Peter Carruthers (Maryland) writes:
The recent discussion of the dearth of women in academic philosophy seemed to me, on reflection, to omit a crucial fact. There are just as few women among undergraduate majors (at least in my experience). The percentage of women majors here at Maryland has bounced around between about 25 and 30 over the last half-dozen years, even while our overall number of majors has doubled. This is very close to the percentage of women applicants we get for our graduate program (about 25%), which in turn is quite close to the percentage of women in the profession. If these figures generalize, it suggests that whatever is happening is happening right at the outset.
One possibility is that women are put off pursing a major where they perceive few women instructors. It might be a viciously confirming circle. A small piece of evidence against this, however, is that we did experiment with packing as many female instructors as we could into our intro classes over a three year period, with no discernable result.
Here is another hypothesis. Philosophers use the language of “argument” a lot. We tell our students that philosophy is all about learning how to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, that philosophy will increase their ability to argue well, and so on. But the word “argument” does double-duty as a label for conflict. When one’s parents argue, this is not generally a good thing. Moreover, “argument is war” is one of Lakoff and Johnson’s famous structural metaphors. We defend our position, attack our opponent’s assumptions and so on. Since women tend, on average, to be less aggressive and competitive than men, and to be more inclined to cooperation, then the way philosophers talk about their discipline might be putting them off.
The idea should be readily testable, if any experimental philosopher were inclined to take this up. Two groups of students in a large intro class could be given a promotional flyer describing the philosophy major. The only difference between the two groups would be that one flyer would use “argument” where the other would use “reason” (“philosophy is all about distinguishing good reasons from bad reasons” etc.). The students could be asked to score how attractive they think the philosophy major looks on the basis of the flyer. If there are significant differences between the two groups, then that might suggest that it would be worthwhile making an effort to adopt the language of reason over argument.
Thoughts from readers? As usual, signed comments will be strongly preferred.
