A long analysis from philosophy PhD student Philippe Lemoine (Cornell), but this was the bit I thought most striking:
[T[he hypothesis that women tend to be less interested in philosophy than men has some direct empirical support. For instance, a study from 2015 found some evidence that, even before their first philosophy course, women at the University of Sydney were already less interested in majoring than men. I also calculated that, according to a survey filled by more than 1.6 million students in the US between 2000 and 2005, among those who entered a four-year college with the intention of majoring in philosophy during that period, only 31% were female despite the fact that women made up 56% of the respondents. It’s true that, in 2012, another study had found that the proportion of women declined significantly between the population of philosophy introductory courses and the population of philosophy majors. Many people took that to be evidence that women are discouraged from majoring in philosophy after they experience a philosophy classroom, but since many if not most students take introductory philosophy courses to satisfy a requirement, this was clearly a mistake. Indeed, not only did that same study also find that men still outnumbered women in introductory philosophy courses, but it found no statistically significant decline in the proportion of women between the population of philosophy majors and the population of philosophy graduate students or between the population of philosophy graduate students and the population of philosophy faculty.
Yet another study based on a survey of 1,540 undergraduates at Georgia State University, which they filled at the end of their introduction to philosophy, showed that women found the course less interesting, were less interested in taking more philosophy courses or majoring in philosophy, thought philosophy was less relevant to their lives, etc. They said that at a time when they had only taken only one philosophy class, whose instructors were clearly interested in drawing women to the field, since they were conducting a study to understand why so few women were majoring in philosophy. Indeed, according to the survey, the women in the class felt the instructors, but also the men in the class, treated everyone with respect no matter their gender. In order to test whether the small number of women may have something to do with the fact that women showed less interest than men in philosophy, the instructors intervened by increasing the proportion of women on the syllabus after the first year, but it had no effect whatsoever. There is also nothing surprising about it, since it’s just a specific instance of the more general phenomenon that women have different occupational preferences than men, which is largely uncontroversial. Again, even among those who peddle the official narrative, few would dispute that women tend to be more interested in psychology than men. It’s only when you suggest that women might be less interested in philosophy than men that people start being uncomfortable with that kind of explanation.
Not only does the evidence I just discussed support the hypothesis that women are less interested in philosophy, but it’s also hard to reconcile with the official narrative, since it suggests that women are already less interested in philosophy before they have even taken any philosophy class. I understand that, for the people who promote that narrative, bias is a powerful factor, but they will have to forgive me if I continue to think that backward causation is not a thing… On the other hand, unlike the official narrative, the hypothesis that women are underrepresented because they tend to be less interested in philosophy explains the data extremely well. Indeed, as we have seen above, approximately 31% of the students about to enter college who declared the intention to major in philosophy between 2000 and 2005 were female. Now, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF), almost 28% of the people who received a PhD in philosophy between 2010 and 2015 were female. However, during that period, women only made up 46.3% of the people who received a PhD. When you account for that fact, based on the proportion of women among the students who declare the intention to major in philosophy when they enter college, you would only expect approximately 27% of the people who received a PhD in philosophy to be women, which is less than the actual proportion. Of course, by applying this correction, I may be in part accounting for bias against women that prevents them from getting a PhD, but if so this has nothing to do with philosophy in particular.
In fact, this is not just true of philosophy, it seems to be true across the various academic fields. I used the data about students in four-year colleges from the CIRP Freshman Survey, which asks more than 250,000 students every year what they plan to study as they enter college, as well as the data from the NSF about PhD recipients, to see what correlation there was between the women/men ratio of incoming freshmen who declared their intention to major in a field between 2000 and 2005 and the proportion of women who received a PhD in that field between 2010 and 2015. There was data about dozens of fields/majors, but it wasn’t always possible to match the data about majors from the survey to the data about PhD recipients from the NSF and the preparation of the data was pretty time-consuming, so I only compiled data for 21 fields. They include philosophy, mathematics, physics, history, psychology, biology, etc. The criteria I used to choose which fields were going to be included in the analysis were how easy it was to match the data from the survey to the data from the NSF, what proportion of the incoming freshmen declare their intention to major in them and how prestigious they are. I may have made a mistake, so if you want to check my analysis, I have uploaded the data here. If you want to include more fields/majors, you also have everything you need.
As it turns out, the women/men ratio of incoming freshmen who declared the intention to major in a field between 2000 and 2005 predicted the proportion of women who received a PhD in that field very well, which is clear on this graph:
The correlation between the women/men ratio and the proportion of women among the PhD recipients was a whopping 0.93, which means that the former explained approximately 87% of the variance in the latter. This is as strong a correlation as you are ever going to find in social scientific data. In fact, although I expected the correlation to be strong, even I didn’t think it would be that strong.
Thus, for the most part, the proportion of women in the various fields is already determined by the time students enter college. Of course, this doesn’t explain why women are underrepresented among PhD recipients across the board, which could have something to do with bias or some other form of injustice against women. (My guess is that it has a lot to do with the fact that, in order to get a PhD, women often have to delay motherhood, which many are not willing to do. Universities could probably do more to accommodate women who want to have a child while in graduate school, but it’s not that easy and, in any case, this is more complicated than people taking the work of women less seriously.) But even if bias or some other kind of injustice explains this fact, it seems to operate more or less equally across fields. In particular, you can see on the graph that philosophy is not an outlier, on the contrary. This should put to rest the narrative that philosophy is uniquely bad for women and that sexism discourage them to pursue a PhD in philosophy in a way it does not in other fields. Insofar as sexism discourages some women from pursuing a PhD in philosophy, it does not seem to do so any more than in other fields. Finally, given the huge variation in the proportion of women across fields, even if bias is a factor in the underrepresentation of women in academia as a whole (which is not clear), it’s presumably a relatively minor one.
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