Sophia Wong has posted a short essay on “how to mentor someone who doesn’t look like you”, but as she notes the issues are much broader than those related to appearance– how, for example do you mentor a student with kids if you don’t have kids? Or a trans person if you’re not trans? A disabled person if you’re not disabled? Since under-represented groups *are* under-represented, people from the better represented groups need to do some thinking about how to be good mentors to those unlike them. And Wong lists some simple, useful tips. Go check it out!
Conference: Embodiment and Identity March 20, 2008
Keynote speaker: Linda Alcoff
May 22nd - 23rd 2008
This conference aims to explore the role the body plays in constituting aspects of our individual and social identity. The claim that biology fixes identity has been hotly contested in recent decades, but its apparent abandonment has led to intense theoretical debate over the role of the body in constituting both individual subjectivity and categories of social identity. We will be focusing particularly on gendered, cultural and racial identity, disability and identity, and identities reached by degrees of bodily modification. In each case attention will be paid to the role of social others in constituting the meaning and recognition bestowed on bodily physiognomies. The common assumption that such categories of identity are required for social participation, political agency and constructions of subjectivity, will be subjected to critical scrutiny.
Conference webpage, including booking form, can be found here.
Carnival Time!! March 1, 2008
The 54th Carnival is up. It is takes in a number of countries on a trip around the world.
And we’re proud to see a piece by our own Jender in it.
Enjoy!
Women of Color and the Academy February 20, 2008
Campus Lockdown:
Women of Color Negotiating the Academic Industrial Complex
The Campus Lockdown conference will center women of color in the academic industrial complex.
We will consider its structural constraints, as well as the implications of our scholarship.
Saturday, March 15, 200810:30 - 5:00pmMichigan UnionUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Speakers include:
- Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
- Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz (via teleconference)
- Rosa Linda Fregoso, University of Southern California
- Ruth Gilmore, University of Southern California
- Fred Moten, Duke University
- Clarissa Rojas, San Francisco State University
- Haunani-Kay Trask, University of Hawai’i
Schedule at a glance:
10:30 - 12:00 Panel I: Women of Color in the Academic Industrial Complex
1:30 - 3:30 Panel II: Why Women of Color Scholarship? Social Justice, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies
3:45 - 5:00 Closing Event
The registration deadline is February 29, 2008. For more information & to register online, please visit http://www.woclockdown.org/
Women in Philosophy February 12, 2008
For women the philosophy profession has real problems, starting with problems of exclusion. Perhaps foolishly optimistically, I’ve thought that making the problem more visible would help.
And I’ll confess upfront: My idea of fun at an APA would be to combine the style of a Cristo and Jeanne Claude project with a philosophical version of the Guerrilla’s Girls statement. Not that anyone at an APA meeting would notice, so a bunch of us might have to put on some sort of costume (from “Cats!”) and perhaps act a bit menacing in the hall ways.
OK, maybe not that. Still, see if you can get some ideas from this:
And for Christo and Jeanne Claude:
see the Reichstag wrapped in silver cloth:
Or The Gates in Central Park:
Women, Work and the Academy January 19, 2008
How do discriminatory attitudes and practices get so embedded in the academy that we find ourselves still struggling against them after decades of efforts to eradicate them? A pamphlet, Women, Work, and the Academy, written by Alison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen and Gisela Fosado, brings very recent research to bear on these issues.
The pamphlet grew out of a conference held at Barnard shortly after Summers infamous remark. The conference website is also a wonderful resource. Note the video of the keynote panel and the summaries of presenters’ remarks.
Anyone who wants to understand academic discrimination and think about effective tactics against it should read these resources carefully.
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.
Under-Represented Groups and Stereotype Threat January 7, 2008
There has been a lot of excellent discussion lately about the under-representation of certain groups in philosophy, and what can be done about it. (This post gives links to some of it.) One force which is very likely to play a role in this (both as partial cause and effect) is Stereotype Threat. Stereotype Threat is a very well-confirmed phenomenon, in which people from groups stereotypically expected to perform badly on a task perform in stereotype-confirming ways if they are reminded of their group membership. (See Stoat’s post here.) For example, women asked to indicate their sex at the beginning of a math exam do worse on the exam than women not asked to do this. It’s not hard to see how this could have effects in philosophy. Women are stereotypically bad at e.g. logic, so being reminded of their sex could worsen their logic performance. Surely, you may argue, nobody asks women to indicate their sex at the top of a logic exam. Absolutely right, but there’s more than one way to be reminded of one’s sex, and being one of very few women in a room certainly has that effect. (As does being in a room full of people who go to men-only events together, hearing the phrase ‘lady academic’, being told that one is ‘an affirmative action hire’, to cite anecdotes from recent comments. For more on the way this works, see a post from JJ.) I use women as my example, but there are similar destructive stereotypes about other groups. It’s heartening to read, then, at Mixing Memory, that there are some very easy and effective ways to combat Stereotype Threat. Here’s one example:
Good et al. had advanced college calculus students take a practice exam that they were told would test their readiness for the upcoming real exam, and would also get them extra credit based on their score. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the reduced-threat condition, in which they were told that the exam had been thoroughly tested, and had shown no gender differences, and the control condition, in which gender wasn’t mentioned (gender stereotypes in math are pervasive, so it’s likely simply taking a test will activate them). Male participants performed equally well in both conditions, while female participants performed significantly worse in the control condition than in the reduced-threat condition. In fact, while female participants in the control condition performed worse than male participants, the female participants in the reduced-threat condition performed better than all of the male participants.
It would be great if we could come up with easy ways, appropriate for teaching philosophy, to reduce stereotype threat. I’d love to hear any ideas that folks have. One potential problem that occurs to me is that I wouldn’t want to just focus on sex/gender stereotypes. But it’s hard to imagine a non-clunky way to combat all the many stereotypes that might affect our students. Suggestions? One thing I find myself wondering is whether teaching people about stereotype threat could help make them less susceptible to it. Has this been tried?
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.
