Women in Philosophy:
Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and
Generational Change
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California
at Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521-0201
eschwitz
at domain ucr.edu
Carolyn Dicey Jennings
School of Social
Sciences and Humanities
University of California
at Merced
Merced, CA 95343
cjennings3
at domain ucmerced.edu
February 12, 2016
Women in Philosophy:
Quantitative Analyses of Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational
Change
Abstract:
We present several quantitative
analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and
social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation
has changed over time. Measures include
faculty lists from the Philosophical Gourmet Report, PhD job placement data
from the Academic Placement Data and Analysis project, the National Science
Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, conference programs of the American
Philosophical Association, authorship in elite philosophy journals, citation in
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
and extended discussion in abstracts from the Philosopher’s Index. Our data strongly support three conclusions:
(1) Gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy; (2)
ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer
to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women’s
involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s. However, by most measures, women’s
involvement and visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy has increased
only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the
1990s. We find mixed evidence on the
question of whether gender disparity is even more pronounced at the highest
level of visibility or prestige than at more moderate levels of visibility or
prestige.
Word Count: about 8000 words, plus 5
tables and 3 graphs
Women in Philosophy:
Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational
Change
1.
Introduction.
Women are half of the population, but
they do not occupy half of all full-time university faculty positions, publish
half of all academic journal articles, nor constitute half of the highest
social status members of academia.[1] The
last several decades have seen substantial progress toward gender parity in
most disciplines, but philosophy remains strikingly imbalanced in faculty
ratios and in citation patterns in leading philosophical journals.[2] The
persistent gender imbalance in philosophy is particularly noteworthy because
(a) feminism is an important subfield within philosophy and many philosophers
explicitly identify as feminist, suggesting that the discipline ought to be a
leader rather than a laggard in addressing gender issues; (b) most of the
humanities and social sciences have shifted much closer toward parity than has
philosophy, leaving philosophy with gender ratios more characteristic of
disciplines superficially very different, such as engineering and the physical
sciences; and (c) some measures suggest that progress toward gender parity in
philosophy has stopped or slowed since the 1980s.[3]
Previous work in the
sociology of academia suggests that gender ratios differ substantially between
subfields within academic disciplines, possibly with women more common in
subfields regarded as less prestigious.[4] Preliminary data suggest
that ethical, political, and social philosophy might be closer to gender parity
than other areas of philosophy, and many of the most prominent women
philosophers of the past hundred years have been known primarily for their work
in these areas (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Philippa
Foot, Martha Nussbaum, and Christine Korsgaard).[5]
Below we present data
from several sources on the prevalence and visibility of women in philosophy
over the past several decades. We focus on philosophy in the English-speaking
world, especially the United States. There is, we believe, a sociological
center of dominance in philosophy as practiced at universities in the United
States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. We will call this
sociological center mainstream Anglophone
philosophy, without intending any judgments about the quality of mainstream
Anglophone philosophical work compared to work in other languages or traditions
or outside of this sociologically defined mainstream. Visibility in mainstream
Anglophone philosophy can be measured in a variety of ways, among them
membership in highly ranked departments in the Philosophical Gourmet Report; publication
in and citation in journals that are viewed as “top” journals (e.g. Philosophical Review and Ethics, which tend to lead
journal-ranking polls on Anglophone philosophy blogs with large readerships
among professional philosophers); and citation in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
We aim to test four
hypotheses:
(1)
Confirming other recent work, gender disparity remains
large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, across several methods of measuring
women’s involvement or visibility.
(2)
Ethics, construed broadly to include social and
political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other areas of
philosophy.
(3)
The gender disparity in mainstream Anglophone
philosophy is even more pronounced at the highest levels of visibility or
prestige than at moderate levels of visibility or prestige.
(4)
Women’s involvement and visibility in mainstream
Anglophone philosophy has increased over time, but only slowly in the past few
decades. (We would regard a 10% increase over 40 years to be slow, whether it
is from 5% to 15% or 25% to 35%.)
2.
Analysis of the 2014 Philosophical Gourmet Report.
The Philosophical Gourmet Report
(PGR), edited by Brian Leiter and Berit Brogaard, is a survey of philosophy
faculty quality or reputation. Every few years hundreds of “research active”
philosophers are asked to numerically rate overall faculty quality at dozens of
PhD programs – programs that in the view of the editorial board stand a
reasonable chance of being among the top 50 in the U.S., the top 15 in Britain,
the top 5 in Canada, or the top 5 in Australasia. These numerical ratings are
averaged to create overall rankings.[6]
We examined the
faculty lists provided to the PGR evaluators in 2014 for all departments in the
United States (59 total departments), removing from the list faculty listed as
“cognate” or “part-time.” Subfield was determined by area of specialization
information available on department or faculty websites and sorted into four
categories: “Value Theory”, “Language, Epistemology, Mind, and Metaphysics”
(LEMM), “History and Traditions”, and “Science, Logic, and Math”. These
categories were chosen using the PhilPapers Taxonomy
from the PhilPapers Categorization Project (combining
the categories of “History of Western Philosophy” and “Philosophical
Traditions” into “History and Traditions”), and areas of
specialization were fit into subfields based on that taxonomy.[7]
Faculty whose work crossed subfields were classified based on their first
listed area of specialization. For example, if a faculty member listed “Ancient
Philosophy” and “Virtue Ethics” in that order, she would be classified under
History and Traditions; if she listed “Kant’s ethics”, she would be classified
under Value Theory. Gender was classified based on name, website photo, and
personal knowledge. In no case was gender judged to be intermediate or
indeterminable.
Of the 1104 analyzed
faculty, 25% (271) were women, a number roughly consistent with previous
estimates that women are about 21% of U.S. faculty in philosophy overall. The
distribution of women and men across different subfields was significantly
different (χ2 [3] = 31.0, p
< .001), as shown in Table 1. If we confine the analysis to the 258 faculty
at the top twelve[8]
ranked universities according to the 2014 PGR, the percentage of women is about
the same: 61/258 (24%).[9]
Table 1: Percentage of faculty in each
subfield who are women, among 2014 PGR-ranked faculty in the United States.
Subfield #
women # men % women
Value Theory 90 176 34%
Language, Epistemology, Mind, and
Metaphysics 65 266 20%
History and Traditions 78 185 30%
Science, Logic, and Math 38 206 16%
Value theorists constituted 22%
(56/258) of faculty at the top-twelve rated universities and 25% (210/846) of
faculty at the remaining universities, a difference in proportion that was not
statistically significant (z = -1.0, p = .31, all z’s two-tailed unless
otherwise specified). The mean PGR rating was 3.02 for faculty in the Value
Theory subfield and 3.12 for faculty in all other subfields, a statistically
marginal trend (t = -1.9, p = .06).
Table 2 displays the
data by academic rank. The different distributions of women and men in these
academic ranks was statistically significant (χ2
[2] = 23.1, p < .001), with a higher proportion of women at the rank of assistant
and associate professor than at the rank of full professor. The trend was
evident both in Value Theory (43% women among faculty at assistant rank, 55%
among faculty at associate, 26% among faculty at full) and in all other
subfields combined (36%, 22%, 18%).
Table 2: Percentage of faculty at each professional
rank who are women, among 2014 PGR-ranked faculty.
Rank # women #
men % women
Assistant professor 58 97 37%
Associate professor 72 180 29%
Full professor 141 556 20%
These data thus
support Hypothesis 1: At 25% women faculty, gender disparity among faculty at
PGR-ranked U.S. PhD programs is large and approximately in line with previous
estimates. Hypothesis 2 is also supported: Women were not proportionately
represented among the subfields, with the highest proportion in Value Theory
(34%) and the lowest proportion in Science, Logic, and Math (16%). Hypothesis
3, however, is not supported: 2014 PGR-rated PhD programs in the United States
do not appear to contain a lower percentage of women than U.S. faculty as a
whole, nor did we find evidence that the top 12 programs contain
proportionately fewer women than the other rated programs. The difference in
distribution between men and women with respect to faculty rank is consistent
with an increase in women recently entering the faculty (Hypothesis 4) but is
also consistent with higher attrition rates or lower promotion rates for women.
3. Analysis of PhD Job Placement Data,
2012-2015.
The Academic Placement Data and
Analysis project (APDA), directed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, maintains
placement information for PhD graduates from 146 English-language philosophy
programs around the world (the data for 128 of which are included here). This
information has been largely provided by the graduates themselves, placement
directors, and department chairs. Collected information includes name; area(s)
of specialization; graduation year and program; and placement institution,
type, and year. While the APDA database is the most complete record of
placement information for the field of philosophy, it nonetheless incomplete
for graduation years before 2012 and for some categories of data, such as
non-academic placements and temporary placements. Gender was determined by
first name, using an online gender probability generator (genderize.io) and the
cutoff of .6 probability to assign gender. For those
below the cutoff, gender was classified based on website photo and personal
knowledge. In 2% of cases (40/1802) gender was judged to be indeterminable or
non-binary. Those individuals were
excluded from further analysis. Area of specialization was grouped using the
same system used in section 2.[10]
Among recent
graduates with recorded academic placements (graduating between 2012 and 2015),
28% were women (424/1509), which is statistically somewhat higher than most
estimates of the overall percentage of women in philosophy faculty positions in
English-speaking countries (the 95% confidence interval of 424/1509 is 26% to
30%). Among recent graduates with permanent academic placements, 32% were women
(231/723, CI 29% to 35%), also higher, though not higher than the proportion of
women we found at the assistant professor rank in the PGR-ranked universities
discussed above (37%).
Area of
specialization was not consistently provided, so we had to leave subfield
unclassified for 25% of the dataset (449/1762). The most common reason for
missing subfield information was that the graduating program did not track this
information. Missing subfield information did appear to track PGR rating: Field
information was missing for 31% of individuals from unrated programs, compared
to 23% from PGR-rated programs (169/539 vs. 280/1223, z = 3.8, p < .001);
and among the rated programs, the mean PGR rating was 3.04 for graduates with
missing subfield information and 3.15 for all other graduates (t = -2.5, p =
.01). However, the difference between
the proportion of women and men with missing subfield information was not
statistically significant (23% vs. 26%, z = -1.5, p = .12). For those with
classified subfields, area of specialization was significantly different by
gender, but not as strikingly so as among PGR faculty (χ2 [3] = 8.4, p = .04). See Table 3.
Table 3: Percentage of graduates
in each subfield who are women, among 2012-2015 graduates in APDA database.
Subfield #
women # men % women
Value Theory 143 287 33%
Language, Epistemology, Mind, and
Metaphysics 92 288 24%
History and Traditions 94 231 29%
Science, Logic, and Math 48 130 27%
We did not see
evidence of gender differences based on the 2014 PGR rating of the PhD-granting
university. Among universities rated in the 2014 PGR,
the mean rating of the granting university was virtually the same for women and
men (3.14 vs. 3.12, t = -0.3, p = .74) as was the proportion of women among
graduates from PGR rated programs (28% of both groups).
Among PGR-rated
programs, we did not see a statistically significant tendency for certain subfields
to associate with more highly rated graduating departments (F [3, 939] = 1.2, p
= .30). However, graduates from unrated programs were less likely to specialize
in Language, Epistemology, Mind, and Metaphysics (14% vs. 35%) and more likely
to specialize in History and Traditions (45% vs. 17%) than were graduates from
rated programs; but the rates of specialization in Value Theory were similar
for unrated and rated institutions (36% vs. 31%).
Hypotheses
1 and 2 are thus supported: Gender disparities are large in this dataset, with
women disproportionately specializing in Value Theory. Hypothesis 3 is again
not supported: The percentages of women do not appear to change at the highest
levels of status. These data are consistent with, and perhaps support,
Hypothesis 4: If 28% of recent PhD graduates with recorded academic placements
are women, this might reflect a trend toward decreasing gender disparity, if
women comprise fewer than 25% of existing faculty in the relevant range of
hiring departments – though the unsystematic geographic mix of hiring
departments makes a strict comparison impossible.
In this section and
the last, we categorized philosophers according to the PhilPapers
taxonomy, focusing on its Value Theory subfield. Although most philosophers
working in Value Theory specialize in ethics broadly construed to include
applied ethics, normative ethics, meta-ethics, social and political philosophy,
and law, some work on aesthetics (in this data set, 18 out of 430 value
theorists), and others work on gender, race, and sexuality (14 out of 430) which
often but not always fits within ethics broadly construed. Given the small
numbers in each of those groups, this labeling issue does not make much overall
difference to the results above.
However, in the remaining sections we focus on ethics broadly construed,
excluding aesthetics and including gender, race, and sexuality only when those
directly pertain to ethics broadly construed.
4.
Survey of Earned Doctorates, 1973-2014.
The Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)
is a questionnaire distributed by the U.S. National Science Foundation to
doctorate recipients at all accredited U.S. universities, which draws response
rates over 90% annually. Publicly available data are published on the NSF
website for 2009-2014. Upon request, the NSF supplied us with data going back
to 1973. Available data include gender by subfield, with one subfield being
“philosophy” (1973-2014) and another (much smaller) “ethics” (2012-2014). For
analysis, we merged these two subfields. The large majority of philosophy PhD
recipients in the United States aim to enter careers teaching philosophy at
either the university or college level.[11]
For 2009-2014, 29% of
“philosophy” and “ethics” SED respondents who reported gender were women, in line
with the 28% of PhD placements who were women in a similar period in the
Anglophone-dominated (but not exclusively U.S.) dataset analyzed in Section 3
(811/2840, CI 27%-30%). In the same period, women received 51% of PhD degrees
in the humanities as a whole (16,330/31,734). However, philosophy was not
entirely alone among the humanities in its gender disparity: Among the 33
humanities categories, “music theory and composition” was even more gender
skewed at 22% women (127/587). The third most skewed humanities discipline was
“religion/religious studies, Jewish/Judaic studies”, at 34% women (646/1876).
Figure 1 shows
historical trends back to 1973.[12] A
linear regression predicting percentage of doctorates awarded to women by year
of award is significantly different from zero slope (t = 8.6, p < .001) but
the slope is still rather flat, with an increase of only 0.30% per year. Since
we had hypothesized that change in disparity might be slowing, we also tried
fitting a quadratic curve, displayed in black in Figure 1. The quadratic curve
does indeed fit much better than the linear, with a difference of 11.40 in the AICc scores (which penalize models with more parameters):
The AICc relative likelihood of the quadratic vs. the
linear is .996 to .004. In other words, the visually apparent flattening is
highly unlikely to be chance variation in a linear trend. (We use the quadratic
only to test for flattening, not to extrapolate beyond the measurement years.)
One intuitive way to see the slowing is to aggregate the data by decade: in
1973-1979 17% of U.S. philosophy PhDs went to women; in the 1980s, 22%; in the
1990s, 27%; in the 2000s, also 27%; and in 2010-2014, 28%.
Figure 1: Based on SED data. The gray line
is the best linear fit. The black line is the best quadratic fit.
These data confirm
Hypothesis 1: Gender disparity in philosophy remains large. Hypothesis 4 is
also confirmed: Disparity has decreased, but this decrease has slowed over
time.
5. American Philosophical Association
Gender Data.
The American Philosophical Association
(APA) is the main professional association of philosophy professors in the
United States (with substantial Canadian and other international involvement). In
2014 and 2015 it conducted demographic surveys of its members. In 2014, 4152
out of 9180 members responded with gender information (45% response rate).[13]
Among those, 983 (24%) were women and 1 responded with “something else.” In
2015, 3362 out of 8975 members responded (38% response rate), 805 (24%) women,
4 “something else”, and 19 “prefer not to answer.” Although these numbers are
similar to other estimates that support Hypothesis 1, reasons for caution
include (a) that women may be more or less likely than men to be APA members or
(b) that women may be more or less likely to respond to such a demographic
survey.
6. Appearance on American Philosophical
Association Programs, 1955-2015.
Long term temporal trends might also
be evident from patterns of participation in meetings of the American
Philosophical Association. By examining the roles women play in the program
(e.g. invited speaker, commenter, session chair), we
can also explore questions about prestige and visibility.
The APA contains
three divisions: Eastern, Central (formerly Western), and Pacific, each of
which meets separately, with participants from across the world. There is no
primary meeting of the entire APA. Meetings consist of a “main program”
organized by program committees and a “group program” separately organized by
subgroups of philosophers. Some of the main program sessions are “special
sessions” on issues like the teaching of philosophy or on the status of women
or ethnic minorities. The remaining sessions are focused on research topics in
philosophy. “Colloquium” sessions normally consist of submitted and refereed
papers, often by less senior faculty. Some “symposium” sessions are similarly
refereed, while others are invited. “Colloquium” sessions typically have only
one commentator; “symposium” sessions have longer talks with more than one
commentator. Other sessions are invited, normally featuring senior, visible
people in the profession. Some sessions are named, and typically regarded as
especially prestigious, such as the “Dewey Lectures” or the Presidential
addresses (each division has its own President). Also notable are “Author Meets
Critics” sessions, which feature a panel of invited critical treatments of a
recent book and a reply by the author. Every session has a “chair”, which
(despite the title) is a less visible and prestigious role than speaking or
commenting, normally confined to keeping the session on schedule and managing
the question queue.
We examined main
session programs for all three divisions from five sample years: 1955, 1975,
1995, and 2014-2015, excluding special sessions.[14] The gender of every program
participant was coded based on first name or personal knowledge, excluding
cases judged to be ambiguous, such as where only first initial was provided,
where the name was gender ambiguous (e.g. “Pat”), or names where gender
associations were unknown to the coder (e.g. “Lijun”).
Overall, 8% (240/3180) names were judged indeterminable, with a trend toward a
more indeterminability in the 2014-2015 data (10%:
177/1703; impressionistically, due to a higher rate of non-Anglophone names).
We sorted program role into five categories in what we judged to be decreasing
order of perceived prestige: (1) named lecture, author in author-meets-critics,
or symposium speaker with at least one commentator dedicated specifically to
her presentation; (2) non-colloquium speaker not in Category 1, including
critic in author-meets-critics, (3) non-colloquium commentator, (4) colloquium
speaker or commentator, (5) chair of any session. Finally, we classified each
participant as ethics (construed broadly to include political and social
philosophy, but not including other value theory fields, such as aesthetics),
non-ethics, or mixed/excluded (including intermediate topics such as philosophy
of action and philosophy of religion without an explicitly ethical component,
and including treatments of historical figures known for contributions both in
ethics and outside of ethics if the ethical or non-ethical focus was not
explicit). Thus, we could examine temporal trends in women’s involvement in APA
programs, both in ethics and in non-ethics, and whether women are more or less
likely to serve in prestigious roles on the program.
Figure 2 displays the
data on women’s overall involvement in ethics and non-ethics sessions in the
four time periods. As is evident from the figure, women’s involvement has
increased substantially since 1955 and 1975. Overall, women were 6% of program
participants in 1955 (7/121, excluding 5 indeterminable), 16% in 1975 (62/397,
excl. 20), 25% in 1995 (220/896, excl. 38), and 32% in 2014-2015 (481/1526,
excl. 177). By 2014-2015, 41% (206/500) of participants in ethics sessions were
women. The increase in women was statistically significant both for ethics and
non-ethics (correlating year 1955, etc., with gender = 1 for women and 0 for
men yields r = .18 in ethics, r = .13 in non-ethics, with both p values <
.001 [treating 2014 as 2015]). Women were statistically more likely to appear
in ethics roles than non-ethics roles in 1995 and 2015 (1955 Fisher’s exact p =
.09, two-tailed; 1975 z = -0.5, p = .64; 1995 and 2014-2015 z’s > 5.0, p’s
< .001).
Figure 1: Based on APA data. The vertical lines indicate 95% confidence
intervals.
Overall program role
data are displayed in Table 4, with 1955 and 1975 merged for presentation.
Chi-square analysis of 2014-2015 shows a statistically significant relationship
between gender and program role (χ2
[4] = 18.9, p = .001). In 2014-2015, women were more likely to appear as
invited speakers, but not in the highest prestige invitations, and as session
chairs (Categories 2 and 5), than to appear in the highest prestige lectures
and as colloquium speakers (Categories 1 and 4), but since this doesn’t map
neatly onto our initial hypothesis about prestige, and since it is not
consistent across the sampled years, we interpret the results cautiously.
Table 4: Percent of women in
different program roles, for APA meetings in sample years from 1955-2015.
Role 1955-1975 1995 2014-2015
_
Category 1 (most prestige) 5/34 (15%) 11/46
(24%) 27/99
(27%)
Category 2 4/63 (6%) 28/104 (27%)
117/314 (37%)
Category 3 8/61 (13%) 15/51 (29%)
29/96 (30%)
Category 4 38/256 (15%) 104/463 (22%) 155/597
(26%)
Category 5 (least prestige) 14/104 (13%) 62/232 (27%) 153/420 (36%)
These results compare
interestingly with the results of other measures. Overall APA main program
participation (excluding special sessions) was 32% women with a 95% confidence
interval from 29% to 34%. If the population of women in the profession is 28%
or less, as it would appear to be from our data in previous sections as well as
data from other investigators, then women are proportionately more likely to
appear in APA main programs than are men. Several past APA program committee
members have told us that they have made efforts to include more women on the
program. These data suggest that their efforts may have been successful,
perhaps especially in the invited parts of the program (all but Category 4,
which at least in recent years tends to be anonymously refereed). Another
possible explanation is greater interest in APA meetings among women than among
men.
These data confirm
Hypotheses 1 and 2 (gender disparity, but less in ethics), and provide mixed
results regarding Hypothesis 3 (that disparity is largest at the highest levels
of prestige). Hypothesis 4 is that women’s involvement has increased over time
but only slowly in the past few decades. These data confirm women’s increased
involvement. Whether the increase has been “slow” depends on whether an
increase from 16% to 32% over forty years (1975-2015) is slow.
7. Authorship in Five Elite Journals,
1954-2015.
To further examine temporal trends in visibility
at the highest levels of prestige, we examined authorship rates over time in
five elite journals. Three of the journals were Philosophical Review, Mind, and Journal of Philosophy, sometimes referred to as the “big three”
general philosophy journals. All three have been regarded as leading journals
since at least the early 20th century, and they tend to top informal polls of
journal prestige, such as polls on the Leiter Reports blog, sometimes alongside
relative newcomer Noûs
(e.g. Leiter 2013, 2015). Since these journals publish proportionately less in
ethics than in other areas of philosophy, we also include two elite ethics
journals, Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs, which
tend to top polls of ethics journals (e.g. Bradley 2005, Leiter 2009), although
Philosophy & Public Affairs has
only been publishing since 1972.
In December 2014, we
examined the names of all authors publishing articles, commentaries, or
responses (but not book reviews, editorial remarks, or retrospectives), in four
time periods: 1954-1955, 1974-1975, 1994-1995, and 2014-2015. (However, since
not all 2015 issues of Philosophical
Review and Journal of Philosophy
had been released at the time of data collection, we went back into late 2013
for these two journals to have a full two-year sample.) All articles in Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs were coded as “ethics.” Articles in
the other three were coded as either “ethics” or “non-ethics” depending on
article title or a brief skim of the article contents when the title was
ambiguous. Gender was coded based on first name or personal knowledge, or in
cases of uncertainty a brief web search for gender-identifying information such
as a gender-typical photo or references to the person as “him” or “her” in
discussions of that person’s work. In only 11 cases out of 1202 were we unable
to make a determination. We treated non-first-authors in the same manner as
first authors, but only 53 out of 1143 articles (5%) had more than one author.
Figure 3 displays the
results. Increases in the rates of women authors were statistically
significant, though small, both overall (r = .10, p = .001) and for ethics and
non-ethics considered separately (ethics r = .10, p = .03; non-ethics r = .08,
p = .04). Ethics authors were significantly more likely to be women in
1974-1975 and in 1994-1995 (26/161 vs. 13/192, z = 2.7, p = .006; 21/119 vs.
11/127, z = 2.1, p = .04), but no statistical difference was evident in the
earlier or later time samples (5/107 vs. 12/236, z = -0.2, p = .87; 18/119 vs.
14/130, z = 1.0, p = .31).
Figure 3: Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.
The 2014-2015 results
are strikingly low. Merging the ethics and non-ethics for analysis (which
probably somewhat overrepresents ethics compared to
philosophy as a whole), only 13% of authors were women (32/249). This is significantly
lower than even the more pessimistic estimates of the percentage of women in
the profession, with a 95% confidence interval from 9% to 18%, and these
percentages are vastly lower than the APA percentages, especially for ethics:
In 2014-2015, only 15% of authors publishing ethics in the most elite journals
were women, despite women constituting 41% of APA ethics session participants.
In this data set, little
change is evident since the 1970s. Given the large error bars and the dangers
of post-hoc analysis, we would interpret that fact cautiously. However, these
low and flat numbers since the 1970s are also consistent with data from
2002-2007 for these same journals, compiled by Sally Haslanger (2008).
Haslanger found 12% women authors in a selection of eight elite journals, and
13% in the five journals we have analyzed.
These data confirm
Hypothesis 1, that gender disparities in philosophy are high. They provide
mixed evidence for Hypothesis 2, with significantly less disparity in ethics
than in non-ethics for two of the four sampled time periods. They support
Hypothesis 3: Authorship in one of these journals plausibly constitutes a
higher level of visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than does
faculty membership (at least outside PGR-ranked departments), and at this high
level of visibility the percentage of women is lower than that in the
population of faculty as a whole. These data also support Hypothesis 4:
Disparity has decreased since the 1950s, but only slowly if at all since the
1970s.
8. Most-Cited Authors in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely viewed as the
premier resource for up-to-date literature reviews in mainstream Anglophone
philosophy. Our impression is that frequent citation in the SEP is a better
measure of visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy than are more
standard measures in the bibliometrics of other fields,
such as the ISI Web of Science database and Google Scholar. We will present
some confirmatory tests of our SEP measure below.
In summer 2014, we
downloaded the bibliographical section of every main entry from the SEP
(approximately 1400 encyclopedia entries, containing over 100,000 citations).
Looking only at first-authorship, we looked at authors who appeared at least
once in the bibliographies of at least twenty separate main entries (not
sub-entries), hand-separating authors with common names (e.g. “J. Cohen”),
hand-merging individuals who used different names in different periods of their
career (e.g. “Ruth Barcan” = “Ruth Marcus”), and
excluding authors born before 1900. In this way we generated a ranked list of
the 267 contemporary authors appearing as first author in the greatest number
of SEP front-page entries. We will call these the “most cited” authors in the
SEP. (We had been aiming for 250, but a large tie for rank 243 gave us 267
total. The full list was posted on Eric Schwitzgebel’s
blog, The Splintered Mind, and generated enough interest to result in a few
minor corrections. See Schwitzgebel 2014b for the full list.)
Partly based on
reader’s reactions, we believe this list has surface plausibility as an
approximate measure of visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. The top
ten in order are David Lewis, W.V.O. Quine, Hilary
Putnam, Donald Davidson, John Rawls, Saul Kripke, Bernard Williams, Robert Nozick, and (tied) Thomas Nagel and Martha Nussbaum.
Further evidence of the validity of this method as a measure of visibility or
prominence in the target social group is: (1) similar names appear near the top
of reputational polls on philosophy blogs, such as Leiter’s
(2015b) poll of “the most important Anglophone philosophers, 1945-2000” which
lists Quine, Kripke, Rawls, Lewis, and Putnam, in
that order; and (2) a good correlation between departments’ PGR rankings and
their rankings based upon the SEP citation numbers of their faculty (Leiter
2014).
Women are
underrepresented on this list. Only one woman appears in the top 50, Martha
Nussbaum (tied for 9th). Six more fill out the top hundred: Christine Korsgaard, G.E.M. Anscombe,
Elizabeth Anderson, Julia Annas, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Iris Marion Young.
Women constitute 10% of the total list (27/267). We classified philosophers on
this list as primarily known for their work in ethics (construed broadly to
include political and social philosophy as well as history of ethics) or not
primarily known for their work in ethics. Despite some close calls,[15]
most classifications were clear. Although women were only 6% of the
non-ethicists on this list (12/197), they were 21% of ethicists (15/70), a
difference large enough to be statistically significant even in this relatively
small sample (z = 3.0, p = .002; given the sample size and clear directional
hypotheses all proportion tests in this section are one-tailed to improve
power).
Table
5: Women among the most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Citation Rank ethicists non-ethicists
women men women men
1-48[16] 1 12 0 40
54-150[17] 6 22 3 67
152-267 8 21 9 78
We also noted the
birth year, usually based on biographical information available on the web, and
in a few cases estimated from other information such as year of BA, PhD, or
first publication (estimating 22 years for BA and 29 years for PhD or first
publication). The mean birth year for men was 1939, a bit earlier than women’s
mean birth year of 1945 (t = 2.4, p = .03), suggesting that women are a bit
better represented in the younger generation than in earlier generations. Based
on data from the Philosopher’s Index abstracts, analyzed in Schwitzgebel (2010;
see also below), philosophers appear to achieve peak influence around ages
55-70. If we look at philosophers born 1946 or later among the 267 most-cited
philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopedia – the most influential Anglophone philosophers
in the world, at or near the peak of their influence – 16% are women (17/107),
compared to 6% in the earlier generation born 1900-1945 (10/160, z = 2.4, p =
.008). Of these post-war women, 59% are ethicists (10/17), compared to only 21%
ethicists among men (19/90, z = 3.0, p = .001).
These data support
all four of our hypotheses. The percentage of women is small (Hypothesis 1); it
is greater in ethics (Hypothesis 2); it is lower at the highest levels of
visibility than at more moderate levels of visibility, both within these data
(top 50 vs. the rest) and comparing these data with the prevalence of women in
the profession as a whole (Hypothesis 3); and the percentages are increasing,
though perhaps only slowly (Hypothesis 4).
9.
Analysis of “he” and “she” in Selected Philosopher’s Index Abstracts,
1970-2015.
Another measure of visibility is the
mention of one’s name in article abstracts in the Philosopher’s Index, the standard source of
English-language philosophy abstracts since 1940 (though now facing competition
from PhilPapers). Schwitzgebel (2010) defines this as
“discussion” and analyzes the temporal course of the discussion rates of
selected prominent philosophers, finding (as mentioned above) peak discussion
typically around ages 55-70.
“Extended discussion”
might be operationalized as reference at least twice in the abstract of an
article, by either name or pronoun, suggesting a very high level of attention:
an article published primarily as a treatment of another philosopher’s work.
Outside of history of philosophy, such treatments are a small percentage of
articles. The nominative pronoun might be especially telling, since its
presence suggests that the person is being referred to repeatedly in
independent clauses. For example:
Later, Nussbaum gradually reconsidered
the notion of patriotism in texts that remained largely unknown and rarely
discussed. This article begins with a brief account of her shift from cosmopolitanism to
what she terms ‘a globally
sensitive patriotism,’ and the task assigned to education within this
framework....
This suggests a possible rough and
simple measure of the rates at which women receive this sort of discussion,
compared to men: Compare the ratio of “she” to “he” in philosophy abstracts,
then remove cases in which those words are used with generic intent (e.g. “If
the agent wouldn’t have done otherwise whether or not she could have….”) or
otherwise not referring to an individual philosopher whose work is being
discussed (e.g. reference to historical leaders or third-person reference to
the author him- or herself for abstracts written in the third person).
We searched the
Philosopher’s Index for all appearances of “she” or “he” from 1970 to 2015 in a
sample of ten ethics journals and ten general philosophy journals.[18]
This yielded a total of 876 ethics journal abstracts and 1445 non-ethics
abstracts. Limitation to abstracts in which “she” or “he” refers to an individual
philosopher reduced the totals to 620 in ethics and 932 in non-ethics. An
approximate total universe of abstracts was estimated by searching for “the” in
abstract field, which yielded about 6700 hits in the ethics journals during
this period and 11,600 in the non-ethics journals – thus only about 9% of
ethics abstracts and 8% of non-ethics abstracts met the criterion for
containing extended discussion of an individual philosopher. Being mentioned
multiple times in the abstract of a journal article is a high and unusual level
of attention in mainstream Anglophone philosophy.
Gender trends by
decade are displayed in Table 4. Consistent with the data from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at
this extremely high level of visibility the gender skew is very large,
especially in non-ethics and especially in the older generation. In the ten
selected non-ethics journals, from 1970s through the 1980s, 267 abstracts
contained extended discussion of the work of men and only 4 contained extended
discussion of the work of women. The numbers do appear to increase over time,
clearly so in the non-ethics journals (r = .14, p < .001) but with only
marginal statistical significance in the ethics journals (r = .07, p = .09).[19]
Merging the data from the 2010s, which might somewhat overrepresent
ethics relative to the profession as a whole, only 13% of the recipients of
extended discussion were women. Merging across the decades, women received
extended discussion more frequently in the ethics abstracts than in the non-ethics
abstracts (z = 3.2, p = .002).
Table 5: Extended discussion as
measured by use of “she” or “he” to refer to individual philosophers in the
abstracts of 10 selected ethics journals and 10 selected non-ethics journals,
1970-2015.
Decade Ethics Non-Ethics
#
she _ # he % she #
she # he % she
1970s 8 84 9% 4 129 3%
1980s 3 74 4% 0 137 0%
1990s 20 127 14% 9 180 5%
2000s 16 168 9% 16 213 7%
2010s 19 101 16% 27 217 11%
Given that the
philosophical canon was overwhelmingly male before the 20th century, we
conducted a second analysis removing pronouns referring to philosophers whose
primary work was done before 1900. (Frege, an
important borderline case, we classified as pre-20th century.) This resulted in
the removal of 364 abstracts (23% of the total) and did not have a large effect
on the results, with 20th-21st century women receiving 7% of extended
discussion in the 1970s (12/161) and still only 14% in the 2010s (44/305). The
95% confidence interval around this last number is 11%-19%, significantly lower
than the percentage of the women currently in the profession, but perhaps not
lower than the percentage several decades ago (see footnote 12). This data set
supports Hypotheses 1, 2, and 4: There’s a substantial gender disparity in targets
of extended philosophical discussion, more so in ethics, and with a slow
increase in the proportion of women over time. Hypothesis 3 is that the
disparity is more severe at the highest levels of visibility than at more
moderate levels of visibility. Whether this hypothesis receives support is
harder to assess, since philosophers are sometimes targeted for extended
discussion decades after their relevant work, so one might expect discussion
percentages to reflect a compromise between the percentage of currently active
women and percentages from a few decades previously.
10. Conclusion.
We began with four hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1 was that
gender disparity remains large in
mainstream Anglophone philosophy. This hypothesis was strongly supported. Women constituted 24% of U.S. PGR-ranked
faculty, 28% of recently placed PhD’s, 28% of recent philosophy PhD’s in the
U.S., 24% of APA members who reported their gender, 32% of recent APA program
participants, 13% of authors in five elite journals, 10% of the most-cited
contemporary authors in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and 14% of 20th-21st century philosophers
recently receiving extended discussion in the abstracts of 20 sampled journals.
Only one measure approached gender parity: women were 41% of participants in
APA ethics sessions in 2014-2015.
Hypothesis 2 was that
ethics, construed broadly to include
social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other
areas of philosophy. This hypothesis was also strongly supported. The proportion of women in ethics substantially
exceeded the proportion in other areas of philosophy among U.S. PGR-ranked
faculty, recent job placements, APA program participants, authorship in elite
journals, highly cited authors, and targets of extended journal article
discussion. Although the difference is not statistically significant for every
time sample in every measure, across the board it is a consistent story.
Hypothesis 3 was that at the highest levels of visibility or
prestige within mainstream Anglophone philosophy, gender disparity is even more
pronounced that at more moderate levels of visibility or prestige. Evidence
for this hypothesis was mixed. Contra
Hypothesis 3, the percentage of women faculty at PGR-ranked PhD departments was
similar to the percentage in the discipline as a whole, and the percentage
among the top-12 ranked programs was also similar. Also contra Hypothesis 3,
recently placed women did not tend to receive their degrees from lower-ranked
institutions than their male counterparts; nor were they disproportionately
likely to have less prestigious roles on the APA program. However, consistent
with Hypothesis 3, women were considerably less likely to have full professor rank
in PGR-ranked PhD departments than assistant or associate rank, were a
disproportionately small percentage of authors in elite journals (13%), were a
disproportionately small percentage of most-cited SEP authors (10%; 16% among
authors born 1946 or later), and perhaps were a disproportionately small
percentage of authors recently receiving extended discussion in journal
abstracts (14%).
Hypothesis 4 divides
into two sub-hypotheses: 4a, that women’s
involvement and visibility has increased over time, and 4b, that increase has been slow in the past few
decades. Hypothesis 4a received strong
support and Hypothesis 4b received
support. The PGR data perhaps support 4a if the presence of more women at
the assistant and associate professor level than at the full professor level is
interpreted as indicating youth rather than slower rates of promotion. (It
might well reflect both.) The APA data strongly support 4a but perhaps not 4b:
Women’s participation in APA programs has increased substantially in the past
few decades, at a pace that somewhat over our 10%-per-40-years criterion for
slowness. Elite journal authorship data support both 4a and 4b: Despite an
increase since the 1950s, rates of authorship appear to have flattened in the
low teens since the 1970s. Rates of extended discussion have likewise risen,
but slowly at best in ethics. Also supporting hypothesis 4a is the somewhat
younger mean birth year of women than men among authors most cited in the SEP.
Perhaps the clearest evidence for both 4a and 4b is the data from the Survey of
Earned Doctorates: The best-fitting quadratic curve shows a substantial
increase of the percentage of philosophy PhD’s awarded to women, from 17% in
the 1970s to 22% 1980s, but then flattening out around 27-28% from the 1990s to
the present.
We leave speculation
on causes and possible remedies to others. However we emphasize three features
of our findings that might be especially relevant to policy:
A. Journal editors
and conference organizers in ethics should not assume that a proportion of
women consistent with the proportion in philosophy as a whole (say, in the low
20%’s) is representative of the proportion of
available philosophers in ethics.
B. Although the
gender disparity in philosophy is large, it is even larger outside of ethics
than it is in ethics. Non-ethics fields might be in even more need of
intervention than would appear to be the case looking at the numbers in
philosophy as whole.
C. If it is true that
the 20th-century trend toward less gender disparity has slowed or stopped, then
current practices to encourage gender parity might not be enough to ensure
further progress toward that aim, and more assertive action might be required.[20]
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