The Two-Body Problem August 21, 2008

Stanford,CA. August 20, 2008 – Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research presents its latest research,

Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know,

available for download at http://www.stanford.edu/group/gender/ResearchPrograms/DualCareer/index.html .

  

Dual-career issues are increasingly important in higher education today.  Over 70 percent of faculty are in dual-career relationships; more than a third are partnered with another academic.  This trend is particularly strong among women scientists and people in more junior positions.  As the number of women receiving Ph.D.s continues to rise, U.S. universities will see an increasing number of high quality candidates for faculty positions partnered with another academic.  This presents universities with a challenge, but also a great opportunity to access new candidates and diversify their faculty.

 

Based on a major survey of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty at thirteen leading US universities, plus interviews with administrators at eighteen universities, Dual-Career Academic Couples explores the impact of dual-career partnering on hiring, retention, professional attitudes, and work culture in the U.S. university sector.  It also makes recommendations for improving the way universities work with dual-career candidates and strengthen overall communication with their faculty on hiring and retention issues.  It is vital reading for anyone interested in the continuing strength and competitiveness of US universities.

 

Lead author Londa Schiebinger, Director of the Clayman Institute and Professor of the History of Science, welcomes questions and comments on the research at gender-email@stanford.edu

“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”** May 30, 2008

 

And here it is:  The AAUP’s the “2007-08 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession“. For those who don’t want to pore thru the whole thing, here are the “highlights”. Enjoy! ***

 

Have you been wondering whether you’re fairly paid compared  to the guys?  Whether women are fairly represented?  What happened to all those who don’t identify happily as one or the other?  Have you really, really, wondered?  After all, you should have been able to predict these answers:  No.  No.  Everyone is male or female.

 

But have a look.  Warning:  the details are depressing. !

**Thanks to Percy Bysshe Shelley

***hat tip to the PJMB

Congratulations… May 11, 2008

… to Stoat and Buffy the Patriarchy Slayer, on their shiny new jobs!

Helping Philosophy Job-Seekers February 5, 2008

There’s been a lot of talk (Other than FP, here and here, for example) about the problems of APA interviews, one of the most significant being the huge financial cost to job-seekers of attending the APA. I’ve suggested that we should consider ditching the APA interviews. But, as many on the SWIP mailing list have pointed out, we should also do something to help job-seekers as long as so many of them are forced to attend the APA. As a result, Eastern SWIP (US) is setting up a fund to help philosophy job seekers attend the APA.  Here is a description:

ESWIP is now accepting donations to help defray travel costs for graduate students attending the Eastern APA’s December conferences. Eligible graduate students will be able to show they will be interviewing at the APA. Procedures for fielding applications and distributing the funds are to be determined.  

If you’d like to donate, go here.

Why DO We Do The Job Market This Way? January 17, 2008

There’s been a great discussion lately on SWIP-L (US SWIP mailing list, but anyone can join it) about how to get and keep more women in philosophy. Loads of great stuff to take up there, and hopefully we’ll get to all of it eventually. But I wanted to pull out one suggestion from Shelley Tremain, which I think is absolutely on target. (What follows is my words, though, not hers.) The point, put very succinctly, is that the way we (at least in the US) do the job market in philosophy is TERRIBLE. It’s terrible not just for women but for anyone who doesn’t have a lot of disposable cash. Unemployed philosophers, we all know, do not in general have a lot of money. And yet:

The standard demand is that every applicant post a vast and heavy dossier containing writing samples, etc. This gets very expensive, and even more so (obviously) for non-US applicants. Much of this material, we all know, doesn’t even get read. What gets read is, at best, the stuff from people who make it past the first cut, and probably less than that. Given that email is much faster and more reliable, and given that we all supposedly care about the environment, it’s unconscionable not to allow electronic applications. If we can manage that for grad school applications, etc, surely we can manage it for jobs. Yes, this means that receiving departments will have to do the work of and pay the cost of printing all those dossiers. But this cost will have to fall on someone, and can we really justify putting it on some of the most disadvantaged people in our field (the unemployed)? Besides, we’re all increasingly used to reading things online rather than printing them, so printing costs may be lessened not only by the fact that not everything needs reading, but also by the fact that we can read without printing.

APA interviews: Why do we insist on these? Think about it: we’re asking UNEMPLOYED people to spend hundreds of dollars to get to the APA, then hundreds more on accommodation. Moreover, I’ve never met anyone actually prepared to give a rousing defense of the usefulness of APA interviews. In fact, I seem to recall lots of studies showing that interviews lead to people making poor hiring judgments. (Anyone have a reference?) Certainly, it seems to me that being good at APA interviews is not a great predictor of one’s future in philosophy. (I’m pretty sure I’d think this even if I wasn’t totally crap at APA interviews.) And, aside from economic equity and effectiveness issues, let’s at least give another passing thought to air miles. If people do think it’s useful to have a large number of initial screening interviews, why not allow phone interviews?

Current and recent job applicants: What else do you think would improve the process?

The Future State of Equality in Philosophy January 17, 2008

As some of you may know, in the US many philosopers tend to get their jobs by applying for interviews at a large annual meeting of the American Philosphical Association. There are sometimes as many as three hundred positions up for grabs, and for those trying to get jobs, the whole process of applying and interviewing is fraught and unpleasant. This year, this experience has been chartered, in blog form, by some anonymous grad students(see here).

Much of the blog is amusing, often well observed, and highlights just how looking for a job in philosophy affects you (it sends you crazy). Some of the recent posts have started to look at just what it means to be a women or a minority going through the APA job market. Indeed, they even talk about Sally Haslanger’s recent paper on women in philosophy. The most interesting posts are this one, and this one. Sadly, part of what is interesting about them is the comments they generate.

What you find is a lot of white male philosophers - presumably grad students looking for jobs - complaining that women and minorities who get these jobs are doing so purely by dint of their gender or race and at the expense of their more qualified white male counterparts (”Its reverse discrimination I tell ya”).  In one or two cases, people name black philosophers at top institutions, decry the value of their work and openly suggest that the person holds that post purely because they’re black, and it looks good if the department is ethnically diverse. You will even find the term “I’m not racist, but…”. And of course there is the age old “girls can’t do metaphysics” plum - the real reason women aren’t getting jobs easily and need “reverse discrimination” to help them out is because hard-core philosophy is abstract, and women prefer things with material results.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of commenters point out how sexist and racist this all is, and there is alway trolling to take into account, but all the same, I can’t help feeling a bit depressed by it. We know things were bad for women and minorities in philosophy thirty or more years ago. We also know from Sally Haslanger’s paper that they aren’t all that good now. But reading some of the comments coming from those that aspire to staff philosophy departments for the next thirty years, the future doesn’t look all that rosey either.

I’m probably just over-reacting. But have a look at the comments and see what you think.

Women in the boardroom January 11, 2008

This story from the BBC is interesting. A few years ago, Norway, which already had a reasonably high number of women holding top executive jobs, introduced a law which said listed companies would be closed if they didn’t have women making up 40% of their executive boards. They were given until January 1st 2008 to comply. Well, that deadline has passed and it seems very nearly all have managed to comply. Of course, 40% is still not enough, but I’m impressed.As the article shows, there are complaints about this from the companies - “we should be able to choose on c.v.s not gender”, ” executive teams must be very carefully balanced, and worrying about gender just makes teams unbalanced and puts business at risk” - but there are counters made to these complaints in the article too. Looking at the c.v.s of the women recruited suggests that the government may have done these businesses a serious favour.There are still worries though. For instance, there has been a brain drain to the private sector meaning there are now fewer women at the executive level in the public sector. I guess the obvious solution is to introduce legislation giving the public sector five years to recruit women to its top level posts.Any thoughts on this? Some problems aside, legislation seems to have been effective for Norway. What do people think of it as a solution?

‘Tis the season December 22, 2007

For last minute job-market panic.  If anyone would like some last minute advice, feel free to ask in the comments thread here.  We can’t make the job market a good, sane place where people are treated as well as they deserve.  But we can try to give some advice on how to cope with the way it actually is.  So do feel free to ask, and we’ll try!  My big tip for anyone on the job market:  get *away* from the damn hotel.  Spend as little time as possible hanging out with all the other incredibly stressed people who are trying to impress.   Go to a museum, go for a walk, do *anything* other than hang out at that hotel.

Women and Minorities in Philosophy December 14, 2007

There’s currently a huge amount of momentum around the issue of improving numbers of women and minorities in philosophy.  A major catalyst for this has been Sally Haslanger’s incredibly important paper on the topic.  I know that many women just starting out in philosophy found that paper a very depressing read.  But the extremely good news is that it’s serving as a real catalyst for discussion and action, and there’s actually a lot of optimism and energy. There’s a nice example in this post from Evelyn Brister:

In the last decade, at least half of U.S. college graduates have been women. But less than a third of philosophy majors have been women. Women have not reached workplace equity at the beginning of the 21st century, but there are only a few places and ways in which they are not reaching educational parity. Philosophy—the discipline that takes as its subjects ethics, justice, consistency, and self-reflection—is one of those places.What does this gender inequality indicate about our discipline? Some have taken it to indicate that the material itself is gender-biased, that the methods of argumentation reflect masculine psychology, or that philosophy is a bastion of cultural traditionalism that incubates sexist practices.That assessment is too negative, in my opinion. As an optimist, a meliorist, and a pragmatist, I think that it indicates first and foremost that philosophers, unlike other analytic disciplines, have not made gender parity a priority.       

Brister argues for greater attention to undergraduate recruitment and retention. If you have thoughts on this, head over to her post and share them! Sharon Crasnow suggests that those of us from under-represented groups who have persevered or even thrived in philosophy should reflect on what helped us to do this and to talk about this. If you have stories on this to share, go tell Sharon. There are also some very important data collection efforts getting underway– more on those in a later post.

One thing that’s struck me is that there actually are a lot of genuinely well-meaning people in philosophy who would like to improve recruitment and retention of women and minorities in philosophy, at all levels, but who need some guidance about how to do so. I’m going to be working on providing a document with such guidance, and would appreciate any suggestions you may have. One thing I’d particularly like to hear about is what sorts of techniques actually help one to correct against the very unconscious biases that Haslanger and Valian have drawn our attention to. But I’m really interested in hearing about any ideas you may have– or reports of efforts, even those that haven’t worked. Please put them in the comments!

Note: Categories have been updated as a result of comments.

The APA approaches… December 5, 2007

It’s the season when philosophers on the job market are getting phone calls and finding out whether they have interviews at the upcoming American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting, a.k.a. the jobs conference.  It’s an awful month, and the stresses abound (old philosophers can enjoy flashbacks and young philosophers can get an eyeful of the oozing stress here).  For feminist philosophers, this magical time of year is added to by the eternal question as to how feminist one can be at the APA.

My advice of the day: Do be yourself when it comes to your philosophy.  I’m not saying to be yourself in every respect, since job interviews are not the best place to moan over your aching feet, or complain about your lousy holiday party.  But in my limited experience, your feminism is probably somewhat evident from your application materials, which they’ve already read if they’re sitting in the ballroom with you.  Don’t worry about it, don’t try to hide it, and don’t overthink what you believe they want to hear.  They may have to live with you, and you with them, for years to come.  Best we all know each other now!

 Questions about the APA, the feminism, and the market? 

Philosophy Jobs Wiki November 15, 2007

is here.  Looks like a useful resource.  What it seems to be is a list of jobs available, to which status updates (e.g. interviews scheduled) will be added. You have to go elsewhere to get e.g. addresses to send your application to. But it’s still a useful survey of what’s out there, to make sure you don’t miss anything.  Via Thoughts Arguments and Rants.