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Recent PhD placement data: women more likely than men to secure permanent positions within two years of the PhD

Brian Leiter

The data and various charts are here.  What I can't tell from this data is what is "held constant" when the authors say that women are more likely than men to get permanent posts all else equal.  For example, does this analysis "hold constant" the quality of the PhD program from which the graduates come?  I'm not sure.  If more women are graduating from strong programs, proportionally, than men, then the result wouldn't be surprising.   Comments are open for anyone who can clarify what's going on here.

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31 responses to “Recent PhD placement data: women more likely than men to secure permanent positions within two years of the PhD”

  1. Anonymous observer

    How about bias in hiring as a hypothesis for the 65% difference? Somehow that is not on the table as a serious option, although it is obvious to anyone in the profession that this a front-runner as a hypothesis. It is mentioned right at the end that they might look into this in the future, but who believes that this will happen in a serious way?

    BL COMMENT: They did mention affirmative action for female candidates, didn't they?

    Reply
  2. postdoc

    They do mention affirmative action as a possible explanation but it is last on the list. For many in the profession, especially those keeping tabs on appointments, this is pretty obviously the most plausible explanation.

    Reply
  3. Lexington

    My first blush take on the result is that the odds ratios quoted in Table 4, which shows women enjoy 65% greater odds of getting a permanent placement, controls for AOS, cohort, and institution from which the individual received a doctorate. Table 4 reflects Model 2, and that model in particular incorporates a within doctoral level institution comparison of individuals, presumably effectively controlling for doctoral level institution.

    I find it rather bizarre and telling that they offer up two hypotheses they will investigate — both of which preserve the idea that women are not given any special advantage — but don't plan to investigate a third hypothesis they throw in at the end, which would go directly to the question of whether women do indeed receive such advantages. One would think, given their mission, that if they had any confidence that women would turn out to be at a disadvantage, or even in no way at an advantage, this would be the very first thing they would investigate.

    And I find their hypothesis 2 puzzling. The model controls for AOS, so why do they expect that it may be important to find out which AOSes were most sought for by hiring programs? Is the idea that there might be a form of Simpson's paradox operating here?

    Reply
  4. Shane Wilkins

    On the APA page linked in the post, CDJ et al say, "In May 2016 we will add a brief qualitative survey for graduates. We will use linguistic analysis to compare these responses across graduates, connecting them to metadata on graduating institution, gender, graduation year, area of specialization, and placement type." If I'm reading this right, that should mean that the current data do not include information whether prestigious programs tend to graduate a larger proportion of female students, but that they hope to include this analysis soon, based upon survey data yet to be collected.

    I could imagine it being the case that more women than men graduate from prestigious programs. Suppose there is an affirmative action policy in place in graduate admissions that means female candidates are more likely to get into a better program than a male with equivalent qualifications. If so, then we could imagine getting in to a better graduate program might lead to more success on the job market down the line without there being an additional round of affirmative action at the hiring stage. But ultimately if we want to get a better explanation why women seem to be having a better time on the job market, we're going to need more data. So, I'd like to encourage recent PhDs and jobseekers to go to the page and sign up for the survey, so that we get a more fine-grained dataset. I've just done so myself.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous Finalist

    I can tell you that being on the market from a mid-range school and being a white male is challenging. I have had three on campus interviews in the past three years, and in the two times I have been a finalist a woman has beaten me with less publishing than myself. The other time, I was beaten by an African-American male colleague, also with less publishing accomplishments than myself at a tier-2 school VAP.

    BL COMMENT: Being on the job market now is tough for everyone. However, candidates need to get over the idea that you can measure the quality of the candidates by the volume of publishing: it isn't so, and never has been.

    Reply
  6. Eddie

    @BL: Might you be willing to turn your last sentence (everything after the "however") into a category with which posts are tagged? Or is this covered by "The less they know, the less they know it"?

    BL COMMENT: Definitely not covered by "the less they know, the less they know it," since the specific ignorance here is due to lack of experience and exposure to the process from the other side. It's also misinformation that is widely repeated on blogs, so I fault no one for being under that misapprehension. But perhaps I'm giving you a more serious answer than you wanted?

    Reply
  7. Lexington

    It's fair enough to say that in any individual pair of candidates, a better publication record is not necessarily an indication of better quality.

    But to say that across a broad class of candidates a better publication record means nothing with respect to quality is just wrong. One would think it rather obvious that, other things being equal, a candidate who has published more is of higher quality. And the natural assumption in a case like the present one, comparing genders on job placement, is that other things may be held to be equal — "other things" should typically average out in the statistical wash. Of course, some other explanation may account for difference in publication rates so that, in fact, across genders, this apparent signifier does not actually show what it would seem to — again, because other things are not equal, systematically.

    In the end, what's needed is some explanation of the lower publication rate of women who are hired. The obvious one is that they are indeed favored in the process due to affirmative action or a desire for diversity. This favoritism is what the paper by Williams and Ceci, linked to in the APA post, showed pretty convincingly for STEM positions — why should philosophy be different? There may be other explanations, but if they exist, and have any empirical basis, I certainly haven't heard of them.

    BL COMMENT: "One would think it rather obvious that, other things being equal, a candidate who has published more is of higher quality." This is false, and I see no argument for thinking it true. And I'm quite sure this is not how any hiring committee thinks, unless they don't actually read the work of candidates.

    Reply
  8. Anonymous Finalist

    And yes, I can concur in principle with your comment BL, and we can also note that some departments are so starved for diversity and women that the very need for diversity may blind just how structurally advantageous the climate is for those preferences to be working a tergo. It's at the very least plausible that the activist climate of philosophy might tilt these preference because the perceived benefit of diversity (regardless if one thinks diversity is intrinsically valuable) outweighs the all white men department. Publishing is, at least, one way to measure how prepared one is to contribute back to the profession at large lest we keep creating teachers of philosophy than those of us who think to contribute to it. Women might be structurally more advantaged to land permanent employment rather than someone like a straight white male. Then again, we also never talk about those jobs advertised in philosophy of race and feminism that almost guarantee that the advertising department in question wants with such an AOS.

    Reply
  9. US Correspondent

    Hello, Brian (and others). I'd be interested to hear any of your thoughts on the following abductive argument.

    1. Many search committees have a strong preference for hiring female candidates over male candidates.
    2. One would expect, given 1, that women would have an advantage over men in getting hired by these same search committees.
    3. If women have an advantage over men in getting hired by these same search committees, one would expect to find that women are disproportionately (to the ratios of applicants) hired over men.
    4. It turns out that women are, in fact, disproportionately hired over men.
    5. If women have an advantage over men in getting hired by these same search committees, one would expect to find that women need fewer strong publications than men do to impress those search committees.
    6. There is at least some prima facie evidence that 5 is true, because we know that women who are hired tend to have fewer publications overall than men who are hired.
    7. Therefore, there is a good prima facie reason for believing that women have an advantage over men in the job market.

    I'm not saying that this is an airtight argument. The reasoning would be invalidated by the discovery that, say, the average article that a woman publishes is vastly superior to the average article that a man publishes. It would also be invalidated by the discovery that the average woman who is admitted into a PhD program is far better at doing philosophy than the average man admitted into that same program. One can think of other apparently far-fetched explanations for the difference that don't entail that women have a big advantage over men in the job competition. But still, barring some good evidence for one or more of these rather extraordinary explanations, the most reasonable explanation seems to be the fact that women simply have an advantage over men in the process owing to the preference search committees tend to have toward hiring women. In fact, given that preference, it would be very surprising if search committees did not succeed in giving women such an advantage.

    What evidence do I have that there is such a preference? Quite simply, the fact that I have heard many people on search committees say to each other, and openly announce, that they would like to hire a female applicant for the job; the fact that I've often heard search committee members from other programs ask me specifically whether I know of any women I can recommend to them, since they are definitely looking to hire a woman, etc.

    Is this really such absurd reasoning for this prima facie conclusion? Wouldn't such reasoning be easily accepted in less politically loaded contexts? For instance, suppose I hear that a certain company strongly prefers to hire people with 5 years' experience, and I observe that the HR people say in their advertising that they are looking for people with 5 years' experience, and the evidence shows that they do indeed hire predominantly people with 5 years' experience. It still might be the case, admittedly, that it's just a coincidence that the people getting the jobs tend to have 5 years' experience. But wouldn't that be a dubious hypothesis, unless supported by good evidence? Isn't the prima facie expectation in such a case clearly that people who have 5 years' experience have an advantage?

    BL COMMENT: 2 quick points. Regarding your #5: they didn't control for strength of publications. More importantly, I'm not sure who, if anyone, is denying that some departments engage in affirmative action in hiring with regard to gender. Departments don't do it as much as some believe–it has much more effect on who gets interviewed than on who gets hired, but it still has some effect on hiring. If someone thinks affirmative action based on gender is wrongful or unjustified, then that arguments should be made.

    Reply
  10. Lexington

    Look, the point behind publication record being a sign of quality — even if a relatively weak one, and, again, other things being equal — is I should think, particularly true at the earliest stages of one's career, and perhaps especially at less distinguished institutions. A larger publication record early on is a sign of a greater propensity to continue publishing, and at a higher rate. Why would it be anything else? There are many, many philosophers at less distinguished institutions, and some at distinguished institutions, who simply don't publish enough to get tenure, or if they do publish enough to get tenure, don't publish much or indeed anything afterwards. Why wouldn't a rational committee take some notice of the size of the publication record of a candidate, other things being equal? Is the claim that they are, one and all, not rational, and, one and all, completely discount size of publication record?

    BL COMMITTEE: Because what matters is the quality of the work, and that's what a rational committee looks at. If someone has evidence that I'm wrong about this, please put it forward. But never in my experience have I ever heard anyone involved in a hiring process say, X has more publications than Y, let's interview X instead of Y since they're more qualified.

    Reply
  11. US Correspondent

    Hi, Brian. Thanks for your comment.

    Just to clarify: while I agree that there might not be serious pressure on departments to hire women over men, search committees now (in my experience) seem very keen to do it anyway. These sexually discriminatory preferences toward women seem to come from the SC members themselves, and there's rarely anything secret about it. I've had many conversations with people who tell me they're on search committees and say that they really hope that a good female candidate applies because they and their other committee and department members really want to hire a woman. I've been involved in hiring discussions at a couple of institutions in which someone openly said, "Candidate X would be great for the department. She has positive qualities A and B, and also, let's not forget that she's a woman", at which point everyone nods ostentatiously in agreement that this is a very important factor to them. The program where I did my PhD had an open policy that ensured every second TT hire they made was a woman, and they were also clear that this didn't preclude the other candidates from being women, also. On the other side of things, I've heard several people in the profession complain openly over drinks at the APA that Department D doesn't have that many women, and that they hired another man.

    Isn't it reasonable to conclude from all this that there is in fact a strong tendency toward hiring women, at least in many departments? Or do you think my experiences are extremely unusual nowadays?

    BL COMMENT: I don't think they're the norm, though I've no doubt they've all happened. At this point, there may be no norm, except that, in the US, due to "equal opportunity employment" requirements, search committees have to report the gender and racial breakdown of the candidates they have interviewed, which does mean that affirmative action is most visible at this stage.

    Reply
  12. Derek Bowman

    Dear fellow struggling job candidates: The entire system of academic training, hiring, employment, and publishing are all deeply fucked up. I'm sure it makes you feel better to think you have an explanation why you, in particular, have it so hard and why you, in particular, are extra put upon. But the energy that you're spending on this form of resentment and suspicion isn't doing you or anyone else any good.

    Reply
  13. Woman in philosophy

    In the same vein as this discussion, I thought you might find this Cambridge initiative interesting: https://exeternotion.com/2016/05/04/the-immoral-sciences-club-for-women-and-non-binary-people-in-philosophy/

    Reply
  14. US Correspondent

    @ Derek Bowman:

    I'm not on the job market, and am comfortably employed. i also don't think there's any 'suspicion' here about motives. As I've said, the preference for hiring women is loudly and proudly announced all over the place by the very people doing the hiring, to the approval of many. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up for discussion, but I hardly think it should be controversial that it's going on or that it's an important factor.

    Reply
  15. Gainfully employed

    US Correspondent is entirely right. When I was on the job market, I had an APA interview with my undergraduate alma mater. At the end of the interview, I was told, "I really enjoyed speaking with you, but I have to be honest. This was a courtesy interview because you are an alumnus. The Dean told us to hire a woman or the job will disappear. So you have no chance." They hired a woman and I never heard from them again. Maybe I'm a representative of the oppressive patriarchy and thus deserved it, but there's no mystery that I was dismissed for being the wrong gender.

    BL COMMENT: Nothing I said should be construed as a denial that this happens: of course it does.

    Reply
  16. Philippe Lemoine

    The authors of the report used a multilevel regression model, so to answer your question, the effect of gender estimated by the analysis does not result from the fact that women are more likely to do their PhD at stronger programs. (Which they may nevertheless be, although we can't tell from the information the authors of the post on the APA blog give.) As I noted on Daily Nous (http://dailynous.com/2016/05/03/gender-the-philosophy-job-market/#comment-89247), it isn't entirely clear — at least to me — what the model they used is exactly, but that much at least is clear.

    The first hypothesis they discuss, when you get rid of the speculation about the underlying mechanism, is that women are on average better candidates than men. As I argued elsewhere recently (http://dailynous.com/2016/04/15/philosophy-placement-data-and-analysis-an-update/), the first hypothesis is unlikely to explain the data even if it’s true and, as far as I can tell, the only data we have for the moment that directly bear on it speak against it. If people are interested in the details, they can read the comments on that post, especially my discussion with WP.

    The second hypothesis was initially kind of mysterious to me, but CDJ recently clarified what she and her co-authors meant on Daily Nous (http://dailynous.com/2016/05/03/gender-the-philosophy-job-market/#comment-89166), with a few other helpful precisions. If I understand correctly, candidates could declare more than one AOS, but only the first in the list was used to assign them to one of the 4 AOS-categories. The regression analysis controlled for AOS-categories, which are pretty broad, but not for AOS. The hypothesis is that, had they used another method to assign candidates to AOS-categories, the effect of gender would have disappeared. I think it's wildly implausible because 1) presumably only a relatively small proportion of candidates have declared AOS in more than one category so it's unlikely to substantially affect the result of the regression and 2) since the AOS declared by candidates are probably correlated the distribution of men and women across categories should not differ substantially depending on which AOS is used to assign categories.

    It could be that, had they used a more fine-grained classification of AOS, the effect of gender would have been smaller. But, for all we know, it could also have been larger and, in any case, that's apparently not the possibility they had in mind with the second hypothesis. It should be fairly easy to check if something like that might be the case, so hopefully they will do that soon. Even better, I think, they will release the data so that everyone can perform their own analyses.

    Finally, as I already noted in the past, the analysis probably underestimates the effect of gender since the model they used doesn't control for the number of publications and, based on the only data (which admittedly isn't ideal), it seems that men have on average more publications than women, even if you only count publications in top journals. (For a discussion of those data, see the comments on http://dailynous.com/2014/12/23/this-year-in-philosophical-intellectual-history/.)

    I'm assuming that, *other things being equal*, having more publications — at least in top journals — increases your chances of finding a permanent academic position. Frankly, I don't see how that could not be the case, though I have no idea *how much* it helps.

    First, I imagine that having publications in reputable journals help candidates make it past the first round, because at this stage hiring committees will presumably use anything they can to help them select the most promising candidates. Moreover, as Lexington already noted, a lot of departments probably also want to make sure that whoever they hire, that person will be able to get tenure. Now, the fact that someone has already published in good journals is a sign they can do it again, which must be reassuring on that score. Finally, the academic job market has become very international and based on what I have been told, in a lot of countries (particularly in Europe), hiring people who have demonstrated the ability to publish in reputable journals is almost a necessity at this point because of the role played by publications in securing funding.

    However, it wouldn't be surprising if things were different at top departments in the US, where some of those points, if not all, may not apply. In any case, for the assumption I'm making to be true, it's not necessary that it be true for every hiring committee, it just has to be true in enough of them.

    That being said, in the future, it would certainly be useful to include the number of publications in the analysis. It would not only allow us to confirm that I'm right, but also estimate how much it helps, if at all, to publish while in graduate school. Also, even if I'm wrong that, other things being equal, having more publications in good journals increases your chances on the job market, it seems reasonable to assume that the number of publications in reputable journals is at least somewhat correlated to the quality of a candidate. So, even if I'm wrong that the analysis published by CDJ and her team probably underestimates the effect of gender (i. e. because I'm wrong that, other things being equal, having more publications increases your chances), the fact that men have on average more publications than women, if indeed it's a fact, would still support the hypothesis that employers have a preference for women.

    So far, the only point I have seen anyone make that led me to reduce my confidence that employers had such a preference is the observation made by WP on Daily Nous (http://dailynous.com/2016/05/03/gender-the-philosophy-job-market/#comment-89184), who noted that the advantage of women seems to vary a lot across AOS-categories. I still think the hypothesis that employers have a preference for women is well supported by the evidence — it remains true that, when you control for AOS-category and year of graduation, women have a substantial advantage — but that's certainly a good point that should be explored further.

    Reply
  17. Eddie

    @BL: My previous comment was snarky but intended seriously. Thank you for sharing your view of the matter and for the serious explanation. I do think that there's a bit of willful ignorance involved, given the confidence and intensity that often accompany that specific belief (though perhaps people are just desperate for metrics of any sort). Even those who have not served on hiring committees have, if they are perceptive, the means with which to dispel this myth for themselves.

    Reply
  18. Derek Bowman

    The fact that these things happen – even with some regularity – does not negate my claim that there is an unhealthy suspicion that such gender preference is what explains one's not getting any individual job or any individual set of jobs. The same is true with prestige bias (which also certainly exists to at least some degree above and beyond whatever a justifiable 'prestige heuristic' might be). I know, both from way too much navel gazing and way too much time seeking solidarity and commiseration in blog comment sections, how common it is to look for "the" explanation why one is not getting *a* job, or why one didn't get *this* job. But except in some specific cases where one has specific information, there just isn't such a unifying explanation. Just look at the chart: "No permanent" is the most common outcome overall – including for women. (By the way, this is no picnic for women if it turns out that placement in prestigious and/or livable-wage nonpermanent positions is more heavily weighted toward men as has been suggested in the past; has that data been calculated/released?)

    So fixating on any individual factor as "the" reason for not obtaining a permanent job is, in most cases, both unhealthy and irrational. That is the most likely outcome for the average candidate, and it is guaranteed that more than half of candidates (including more than half of women!) will face it. Any given candidate's failure to get a permanent job is not an anomaly in need of explanation – even when you, as an individual candidate desperately desire such an explanation. That is the great scandal here that we should all be angry and concerned about.

    Reply
  19. Michael B

    "I find it rather bizarre and telling that they offer up two hypotheses they will investigate — both of which preserve the idea that women are not given any special advantage — but don't plan to investigate a third hypothesis they throw in at the end, which would go directly to the question of whether women do indeed receive such advantages."

    Don't we always start from a null hyopthesis of no difference? That, along with some assumptions about variation and distribution etc., is what allows us to get p-values, no? So we can still end up with evidence to reject that null hypothesis – which, to be fair, does not in and of itself provide any evidence for any particular alternative hypothesis. But then, we don't ever accept a null hypothesis either: we either reject it or fail to reject it.

    Genuine question – if we were to investigate the third hypothesis as quoted above, how might we frame that numerically, so that we can analyse it statistically? The null hypothesis here would be that what parameter equals what value?

    Reply
  20. US Correspondent

    Derek Bowman,

    It seems to me that there are two consistent argumentative approaches you might take. The first is to argue that people on the job market (who seem to make up a rather small percentage of your interlocutors, as far as I can tell) are just being paranoid in thinking that they have lost their chance at a position or had that chance seriously diminished owing to affirmative action, since no search committees actually set to hire a woman in any serious sense. To take that line, you will have to claim that people with stories like commenter 15 above, or like my stories, are either hallucinating or lying.

    The other consistent approach you might take is to concede that there are in fact men who are losing out to women in job competitions on the basis of 'reverse discrimination' or affirmative action, but that this is morally acceptable. To do that, you would have to make the case that the unfair treatment of these candidates is outweighed by the greater good that is achieved by preferentially hiring women in these cases.

    But you seem to be trying both strategies at once: you at the same time admit that "these things happen – even with some regularity", and then you go on to criticize people who (in some cases quite correctly) attribute their failure to get certain jobs to hiring biases against them as 'irrational'.

    If you concede that anti-male hiring biases exist 'with some regularity', wouldn't it be better to commiserate with people like Anonymous Finalist, but argue that what may have been his loss is all for the greater good, and that the anti-male hiring bias is for the best? That would at least not be an insult to his intelligence. If someone is allowed to cut ahead of me in line owing to an emergency, I would rather be told the reason for the different treatment than be accused of being unreasonable or psychologically unhealthy for noticing the trend.

    Reply
  21. Sci Guy

    If you look at the supplementary data from the study – available here:

    http://www.patricehazam.com/#!supplemental-material/c1mqf

    you can see the following:

    62.1 % of women in LEMM got permanent academic positions
    56 % of women in Sci, Log, and Math got permanent positions
    44.9 % of men in Sci, Log, and Math got permanent positions
    43.2 % of women in History got permanent positions
    41.4 % of men in Value theory got permanent positions
    40.7 % of women in Value theory got permanent positions
    39.5 % of men in LEMM got permanent positions
    36.2 % of men in History got permanent positions

    Reply
  22. Derek Bowman

    U.S. correspondent: If more than half of PhDs fail to secure permanent positions (in the studied time period), including more than half of women PhDs, then no matter how strong the pro-woman bais in hiring is, that can't be the main reason for most men that such bias is the reason *he* didn't secure a permanent position. Even if there were no preference for women, at most one man would have received any given position (perhaps a handful would have received offers). So for any given man and any given position, even if there is a significant pro-woman bias, that won't be the reason he didn't get a job. The most salient reason he didn't get a job will be that the job market if fucked up for everyone.

    In your ER analogy, I think we'd be much better served trying to either expand ER services or find other places for people to get their medical needs met than wishing that others – rather than me – were suffering from lack of care. I think that's true even if others with the same medical needs are wrongly being given preference over me, and I think it's all the more true if the preference for others is morally good or morally neutral.

    Reply
  23. Dan Dennis

    I too have heard staff saying they favour women candidates over men, and of formal (from administrations) and informal pressures to appoint at least as many women as men. I observe the following:

    If each department appoints at least as many women as men, and if one third of applicants are women, and if women candidates are of a similar standard to men candidates then at least a sixth extra women will be appointed than would have been appointed in the absence of this sex discrimination in favour of women, meaning women have at least a fifty per cent higher chance of landing a job than they would in the absence of this sex discrimination in favour of women.

    BL COMMENT: That's a lot of "if"s!

    Reply
  24. Enzo Rossi

    A question on a recurring side issue: why is it that PhD programme quality is considered a much more important proxy measure of candidates' abilities than publications? (This, by the way, applies much, much more strongly to US hiring in my experience.)

    Reply
  25. US Correspondent

    @ Derek Bowman:

    Nobody in this conversation, or in any other conversation I've seen about the matter, is saying that "the main reason for most men" that "*he* didn't secure a permanent position" is affirmative action.

    Absolutely nobody is saying that.

    There is a serious conversation to be had about whether introducing or maintaining *certain* affirmative action policies that favor women is fair *given the evidence we have about the current evidence about hiring practices already being biased toward women*. There are, I'm sure, good points to be made on either side of that issue, and it's an important one for us to discuss. However, we don't seem to be able to have that conversation without some ignorant, and perhaps willfully ignorant, people on your side of that conversation repeatedly engaging in outrageous straw man attacks, to the effect that anyone who questions the legitimacy of the ongoing push toward these non-merit-based considerations is arguing that the main reason that *most* men are not hired is affirmative action. Even worse, this is often coupled with a psychological ad hominem fallacy involving the characterization of anyone who raises the point as a disgruntled, unsuccessful job seeker who is just looking for someone to blame.

    Let's please do better than that and focus instead on the issue without trying to bury the issue beneath these well-worn fallacies.

    The main issue is not really whether it is true, for any particular candidate, that the main reason why he didn't get the position has to do with affirmative action. There are many cases of institutional harms that affect anyone to a slight degree even though they don't affect any single person to a noticeable degree. But just to be clear, there surely are many men whose reasons for not getting a position are adversely affected by these considerations. For instance, we know that there are many search committees that decide between two otherwise indistinguishably close candidates by automatically selecting the woman over the man. If I'm not mistaken, you yourself have advocated exactly that practice elsewhere. So let's suppose (not implausibly, since it's normally very difficult to distinguish between candidates that have already made it to the on-campus interview stage) that there are twenty close-call cases each year in which one of the candidates is male and the other is female. Without the policy we know is often used, and which you recommend, of choosing the woman automatically in such cases, we can presume that the search committee would have used some neutral decision-making method, perhaps looking at some trivial factor that both candidates would be equally likely to have, or perhaps flipping a coin. In such cases, the male candidate would win 10 times out of 20. But in fact, on the basis of your own recommendation, the man loses to the woman 20 times out of 20. Ergo, there alone are 10 men such that the main reason each one didn't get his position was that the department decided to go with your preferred affirmative action decision.

    Not only that, but there are many men who are in fact justified to various extents in believing that they are in fact just such men. Commenter #5 above knows that he was qualified enough to make it to several on-campus interviews, and routinely lost to women; and he also knows (because there's no secret about it) that committees often decide to make their final decisions on the basis of the sex of the candidate, and they invariably do this in the direction of favoring women over men. Hence, Commenter 5 has *some* good reason for suspecting that this factor, which he knows is in play in philosophy job interviews, could have been the decisive factor in at least *one* of his job competitions, and hence is somewhat likely to be the main reason why he is now unemployed. Moreover, Commenter 15 was told explicitly by someone on the search committee that the dean insisted that they hire a woman (a practice I, too, have heard about in several specific occasions from the mouths of search committee members I know). So Commenter 15 is apparently in an even better position to believe this about himself. It is surely unfair to dismiss these claims out of hand and to tell these and other people that they are just psychologically unhealthy and irrational for thinking these thoughts. But this is just what you say when you make the extreme claim that "for any given man and any given position, even if there is a significant pro-woman bias, that won't be the reason he didn't get a job." The job market is fucked up for everyone, but we're talking about finalists here and also people who would have been finalists had it not been for these policies.

    Finally, you've greatly distorted what I said about the ER case. I never claimed that people who don't get immediate attention because someone in greater distress is rushed in should wish "that others – rather than [themselves] – were suffering from lack of care." What an outrageous straw man attack! What I said, and I quote, was "If someone is allowed to cut ahead of me in line owing to an emergency, I would rather be told the reason for the different treatment than be accused of being unreasonable or psychologically unhealthy for noticing the trend."

    It's a very easy thing to repeatedly attack the caricatures of your interlocutors, and then moralize at them for being, as you put it, psychologically unhealthy and irrational. But doing so is preventing an important conversation from happening. Please read what I and others are saying before dismissing us for saying things we aren't saying. Thank you.

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  26. Derek Bowman

    U.S. Correspondent:
    Fair enough for many of your points. Though I will say that if you haven't seen anyone who thinks women have it easy, that pro-woman (or pro-minority) bias is among the primary reasons (white) male candidates struggle to get jobs, you must engage with wiser interlocutors than I. I have been told these things more than once (online and in person).

    But the – clearly unsuccessful – intention of my original comment was primarily to emphasize that solidarity is a more fitting (and, in my experience, psychologically healthier) response to one's struggles in a deeply dysfunctional job market.

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  27. John V. Karavitis

    Nonsense like this just goes to show you how politicized academia has become, and, regrettably, even Philosophy departments, whose members "should know better." This behavior is reverse discrimination, plain and simple, and will, in the long term, be to the detriment of academia. Preferential hiring of females now does nothing to erase past injustices, but rather continues the practice of injustice. Couldn't hiring decisions for faculty positions be done blindly, say, a roster of candidates whittled down by interacting over a computer terminal, rather than having initial interviews be face-to-face? John V. Karavitis

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  28. Phil Prof

    Not sure if anyone else points this out but if indeed it is correct as many suggest that philosophy as a field has been one of the least supportive of women and minorities in grad and undergrad programs historically and thus complete the PhD in lower percentage amounts relative to the number of men who attempt to do so (offhand I don't have any evidence to back that assumption up), then it would seem that those women that actually complete the PhD might be already stronger candidates compared to the average male candidate. If you combine this possible factor (stronger average candidates) with another factor (fewer numbers to start with and now even less) and add to that the embarrassment that departments have with disproportionately less underrepresented groups (i.e., reasons to implement affirmative action or at least "all things being equal, pick a female candidate and/or a minority), then this might account for a surge in female hiring. The women (few as they might be) applying to positions are going to be stronger on average than the men. The last factor (affirmative action) has been discussed but I wonder if the former (relatively stronger candidates) merits consideration. Side note: I was on a hiring committee last year at a community college (and along with an influential dean on the committee) was strongly motivated to hire a female candidate (all things being equal). Of about 70 applicants, only one female made the final 12 and after interviews did make it as one of three finalists. But we did end up hiring a white male as per the usual. Although we have no regrets, looking back the female candidate was relatively inexperienced teaching only a few years (something important at a teaching college) which hurt her on paper but was impressive by all accounts in her overall presentations and research which looks even more impressive the following year. Did she get to the final 3 in part by being the only female candidate? Or did she not get the final position because she was a female? I don't really know but I do think it helped her by being the only female candidate among the top 10. Turns out she declined to attend the final interview and took a TT job where she was teaching at (even though it was clear from my view of the committee members she would not have cracked the top 2 in any case). Not surprised she got hired somewhere else. But very surprised there were no other "very qualified" female candidates. Of the 70 applicants there were about 8 or 10 women and we had to throw out half of those applications because they didn't meet minimum quals (background in theology/divinity schools, etc. not philosophy). None of this experience of course is statistically significant or should be generalized about.

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  29. US Correspondent

    Thanks for conceding the point, Derek Bowman. I'm glad we seem to agree on that matter now.

    @ Phil Prof: I've seen this reasoning before, but so much of it is highly speculative.

    First, it is very far from clear that "philosophy as a field has been one of the least supportive of women and minorities in grad and undergrad programs historically." The research coming in on this issue seems to indicate that the explanation for lower numbers of women overall must be traced to a lack of interest among many women to take philosophy courses, either in freshman year or prior to starting college. While I think that there is good work to be done to encourage more women to consider taking philosophy, there just doesn't seem to be good support for the 'hostility to women' explanation over the alternatives. In fact, that explanation doesn't seem to account for the data.

    But *if* one were to start with the assumption – and it is an unfounded and dubious assumption at present, as far as the evidence shows so far – that philosophy is very hostile to women at the undergraduate and graduate levels, causing a massive exodus of women, then there would still be several different and plausible stories to choose between. Among them:

    1 – The hypothesized mass exodus of women from philosophy, if it existed, would knock out all the least capable women, leaving behind only the most capable, since they would not be driven away by any adversity. Hence, the average woman who makes it to the end would be far stronger than her average male counterpart.

    2 – The hypothesized mass exodus of women from philosophy, if it existed, would knock out all the least capable women, leaving behind only the *least* capable, since the more capable women have many better options outside of philosophy and only the less talented ones remain. Hence, the average woman who makes it to the end would be far *weaker* than her average male counterpart.

    3 – The hypothesized mass exodus of women from philosophy, it it existed, would thin out the number of women at all levels of capability, since there is no correlation between capability in the discipline and willingness to endure the hypothesized hostile climate for women that exists everywhere. Hence, the average women who makes it to the end is no different from her average male counterpart.

    Good evidence-based arguments could help us winnow these and other options down. But you and others haven't yet, as far as I've seen, present any evidence for preferring 1 over 2, 3, and others.

    Here's what we do know for a fact. Women on the market are, proportionally, getting far more jobs and interviews than men on the market. And yet the two factors anyone has so far looked at methodically to correlate with this — publication rates, and publication rates in top journals — show that the men being hired have, on average, far *more* publications, and *particularly* more in top journals. Those things, we know as matters of fact. We also know, as a matter of fact, that many search committees want to hire women over men, are under pressure from their departments and administrators to hire women over men, and sometimes openly tell candidates that they are inclined to hire a woman over a man.

    Given all these facts, it seems reasonable to conclude, defeasibly, that women are being hired at far higher rates than men because these search committee members aren't just saying that they would prefer to hire women over men, but actually do have those preferences and put them into action; and that the views expressed by people like Derek Bowman, Justin Weinberg, etc. and applauded by so many others are actually the views held by many people on search committees, who accordingly put them into action.

    It is also possible that all this is just illusory, and that what's really happening is this: there is, despite the evidence to the contrary, a massive exodus of female philosophy majors in the face of horrible, anti-women conditions in philosophy departments, leaving behind only the most philosophically capable women. These women, though they tend to be philosophical powerhouses who leave their male counterparts in the dust, tend to publish far less, particularly in the top journals. But the fewer things they do publish are of such a stellar quality that search committee members are blown away by how superior they are to the best male candidates for the same jobs, whose publication rates (particularly in top journals) may be higher, but whose quality and promise doesn't touch that of the female candidates. Moreover, these search committee members are making these assessments completely objectively, despite openly admitting their own preferences, and departmental preferences, and sometimes even pressure from deans to hire women over men.

    Yes, what I wrote in the above paragraph is logically consistent with the evidence we have so far. But isn't a much simpler explanation simply that the people who say they want to hire women over men, and are pressured to hire women over men, are in fact doing so? It explains the phenomena so easily without engaging in ad hoc speculation.

    What I'm saying is, sure, what you suggest is one possibility among many. But it hardly seems likely. If there's evidence for this possibility, then I'd like to see the evidence. In the absence of that, perhaps it's time to stop introducing more and more speculative epicycles to preserve the theory we've all come to accept, and consider that the theory is just wrong.

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  30. US Correspondent

    Sorry, 2 – should read "…would knock out all the MOST capable women…"

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  31. Adam Rigoni

    Hi Brian,

    I think it might interesting to see what people think about the discussion in this thread from long ago on the role of publications in hiring:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/the_thread_on_t.html

    A number of comments seem to think that the number of publications does matter at least at some stages in the hiring process. Further, many seem to think that publications should be given a larger role in the hiring process as a matter of fairness, which seems to be recurring theme here.

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