Different Voices or Perfect Storm: Why Are There So Few Women in Philosophy?

Abstract

Women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy.Although women garner a little more than half of the PhDs awarded in the United States, and about 53 percent of those awarded in the Arts and Humanities, 2 slightly fewer than 30 percent of doctorates in philosophy are awarded to women.3 And women's representation in the professoriate falls below that.4 Why is philosophy so exceptional in this regard?My aim in this paper is not to answer this question but to contrast two different frameworks for addressing it.I call one model "Different Voices" and the other "The Perfect Storm"; I'll argue that we ought to adopt the second model and that we ought to abandon the first.Why are there so few women in philosophy?Women who are in the field have been speculating about this for quite a while, but interest in the question has suddenly surged, engaging men now as well as women.5 Most recently, a paper addressing this issue by Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich has sparked intense controversy.6 Buckwalter and Stich claim to have found evidence of gender differences in people's responses to common philosophical thought-experiments, and they speculate that these differences may help account for the dearth of women in the field.Their idea is that if women have different intuitions about standard thought-experiments than men do, and if men dominate philosophy, then women studying philosophy may come to the conclusion-or be told explicitlythat they just don't "get" philosophy-that philosophy is not the subject for them.More precisely, Buckwalter and Stitch's suggestion is that women may be victims of a "selection effect" within philosophy.If agreement with the philosophical consensus is taken to be a sine qua non of philosophical ability, individuals with non-orthodox intuitions will be filtered out.If that consensus is forged within a community that is almost all-male, then it will be men's intuitions that will constitute the philosophical mainstream.If women, then, have systematically different intuitions from men's, then their intuitions will be less likely than men's to agree with mainstream opinion, and thus more likely to be filtered out.Women, in short, will be disproportionately selected against.Now this suggestion-that there's something about philosophy and something about women that makes the one alien to the other-is not new.To choose one notable example: Kant notoriously held that women were generally incapable of abstract thought, that women's faculties of understanding were merely "beautiful," not "sublime" like men's.For this reason, the idea of a woman philosopher bs_bs_banner

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