A young scholar recently shared with me a referee report he received that was, in many ways, complimentary, although it ultimately recommended rejection. But here was the very first comment:
1. One of the first things I noticed is that not a single female author is being referenced or cited in this piece. Given that this is generally seen as problematic, I urge the author to make an effort to engage with some women scholars, such as [female professor X], who I believe wrote on [the topic of the essay] fairly recently.
Female professor X was not a philosopher, and her work was not actually relevant to the topic of the essay. Indeed, since I know something about this topic, I can't think of any female authors who have done relevant work. (I can think of one Black author who has done quite relevant work, but that wasn't the issue here.) If I were an editor of the journal for which a referee started his comments with something this irrelevant, I would never use that referee again. As I wrote recently:
[R]acial or demographic equity in citations is not a value in scholarship; truth and knowledge are the only values. If past racism has resulted in neglect of scholars who can contribute to truth and knowledge in a particular domain, then the demand should be to name those scholars so that they can be studied. But equity-qua--demographic-diversity per se is not a scholarly value. It has a stronger claim to be a value in pedagogy....
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