Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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  1. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  2. Keith Douglas's avatar

    Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…

  3. sahpa's avatar

    Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.

  4. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  5. Mark's avatar
  6. Mark Robert Taylor's avatar

    At the risk of self-advertising:… You claim “AI is unusual in degree, not in kind” and “It is not clear…

  7. F.E. Guerra-Pujol's avatar

    Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…

What we know about the underrepresentation of women in philosophy

Let's sum up:

1.  Women arrive at university less interested in philosophy than men, and that doesn't change as time goes on–indeed, it fairly closely tracks their representation among PhD graduates.

2.  The pseudo-science of "implicit bias" and "stereotype threat" (see also) do not appear to explain anything about the underrepresentation of women.  Indeed, it turns out that philosophers like Sally Haslanger and Jennifer Saul have regularly misrepresented the research.

3.  Women report, credibly, absurd amounts of sexual harassment and other unpleasant and demeaning treatment based on gender in both graduate school and after, behavior that is unprofessional and an unfair burden for women wishing to pursue philosophy to have to endure.  Regardless of its causal role in the underrepresentation of women in the profession (it's hard to see how it could not play some role!), the culture of tolerance for sexual harassment in philosophy has been disgraceful, but now seems to be ending.   This is long overdue, but it's a shame it has been accompanied at times by open contempt for fair process.

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