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Readers identify the most important issues in the profession

Brian Leiter

With almost 725 responses to our earlier poll, here are the ten most pressing issues in the profession identified by readers:

1. Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Declining state support for higher education  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 460–158
3. Hyper-specialization and/or increasing irrelevance of philosophy to public/culture at large  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 552–104, loses to Declining state support for higher education by 451–176
4. Erosion of tenure  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 597–35, loses to Hyper-specialization and/or increasing irrelevance of philosophy to public/culture at large by 301–294
5. Prestige bias in hiring and/or publication decisions  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 569–66, loses to Erosion of tenure by 307–264
6. Sexual harassment and discrimination against women  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 584–60, loses to Prestige bias in hiring and/or publication decisions by 300–233
7. Lack of appreciation for academic freedom outside and sometimes inside the academy  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 581–54, loses to Sexual harassment and discrimination against women by 274–262
8. Underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities in the profession  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 582–60, loses to Lack of appreciation for academic freedom outside and sometimes inside the academy by 272–262
9. Vindictive, intolerant "groupthink" mentality in parts of the profession  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 556–83, loses to Underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities in the profession by 276–272
10. Underrepresentation of women in the profession  loses to Bad job market, decline of tenure-track faculty positions, increasing reliance on adjuncts by 587–55, loses to Vindictive, intolerant "groupthink" mentality in parts of the profession by 280–269

Just outside the top ten were "erosion of intellectual standards in the field for political reasons," which lost to "underrepresentation of women in the profession" 281 to 245; and "implicit bias," which lost to "erosion of intellectual standards" by 261 to 239. 

Overall, not an unreasonable list.  I was struck that quite general issues that affect everyone–e.g., the state of the job market, and erosion of tenure and of support for public universities–were rated more highly than the diversity issues we hear a lot about on the blogs, though those were recognized as well.  The strong showing of worries about "prestige bias" surprised me since whether it is a "bias" or a sensible proxy is debatable, but it's clear many readers are in the former camp.

What do readers think?

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50 responses to “Readers identify the most important issues in the profession”

  1. Anon

    It's interesting to consider how we should update our beliefs in light of the poll. It strikes me as fairly plausible that (some, if not many) issues will have the feature that the more pressing they are, the less they will be perceived as pressing. (And conversely, others will have the feature that the more they are generally recognized as being pressing, the less pressing they are).

    For instance, take the fact that "underrepresentation of political conservatives in the profession" came last in the poll. Should that increase or decrease our credence that it's a pressing problem? I think it should probably increase it: being good Bayesians, our credence in P(Problem) should increase by a factor of P(Problem | Last)/ P(Last), and that seems plausibly >1.

    Reply
  2. anonymous

    On prestige and gender bias: when publication count is taken as a measure of merit, the recent job market shows a bias for women over men, which is even stronger than the bias for high over low prestige PhDs. The most favored group are high prestige female candidates, most of whom had zero publications when they got their first job.

    Call the Alpha candidates those with PhDs from programs with mean PGR rank 3.5-5.0, and the Betas those from programs with rank 2.0-3.4. For candidates getting a first postdoc or tenure track job, the average publication counts look like this (from the anonymous PM3B metablogger analysis of Carolyn Dicey Jennings' 2012/13 spreadsheet, previously posted on the March 2 open thread here):

    ###### Alpha females (0.6, N=49)
    ########### Beta females (1.1, N=37)
    ############# Alpha males (1.3, N=114)
    ################# Beta males (1.7, N=84)

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    Thanks for doing this important poll, Brian.

    I hope our APA leadership picks up on this. If they don't, then I think we need to press them on it. We've seen all sorts of diversity initiatives site visit programs, etc. over the last few years, but most or all of the items on the top five list here have not even been touched. We really need to start focusing our attention there if we want to have a thriving profession to keep being a part of.

    Yes, diversity issues (excluding diverse political and philosophical views) are trendy, and talking about them or brainlessly pontificating about a 'rape culture' or 'harassment culture' or 'the patriarchy' can earn you social credibility. But let's put things in perspective and proportion our collective discussions to what's most pressing.

    Reply
  4. David Wallace

    Means are fairly unhelpful ways of presenting this sort of data. (To use the old joke: if Bill Gates moves to a house on your street, the mean salary in your street goes up a lot, but that doesn't really tell you anything meaningful about any general feature of people on your street). What are the *median* levels of publication? I vaguely recall that they're the same for men and women, and that these mean differences are being driven by a longer tail of men with very large numbers of publications, but I can't immediately find the reference.

    Reply
  5. Ken Taylor

    The bad job market is likely to get worse, unfortunately. Many small liberal arts colleges around the country are on the verge of imploding financially. A very good and close friend of mine who works in banking and specializes in the higher education sector expects e a serious contraction among small liberal arts colleges within the coming five year period. That will take away a fair number of jobs.

    Reply
  6. anonymous

    The median for women hired is 0 publications.
    The median for men hired is 1 publication.

    The same CDJ data shows 311 hired applicants, which can be sorted according to number of publications. There are 211 men and 100 women.

    Pubs: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
    Men: 85, 54, 33, 14, 12, 1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 1
    Women: 54, 26, 13, 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0

    So 54% of female applicants hired had zero publications, while 40% of men hired had zero publications.

    Reply
  7. Anon

    Commenter #3 makes a bad argument. Just because most members of a group think something isn't a major problem, doesn't mean it isn't.

    Reply
  8. Dean C. Rowan

    IANAP, but I'd like to comment on a curious entry here, no. 3, the hyper-specialization/irrelevance concern. Arguably, the perception of irrelevance accounts at least in part for no. 2, declining state support for higher education. If many humanities disciplines are viewed as too specialized, too "ivory tower," then state legislatures will rely on those perceptions to justify withdrawal of funding. So who among the readers views hyper-specialization and irrelevance as genuine problems? If the blog's readers, many of whom are philosophers or have a material interest in the pursuit, view their own enterprise as harmfully disconnected, should we be surprised when funding declines, when the job market tanks? Is there a proper level of specialization in academic work that we can identify ex ante? A level not so remote from the public that a modicum of relevance can be salvaged for the sake of justifying the endeavor?

    Reply
  9. Fritz J. McDonald

    A possible explanation for the outcome of this poll is that issues like sexual harassment, discrimination against women, and underrepresentation of women have no direct impact on the majority of the readers of this blog.

    89% of those who cast votes on this poll were male:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/02/reader-poll-2-gender.html

    I would guess that people are more likely to think issues that have a direct effect on themselves and their own career are important. Men and women alike in the profession are affected by decline in state funding and tenure-stream lines. Given that sexual harassment, discrimination based on gender, and underrepresentation are issues that have had little or no impact on men's own careers, it's not too surprising that they do not find them important.

    Reply
  10. Fritz J. McDonald

    One note: when I said "sexual harassment, discrimination against women, and underrepresentation of women" have had little impact on the careers of men, I was careless. I mean that discrimination and factors leading to underrepresentation have had no *negative* impacts on the careers of men, and so are of little concern to some men. It might be, of course that discrimination and factors leading to underrepresentation have had a positive impact on the careers of men, a positive impact many men might not recognize.

    Reply
  11. Anonymous

    Do we think that that, among candidates who get jobs or almost get jobs, publication count is positively correlated with candidate quality?

    Reply
  12. Anon Grad Student

    "The strong showing of worries about "prestige bias" surprised me since whether it is a "bias" or a sensible proxy is debatable, but it's clear many readers are in the former camp."

    The problem is that the poll question ran together the influence of prestige in "hiring and/or publication decisions". I think a reasonable argument could be made that prestige can play an important and legitimate place in hiring decisions. But this is because those decisions are made in regard to the overall character of the job candidate. The same arguments do not even come close to transferring over to publication decisions. An article should be judged solely for its content and not by the character or background of its author. This is not simply due to considerations of fairness; rather, it follows from the very purpose of publication. I think this is just too obvious to dispute, so I suspect that BL only had hiring decisions in mind when he made the above statement.

    The only thing that even comes close to being a legitimate reason for an editor using the author's background to make a decision about publication (for a peer-reviewed article; invited symposia are perhaps a different matter) is logistical. I.e., there are more submissions than could possibly be sent out for review, so the editor desk rejects anything that isn't from someone in a top 60 department. But even this strikes me as totally outrageous. Do we know in advance that everyone who isn't in a top 60 department is incapable of providing a good argument? (That's a rhetorical question.) Even putting aside considerations of fairness (which I think are probably reason enough taken by themselves), if prestige is a major factor in publication decisions, and prestige and publications are a major factor in hiring decisions, then we can expect an ideological feedback loop to form. The people at the top schools can then set an ideological agenda that is self-perpetuating because only the people from the top schools are capable of publishing anything that might question that agenda.

    No. Non-blind desk rejects are completely unacceptable. If the journals are overburdened then they need hire proofreaders. This will have the additional benefit of providing some jobs for for philosophy PhDs. Though I suppose it will cut into the journals' profit margins. *plays sad music on world's smallest violin*

    Reply
  13. anonymous

    What is surprising that the primarily male readership of this blog has been convinced there is a "crisis of harassment against women" in the profession.

    In the past few years, there has been news of exactly two professors found by their universities to have engaged in sexual harassment. After both had received their punishments, one resigned and the other stopped teaching. The other cases presented as involving such allegations did, however, negatively impact the careers of the accused male philosophers.

    So what should be of concern is the crisis of unsubstantiated allegations and vigilante activism.

    Reply
  14. Russell Blackford

    First, I find it amazing that underrepresentation of political conservatives actually came last.

    I've spent a large chunk of my life arguing with politically conservative bioethicists such as Leon Kass and Margaret Somerville, so I am certainly not a political conservative myself (such disclaimers seem to be needed these days when people are so quick to jump to conclusions about our substantive positions even if we so much as defend someone's right to speak). But the left-wing groupthink in the humanities is unhealthy, and I would have thought that philosophers, of all people, would have the detachment to see this. That's not to say that I put this issue first, but nor did I put it anything like last.

    But the big issue, for me, is about the nature of the discipline, what sort of work is regarded as central, and rewarded with high prestige, within the organized discipline of philosophy, and whether the structure of rewards creates perverse effects in the way philosophy is regarded by our students and the educated public. I.e., it's the issue relating to hyper-specialization and perceived irrelevance to the wider culture. I'm glad to see that this ranked so highly. The two issues that ranked above it apply to many other disciplines, and the decisions that affect them do not relate so specifically to philosophy. This one, by contrast, is something we can debate and address internally to the discipline.

    Reply
  15. Anon

    I think you've answered your own question, Anonymous #13. Many of us (including Brian, from what I've read in the past) know of many credible cases of sexual harassment about which nothing is done. So the thing that you're taking to be evidence that there isn't a problem (only two professors, that we know about, were 'found' by their universities to have engaged in sexual harassment) is the same reason why many people think that there is a problem. Think of the Catholic Church in the 90's: the fact that very few priests were found to have sexually assaulted children was not evidence that there was not a sexual assault problem: it was part of the problem (sexual assault, when it did happen, was being swept under the rug).

    Reply
  16. EB

    I had never heard the term "prestige bias" before seeing this poll. Wow, that's insane. How can you get hired with 0 publications? I've been on 2 searches and both candidates were well published, we didn't even consider anyone with 0 no matter where they were from. (Shakes head).

    BL COMMENT: Interesting, but surprising. Most of the best-known philosophers today were hired with no publication as it happens.

    Reply
  17. V. Alan White

    Ken Taylor is right. Take it from me in Wisconsin where the public university system is under active attack, including threats against tenure and shared governance as well as drastic cuts in state support. My concerns for right-wing representation in the profession are not exactly my highest priority. The survival of the liberal arts and education in general as a desirable public good is very much my concern, because the right-wing plutocratic long-term plans for the conquest of wealth to the diminution of everything else is working and working well here in Cheeseheadland, historically a largely progressive state. The big picture deserves the rightful place of our focus now. Why can't we get it that right-wingers have seen that indeed, all politics are local, and that they have thus smart-ALECed their way into the country's overall direction as per their wishes, and are destroying public education (and voting rights, and social safety nets, and reproductive rights, etc., etc.) as a result?

    Reply
  18. Ravi

    I believe a significant issue confronting philosophy and threatening its future is the growing number of attacks on the value and purpose of philosophy from prominent scientists (Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawkings, others). Perhaps a few areas — ethics comes to mind — are in a relatively better position than others.

    Reply
  19. anonymous

    Taking the lack of evidence for something as evidence for it is paranoia. The feminists cover up their hysteria by accusing their critics of being "conspiracy theorists".

    Is "discrimination against women in the profession" also something we are supposed to believe in without evidence? The job market stats show that hired women have fewer publications than men, indeed a majority of women but only a minority of men had zero publications. This contradicts what feminists have been telling us, that implicit biases against women lead philosophers to discount women's objective accomplishments because of subjective perceptions of "male genius". The reality is that women are being favored in the profession due to preferential treatment.

    Reply
  20. L. BIoom

    "My concerns for right-wing representation in the profession are not exactly my highest priority. The survival of the liberal arts and education in general as a desirable public good is very much my concern"

    You don't see that the two are linked? The reason conservatives don't see liberal arts a common good is that the humanities and the social sciences have been completely captured by liberals.

    BL COMMENT: I'd be curious what the evidence is that this is the reason.

    Reply
  21. Anon Grad 180924609

    Carolyn Dicey Jennings' data also show that women are less likely to get postdocs. I don't have all her analyses in front of me, but men may tend to have more publications when hired in part because more postdocs go to men, who publish during those postdocs and before a TT hire. The point is that the data don't straightforwardly show some kind of bias toward women, as David Wallace and others point out.

    Perhaps we can even discuss this without using the word "hysteria"!

    Reply
  22. anonymous

    The CDJ data is supposed to represent hires for first TT or postdoc from no prior job. So how does this support your analysis?

    The spreadsheet does contain some errors, such as including a female hire from a prior postdoc with multiple publications (without her the average pub count for alpha females goes down to 0.5). What you seem to be saying is that it must contain numerous male hires with prior postdocs.

    Reply
  23. anonymous

    What David Wallace "pointed out" was refuted on his own terms: the typical female hire, but not the typical male hire, has zero publications.

    For men to be favored over women in hiring for research postdocs, based on their having more publications on average, is what is predicted by "meritocracy" rather than "discrimination against women".

    For women to favored over men in hiring overall, especially for TT jobs, contradicts the mythology of profession. For the feminist philosophers to insist that women are in fact disadvantaged by "genius myths" against their hard work is, frankly, hysterical.

    Reply
  24. Anonymous tenured professor

    There's a problem with arguing based on what happens *in TT hiring* that women "are being favored IN THE PROFESSION due to preferential treatment" (anon 19, my emphasis), let alone that there is no bias against women. The best analogy I can come up with right now is the argument that because voting machines work equally well for white and black voters, blacks have equal opportunity to participate in the political system–without any regard to the obstacles black voters may face getting into the polling booth. (Some qualifications: (1) I am pretending there never was any such thing as chad. (2) I realize that a closer analogy would be an argument that black voters are advantaged because the machines work better for them. (3) I very much hope that said obstacles are disappearing in the US, but I can't think of a more current example.)

    To get some idea of what obstacles women graduate students face, commenters/readers can take a look at the stories on "What It's Like". More generally, they might refrain from assuming that if something isn't formally "found by one's university" (anon 13) to happen, then it doesn't happen.

    Reply
  25. Anon Grad 180924609

    Forgive me for my wandering uterus, but I'm not sure how you're using "typical."

    CDJ addresses the gender and publication data here: http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/12/gender-and-publications.html#more Look, it's just not as simple as you're making it out to be. For one thng, median number of publications for men and women alike is 1. The data here include TT hires with previous positions.

    Reply
  26. anonymous

    What the recent market data shows is that the profession treats publication count as less of a mark of "candidate quality" than being female.

    The bias for women over men is even more pronounced than the bias for high prestige PhD pedigree over low prestige pedigree. Beta female hires have fewer publications on average than alpha males, and the alpha female hires have on average only a third of the publications of the beta males.

    The philosophy TT job market is a debutante ball.

    Reply
  27. John Turri

    Hi Brian,

    You commented (March 18 2015 7:48 pm), “Most of the best-known philosophers today were hired with no publications.” I expect that there are some ways of limiting the domain of “best-known philosophers” such that this is true. Could you please say more about how you’re conceiving of the domain and, hopefully, point to some evidence for the quantified claim?

    BL COMMENT: I was just thinking of well-known senior philosophers like Peter Railton, Crispin Wright, Hartry Field, Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard…off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others. It would be more interesting perhaps to find comparable figures who in fact published before being hired.

    Reply
  28. anonymous

    The metametametablog analysis for the 2012-13 market was based on CDJ's spreadsheet which had been made publicly available (and claimed to be for first hires from no prior position). The publication counts by gender are reproduced above in comment 6, where we see zero publications for 54 out of 100 female hires, as opposed to only 85 out of 211 male hires. CDJ's blogpost combines that with the prior year data, where the gender discrepancy in the mean publication counts favoring women is also observed. Both CDJ and the APA note that the gender ratio in hiring mirrors the ratios in PhDs, so the lesson is that men must work harder on average than women to get a job.

    The claim that women are not really advantaged in their getting TT jobs with fewer average publications, because men are "advantaged" in getting non-TT jobs, is bizarre. It concedes the point that women have an advantage in being given, fresh out of their PhD and with fewer qualifications, what men must work harder for: a TT job.

    Reply
  29. Philosophy has 99 Problems (and Feminism Isn't one of Them)

    Oh, brother! I'm so sick of misogynists blaming women for their lack of employment. Has it not occurred to you that there are a number of other reasons why you may be underemployed? Maybe your publications are boring, or your research is derivative, or you come across as arrogant assholes….the possibilities are endless!

    People like #2 and #26 assume that the more publications you have, the stronger candidate you are. This is a bizarre assumption. Candidate A's single publication might simply be better than Candidate B's three publications, or Candidate A's unpublished writing sample might far outshine Candidate B's five formulaic publications. Moreover, I have some reason to believe (although I lack knowledge of any "studies" to back this up), that women are more likely to hold on to their papers and revise them for a longer period of time in comparison to men. Finally, these commentators simply assume, without argument, that a person's gender should not count as a qualification for a faculty position, yet there are all sorts of reasons to suppose that it should be a qualification (women instructors may be better able to teach female students, for example).

    But my main reason for writing is to express my exasperation concerning how this poll was set up and the results summarized: it is ridiculous that "feminism" was provided as an option in the first place. There are myriad forms of feminism, and the only thing feminists have in common is the belief that women are the moral, political, and social equals of men. How anyone could be against feminism or see it as a problem is beyond me.

    Finally, the "diversity issues" that many here are so dismissive of affect *everyone* in philosophy. The fact that so many of you refuse to see this probably explains the sorry state of philosophy.

    BL COMMENT: "Feminist philosophers" and 'Anti-feminist philosopher" were both choices in the poll. Reasonably, neither came close to the top ten.

    Reply
  30. Anonymous

    Correcting comment 28: the CDJ spreadsheet contained data for all hires, but contained a field for "prior" jobs. The metablogger used this to study only those hires with no prior positions, finding the median publications replicate the gender bias in the means, favoring women over men.

    So even if it makes sense to think that women are discriminated against when the better jobs go more to them and with fewer mean publications, CDJ's argument cannot explain the pro female gender bias when the hires with prior positions are filtered out.

    Do you find something different looking at her spreadsheet?

    Reply
  31. Anon Grad 180924609

    Okay, first of all, it's a mistake to conflate "publications" with "qualifications." You're assuming the data we have on the spreadsheet licenses you to make certain judgments about hiring that it simply doesn't, at least not without further assumptions, which would need to be defended. In other words, the bare data don't tell us WHY anyone was hired. Again, the median publication count for everyone is 1. Furthermore, this data tells us nothing about the rates at which men and women actually get tenure.

    Anon 26: Debutante ball? Please.

    Reply
  32. anonymous

    It is false that all feminists have in common that the belief that women are the moral, political, and social equals of men. For instance, you have just claimed that being female is a qualification for a job that men do not have, with regard to teaching female students.

    Feminist philosophers have advocated that we should favor the testimony of women over men in considering allegations of misconduct. They have campaigned for including women in conference programs and published collections in virtue of their gender. They have insisted that women need a "market boost" without presenting hiring data showing that women are disadvantaged; in the face of data showing that women are given an advantage over men, they speculate about how women are geniuses holding on to their treasured work while men mass submit their formulaic articles.

    Reply
  33. anonymous

    Please explain how a median of 1 is arrived at from this series of publications from 0 to 10, for women hired from no prior position: 54, 26, 13, 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0.

    There is no "conflation" in CDJ's taking publication count as a significant measure of merit, and the results are the opposite of what feminists tell us to expect from implict biases, as she herself recognized.

    High prestige women (the debutantes) have a mean publication count of 0.6, compared to 1.7 for low prestige males, out of the pool of hires from no prior position.

    Reply
  34. John Turri

    Brian,

    I assume that these are comparable figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Chalmers, Allan Gibbard, Ernest Sosa, Paul Thagard.

    Of course, most of the best-known philosophers today were trained and hired in a very different environment. So a more relevant question is probably whether most of the best-known younger philosophers were hired without publications.

    I do not believe that people should be hired only if they have prior publications. At the same time, I am really surprised by how frequently people in the profession allow *perceived potential for accomplishment* trump an actual track record of accomplishment.

    BL COMMENT: In several of these cases, I can assure you the philosophers were NOT hired because of their publications. I think job seekers are generally helped by having a publication, but some are also harmed. What's surprising is the idea that having a dissertation and perhaps other job market papers is not a sufficient basis for evaluating a candidacy.

    Reply
  35. Anon Grad 180924609

    "There is no "conflation" in CDJ's taking publication count as a significant measure of merit," — based on what? Your close analysis of the merits of each publication?

    The metablog version of Bloody Mary: Say "debutante" in a comments thread three times and… What will appear? A cogent argument? A publication in Nous?

    Reply
  36. Philippe Lemoine

    In case people are interested, I had a discussion with Bijan Parsia about CDJ's data on DN a few weeks ago (http://dailynous.com/2014/12/23/this-year-in-philosophical-intellectual-history/), where several of the hypotheses mentioned above were discussed in some details. I think it's fair to say that, although our analysis was pretty crude and we should therefore be careful, CDJ's data provide some prima facie evidence that women are advantaged on the job market.

    Of course, this doesn't say anything about what's happening before and after hiring and, even if we're only talking about what's happening at the hiring stage, this conclusion might be overturned after a more careful analysis is performed and more data about hiring is collected. But, at this point, the belief that women are being unfairly disadvantaged at the hiring stage in philosophy certainly seems unreasonable to me.

    Reply
  37. EB

    Parting shot: I like to tell my students that even if the prestige track doesn't work out because of money, or other reasons, like having a kid, taking care of a sick parent, who knows? you can always publish your way to the top (over time) with great articles and books. Well, not really, if many of those top jobs are being filled by people out of grad school with ZERO pubs (I'm sorry Brian but I am agog at that in today's competitive job market, I don't know, or care, what went on before). I'm not sure I can (or want to) defend a profession that would not reward a great, seasoned track-2 candidate with a position over someone who is just starting out.

    Reply
  38. Anon

    How are we supposed to reconcile the claim that 'women are advantaged on the job market' with the fact that women are being hired in close proportion to their numbers" (I don't have the exact data at the moment, but from what I recall the percentage of PhD graduates that are women is ~30%, and the percentage of job-getters who are women is also ~30%). Are we meant to conclude that the average female graduate is not as good a philosopher as the average male PhD candidate, and so if we're aiming for a meritocracy, we should try and eliminate the hiring advantage that women enjoy, and thus end up with a situation in which the hiring rates do not reflect the graduation rates?

    Reply
  39. Philosophy has 99 Problems (and Feminism isn't one of Them)

    BL COMMENT: "Feminist philosophers" and 'Anti-feminist philosopher" were both choices in the poll. Reasonably, neither came close to the top ten.

    You seem to be missing my point: I don’t care how they were ranked, it is irresponsible of you to offer “feminist philosophers” as a potential “issue” in philosophy. Nor is the situation helped by adding “Anti-feminist philosopher” to the list of options. The misogynist underemployed also complain that members of minority groups are taking their jobs. Would it be appropriate to have “black philosophers” and “anti-black philosophers” on your list? How one frames “the issues” matters.

    To #32: feminism encompasses many different positions. Not all feminists endorse affirmative action (although this one does).

    To the rest of the misogynists who insist that recent data show that women have an advantage on the job market: please defend your assumption that publications=merit. There are many things that count as qualifications on the job market, including, as I see it, one’s race and gender. If you want to insist that the number of publications, and only the number of publications, constitute merit, you need to defend this claim.

    It is simply amazing to me that underemployed white men are so whiny at this particular time in our history with high profile cases of sexual harassment in philosophy (or worse) making the news over the past year, and at a time when women hold roughly 20% of faculty positions in philosophy. Women *ought* to be hired in greater numbers in order to rectify this situation. However I am grateful for the candid “defenses” of the misogynistic position: I’m happy not to be burdened by feelings of sympathy for your plight; I will simply celebrate when my sistas dominate the market.

    BL COMMENT: It is you who have missed the point. Suppose there were a well-organized group of self-proclaimed "Marxist philosophers," with a blog and active in professional organizations, promoting a particular agenda. Some who object to that agenda, however wrongfully, might nonetheless consider Marxist philosophers a problem; conversely, the Marxist philosophers might think the anti-Marxist philosophers a problem. (You do know the difference between a political ideology or worldview and someone's race, yes?)

    You yourself are part of the current problem in the profession, with your eagerness to smear opponents as "misogynists" and to shut down discussion. Many people are now fed up with this mentality, even when sympathetic to other aspects of your point of view.

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  40. anonymous

    What CDJ's data shows is that, on average, men must publish more than women to have the same chance of getting a junior job. This is shown by CDJ's own analysis of her data for all hires, where women have fewer mean publications than men, and where men are filtered into non-TT jobs while women have the advantage for the TT jobs.

    Contrary to CDJ's hypothesis about the effects of men having a "publication advantage" from pre-TT employment, the metablog analysis of her spreadsheet restricted to the hires from no prior position shows the pro-female correlation is even stronger, and the median publication count for women drops to zero.

    Insofar as having more publications is part of merit, the market is overall favoring weaker candidates in virtue of their gender. For other criteria of merit, there is presently no data showing gender bias one way or another, certainly none vindicating feminist claims that women are disadvantaged and in need of a "market boost".

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  41. David Wallace

    To Anonymous @23:
    "What David Wallace "pointed out" was refuted on his own terms: the typical female hire, but not the typical male hire, has zero publications."

    I think what David Wallace "pointed out" was just that if you have to give a one-number summary of this kind of data, use the median, not the mean. (And if you want to talk about the *typical* X, use the mode, which is 0 in both cases.)

    The broader point is that if you want to have an extended discussion of a dataset, don't use a one-number summary at all: look at the data more systematically, and if you think they prove or disprove a hypothesis, formulate it properly and check it. With that in mind, here are the graphs: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8561203/DW%20placement%20data.pdf. A pretty plausible proxy for the hypothesis being discussed here is "new hires are more likely to have zero publications if they are women". That hypothesis looks pretty robust at first glance: we've got data sets of 100+ elements, so that we'd expect fluctuations in the percentages to be at the (square root of 1/100 =) 10% level or less, and the actual gap is 14%. Doing a more careful calculation (same link) supports that: the hypothesis that this is random noise gets disconfirmed at the 2-sigma level, or 3-sigma if you look at all new hires and not only at those with no previous job. (Bayesians rephrase as you see fit.) Contra CDJ's original suggestion ("vaguely recalled" in my earlier post, and I've now found the link), it doesn't seem to be the case that the M and F distributions just look similar except for a long tail of high publications by a few men. At first glance it also looks robust if you control by AOS, though I haven't done a quantitative check.

    I intend no wider comment, either about the reliability of this dataset or the overall implications.

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  42. Steven Hales

    Job market discussions frequently turn into criticisms of decision making criteria. You don't have to look hard to find blogosphere condemnations of the following as poor reasons to hire:

    1. source of PhD ("pedigree")
    2. letters of recommendation
    3. existence or quantity of publications
    4. quality of journal(s) where published
    5. a single writing sample
    6. interview performance

    Are these fallible? Sure. Can we find examples of great philosophers who lacked one or more? Definitely. But as Ken Taylor remarked on another thread, when faced with literally hundreds of applications, committees MUST make rapid, brutal decisions based on something. If not the preceding heuristics, then what? Committees aren't an omniscient deity capable of weighing all the factors and influences in someone's life and deciding their culpability. What's more, it's such a buyer's market that even second-tier schools can expect successful candidates to hit their marks in all of the above criteria and more. It's absurd, I know, but what are the realistic alternatives?

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  43. Michael B

    "I would have thought that philosophers, of all people, would have the detachment to see this."

    With due respect (no, really) this strikes me as an instance of superiority bias. Why on earth should someone, in virtue of a philosophy PhD, *of all people* have the detachment to see more clearly issues in one's own profession than, say, statisticians, nurses, bus drivers, mixed martial artists or what have you?

    Or, to misquote Feynman: "I believe a philosopher looking at a non-philosophical problem is just as dumb as the next guy."

    "The job market stats show that hired women have fewer publications than men, indeed a majority of women but only a minority of men had zero publications."

    Assuming the data collection methods were trouble free (I don't know, I haven't checked) the raw stats themselves don't "show" anything of interest: without a previously formulated null hypothesis to test, the mere numerical difference is quite irrelevant, no? Is the difference statistically significant? If so, is it real-world relevant? By how much would we expect to see a difference if there is no difference between the populations here?

    Otherwise this is like when news programs make a fuss about the economy going up or down, as a 'result' of some magic spell or other, by some absolute number that translates to a fraction of a percent and well within the bounds of randomness.

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  44. Michael B

    In the comments I see lots of inferences being drawn from descriptive statistics but little to no inferential statistics. Hmm.

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  45. David Wallace

    @Michael B: To borrow from my previous post to answer:

    – "without a previously formulated null hypothesis to test, the mere numerical difference is quite irrelevant, no?"

    Quite so. I suggested as a null hypothesis: male and female new-hire candidates have equal probability of getting hired with zero publications.

    – "Is the difference statistically significant?"

    Yes, at about 2 sigma (first-time hires only) or 3 sigma (all new hires)

    – "Is it real-world relevant?"

    I have no idea. (I have no dog in this fight; I'm just bored of people speculating qualitatively about data without doing the math.)

    – "By how much would we expect to see a difference if there is no difference between the populations here?"

    About 6 percentage points (first-time hires only) or 5 percentage points (all new hires), as against an actual gap of 14 percentage points, based on the normal approximation to the binomial distribution.

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  46. anonymous

    Good, David Wallace agrees with the overall point of the PM3B analysis of CDJ's data: the market has statistical biases favors women over men with regard to number of publications. Specifically, he agrees that the data robustly supports that "new hires are more likely to have zero publications if they are women"

    On the earlier question of whether the median is "similar" for women and men, for hires from no prior position (so bypassing CDJ's hypothesis about the source of differences in the means): is 0 similar to 1?

    The publication counts for both genders are exponential decays, so the modes (zero) are not revealing. The salient gender difference is that, for candidates hired for their first job, most males had publications while most females did not.

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  47. anonymous

    The null hypothesis, formulated by feminists and accepted as orthodoxy in the profession (see "discrimination against women" as a highly ranked "issue in the profession"), is that the market has a gender bias favoring men over women, with respect to objective criteria of merit such as number of publications.

    This hypthesis has been falsified by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, with her results further developed by an anoynmous metablogger and now David Wallace, all of whom found the opposite bias, favoring women over men in terms of publications couns. You can check her original data yourself, the spreadsheet is linked at the NewAPPS blogpost linked above.

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  48. Philippe Lemoine

    In response to #39, you are mistaken that in order to conclude that CDJ's data give prima facie evidence that women are advantaged on the job market, one has to assume that the number of publications is the only factor that counts in favor of a candidate. This is still the case even if, as is no doubt the case, there are other factors which helps a candidate on the market, such as the reputation of their PhD-granting institution, how good their letters of recommendation are, etc. It's the case as long as, other things being equal, having more publications counts in your favor on the job market.

    However, the fact that men have on average significantly more publications than women when they are hired, and that this is not because a handful of men have a very large number of publications, or because men are more likely to get a postdoc or a temporary position before they get a tenure-track job (see my discussion with Bijan Parsia and what David Wallace says above on those points), is only prima facie evidence that being a woman counts in your favor on the job market, because there are many things which could explain this difference in the average number of publications even if women are in fact not advantaged on the job market.

    For instance, it could be that the number of publications of successful applicants is negatively correlated to the reputation of their PhD granting institution, and that women are more likely to have received their PhD from a prestigious institution. This strikes me as unlikely, but I guess we could find out by having a closer look at CDJ's data. There are other possible explanations, including some which could not be tested by using only CDJ's data, since for instance it only contains information about successful applicants and doesn't tell us anything on the other applicants.

    All I'm saying is that, at this point, it seems unreasonable to assume that being a woman counts against you on the job market, since the data that are currently available show no sign of that and, in fact, provide some prima facie evidence – which may or may not be defeated as we do a more careful analysis of CDJ's data and collect more data about hiring – that being a woman counts in your favor on the job market. I really don't see how saying that makes me a misogynist.

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  49. anonymous

    "The misogynist underemployed also complain that members of minority groups are taking their jobs."

    The metablog antifeminists have described feminism as a "debutante club" for "posh, white women", but have cited race, along with socio-economic class, as genuine categories of disadvantage in the philosophy profession. Women, especially ones from high prestige graduate programs, are the most advantaged group in the junior job market even though they present themselves as needing a "market boost".

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  50. anonymous

    "it could be that the number of publications of successful applicants is negatively correlated to the reputation of their PhD granting institution, and that women are more likely to have received their PhD from a prestigious institution."

    This hypothesis was floated on PM3B and resulted in the refinement of the analysis of the data combining gender and prestige, the results for hires from no prior position are summarized in comment 2 above on alpha and beta males. Although publication count is negatively correlated with PhD pedigree, as per CDJ's original finding, the pro-female gender bias is robust across pedigree bias.

    Even low prestige females have fewer mean publications than high prestige males (and both have roughly twice the mean publications of the high prestige females).

    The most disadvantaged group, the low prestige males, have nearly three times the mean publications of the most advantaged group, the high prestige females.

    Reply

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