our paper, generalizing to other populations is not really relevant. The hypotheses that Wes and I propose are aimed at explaining data like those in our Figure 16, which show that the percentage of women in philosophy courses (in this case at Rutgers) declines monotonically, and quite dramatically, from the first year of college to the last. All of the young women and men making the choices reflected in that graph are university students and almost all of them are Americans.

    In the next draft of our paper we’ll try to be a lot clearer and more explicit about the points made in this posting. We’re grateful to Professor Smith, Mr. Hackett and Professor Jacobson for convincing us that this needs to be done.

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  35. Lisa Schwartzman

    I find it interesting that only a few women have commented here, and I wonder about the disconnect there often seems to be between those who do feminist philosophy and those working in more mainstream areas. Feminists (including feminist philosophers) have long noted the ways that philosophical methods work to exclude women.

    I understand the worry of essentialism, but it seems that this was not the ultimate conclusion of the Buckwalter and Stich article. It would be wrong to suggest that even if there are differences between men and women’s intuitions, that these must be understood to be “essential” differences and not the results of socialization. It would be unfortunate if people read this article and concluded that women and men just “have” different intuitions, and that this is what is responsible for the gender disparity in philosophy. As recent work by Sally Haslanger and Jenny Saul (among others) has shown, the problems women face in philosophy are multiple (and the new blog “what is it like to be a woman in philosophy” provides many anecdotal illustrations of this). I don’t think we need to isolate one causal factor, when it’s clear that it’s a combination of things.

    I’ve been reading up a bit on experimental philosophy, and it strikes me that it’s currently a very male-dominated area. I’m hopeful that this paper will call attention to the need for a gendered analysis, but I worry that many philosophers are too attached to their methods to seriously consider that they might be flawed. The fact that people don’t all share the same philosophical intuitions seems to be a hint that there is a larger problem here—a problem with the ways that philosophical methods often focus on abstract thought experiments (which rely on intuitions) rather than also looking the social world in which the philosophical questions arise. As a result of this method, questions that concern real-world issues (such as issues of gender oppression and sexism) may appear to be matters of concern for sociologists and historians, not philosophers. I think this disadvantages women (especially feminist women), but it also leads to an impoverished and skewed version of philosophy, since only certain kinds of questions are taken seriously.

    In any case, I hope that this article will be the beginning of a larger discussion of how philosophical methods might be changed.

    Reply
  36. Dustin Locke

    Stephen,

    If you're still around, would you mind addressing the issue raised by myself and a couple of others above?

    Reply

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