Undecided? You might be wrong about that. August 22, 2008

 From the AAAS’s Science,** (ht to the NY Times):  People who declare themselves undecided may have non-conscious biases that are inclining them to a particular decision:

When deciding between choices, people usually feel as if they’re completely in control. They evaluate the criteria and weigh the available information before committing. And when that information doesn’t seem to tip the balance, they report that they are undecided. But psychologists know that decision-making is strongly affected by the unconscious mind. Might the unconscious mind of an undecided person already know what it will choose?

The answer is “Yes.”  By using an implicit associations test, the researchers were able to predict the undecideds decisions with 70% accuracy. 

So is this news to any feminist who has watched supposedly neutral people decide admissions, prizes or jobs?  Probably not.  But there are at least two points here worth noting:  Now when a colleague talks about neurtrality, we can whip out Science!  And it’s strong and recent evidence that the implicit association tests are connected to actual decisions. 

For standard implicit association tests, try here.

(Note:  for accuracy’s sake, I should note that the Times reports the study as principally concerned with the difference between people who could decide on examining the evidence and those whom the evidence left undecided.  I read the report just as I was thinking of how I could convince a group of people to take seriously the idea that they might really be bigots (of the nicest, least conscious sort, of course).  Hence, my take concerns evidence of bias of which one is not aware.)

**This is a press release; an editorial and the actual study require subscription or library access.

Grab your whistle and don the striped shirt August 22, 2008

Feminist philosophers are not usually hurting for work.  Especially at the early career stages, we’re infamous for prioritizing teaching and service above scholarship, we’re often drafted as token women or feminist-friendly men on committees and panels, and as so many can attest, learning the ropes of the profession from the edges can keep us busy as well. (Hey, reinventing the wheel takes time!)

Yet I find that I resemble the remarks in recent online discussion about philosophers who don’t contribute to the labor of anonymous refereeing for journals, even as I have become a more active writer. I’m struck by the suggestion that perhaps we should referee twice as many articles as we submit.  How annoyingly sensible.  And as it turns out, philosopher-editors appreciate it when I volunteer.  So, my feminist friends, although you’re disproportionately likely to have service coming out of your ears, consider improving our discipline for all our sakes: Most importantly, submit feminist philosophy to journals!, and depending on what journals are in your area, volunteer to referee!

A message from your friendly neighborhood service-hog.

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

Women in Metaphysics, Anyone? August 15, 2008

Check out the all-female speaker list for this workshop organised by Alexander Bird and Emma Tobin. And what’s the girly topic? Metaphysics of Science. Yup, sure makes sense that the 4 volumes of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics have no female authors.

UK Women in Philosophy Stats? August 7, 2008

Reader Aaron has written in wondering if anyone has recently done statistical work on women in philosophy in the UK– percentage of PhDs, percentage in full-time posts, percentage in temporary posts, percentage in senior posts, etc. I don’t know of any data on this. Do you? If so, please tell us in comments!

25th Carnival of Socialism July 27, 2008

is up.  And congratulations to Jender for the reference to her post on abortion vetoes.

Let me (Jender) add that it’s up at the excellent Cruella blog, written by a feminist stand-up comedian.

So who is taking care of your children? July 26, 2008

Female Science Professor has posted some useful answers to those awful questions and comments an academic woman easily gets.  My favorite response is to the question, “So they had to hire a woman…?”  Of the answers offered, this one gets my vote:

Answer 3: Yes, they finally realized they had hired enough mediocre men. 

Some of the questions assume you are in a heterosexual relationship.  No  one will be surprised, I expect, that we/I’ve used these:

Question (said to male person): Who takes care of your kids when your wife travels?
Answer: The cats.

Question (said to married/partnered female person): Who takes care of your kids when you travel?
Answer: The cats.

Question (said to academic couple): Which of you is the trailing spouse?
Answer: Our cat.

Enjoy!

Philosophy facts, thanks to the Spintered Mind July 26, 2008

Our friend, Eric Switzgebel, has posted some revealing  figures about women in philosophy.  In studying philosophers’ voting patters, he and his collaborator gathered a lot of data about philosophers.  Though the sample was just 5 states, they covered them very thoroughly.  In addition, there were age data for philosophers in 4 states. 

They’ve reused the figures to look at men’s and women’s comparative progress in the profession.  Switzgebel concludes that the record shows women move through the profession more slowly than men. 

Another dismal fact emerges; the comparative perceptage of non-TT positions women occupy.  For those young women with birth dates ranging from 1970-1979, 36% are in non-TT positions!  That’s compared with 13% of the guys.

Switzgebel mentions an obvious factor which may slow women’s progress:  marriage and/or  children.  In addition, women are more often “the trailing spouse” in the sciences, and this might well apply in philosophy also.  Of course, we need to be careful not to conclude that sexism isn’t operating.  Not only may it still be at work at a number of junctures, including what makes a male partner a hotter property on the market, but also there’s the institutional sexism of the university and college structures that are still geared to male biological lives more than female.

So thanks, Eric!  For the study!

Feminist Philosophers, do not go gently into retirement. July 21, 2008

I see that the Philosophy Job Market Blog has picked up on the fun of the conversation over at Leiter Reports as to whether or not senior faculty have an obligation to retire at some point.  It IS fun, isn’t it?  Such a nice distraction from writing about global warming, torture, and my usual choices of subjects. 

Yet seriously, I didn’t start writing about the feminist and personal for journals until the year I got tenure, and I’m not so much young anymore.  My mentor, Claudia Card, only found her “outlaw” voice years after getting tenure, and has done her most prolific writing in her sixties.  I remember her smilingly saying, in the hallways of the Wisconsin philosophy department, “They’re going to have to carry me out of here in a body bag,” and I remember thinking, That is great news.  I recall reading Zillah Eisenstein, who observed that she wrote in proper, WELL-BEHAVED analytic fashion for years before daring to be a less well-behaved full professor and radical feminist.  And I consider the persistently low numbers of women in philosophy, and I think, there’s few of us enough already.  And then I think my own colleagues will have to carry me out in a body bag.  (I know, I know, if the quality of my work is suffering, if it’s not an option, etc., etc.  Sure there are reasons some should retire.  I’m arguing against an across-the-board obligation.)

Joint sessions and women in philosophy July 16, 2008

I’ve just got back from the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen, which was much fun. There were plenty of interesting talks, and a good friendly atmosphere.

Some points of note:

1. there was a SWIP UK panel session of talks, which was well attended. The line up was: 

• Marije Altorf, ‘After cursing the library …’ Women and philosophy: a case study; Dan O’Brien, A feminist interpretation of Hume on testimony;  Vera Tripodi, On the distinction between abstract and concrete objects; and Lina Papadaki Pornography: is there a connection between treating things as people and treating people as things?

This seemed to be a good forum for promoting work by and of interest to women in philosophy. For anyone who wants to find out more about SWIP UK, the website is here:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/swipuk/

 

2. My impression was that there were lots of women in attendance, and giving papers. I did a quick  count of the sex distribtution across papers given.

In the plenary sessions, M:9, F:4

In the graduate sessions, M:3, F:5

In the open sessions, M:69, F:26

Total: M:80, F: 35.

 

As pointed out in comments (thanks gaye!) this is rather far off 50%.

 

However, that there was a visible presence of women philosophers, especially at the more prestigious and well attended sessions (plenary and graduate) seems important.

In her much cited and hugely important paper, Haslanger (linked here)notes that schemas (the model with which she understands unconscious bias (from Valian)) tend to be activated when the individuals are perceived to be in a minority group - tipping point being 25-30%.

So having such a visible presence of women in philosophy may be doing good work in dislodging the clash of woman schemas with philospher schemas. One hopes…

 

On a less positive note, whilst the conference drew a fairly international crowd, there were very few non-white philosophers there. And all the papers I saw (which, in fairness, was a small proportion, approx 20) were by white philosophers.

 

(updated from comments, to remedy my maths errors! thanks again!)

The second snort: Philosophy, Women and the Problem July 2, 2008

For the first snort, see here.

Some of the recent discussion on this blog has reminded me of an article from the NY Times that was so startling to me at the time that I remembered it well enough to easily retrieve it.  What was so amazing to me at the time was UMichigan’s Mel Hochster’s conversion; he came to see that there are quite pervasive mechanisms operating to exclude women. 

Some of the examples of bias will be familiar to many feminists:

Three years ago, the University of Michigan had 55 departments in the sciences and engineering, only one of them headed by a woman. Today, eight are headed by women. In that time, the university has also tripled the number of tenure track offers to women in science and engineering to 41 percent.

Mel Hochster, a mathematics professor at Michigan, belongs to a committee of senior science professors that gives workshops for heads of departments and search committees highlighting the findings of numerous studies on sex bias in hiring. For example, men are given longer letters of recommendation than women, and their letters are more focused on relevant credentials. Men and women are more likely to vote to hire a male job applicant than a woman with an identical record. Women applying for a postdoctoral fellowship had to be 2.5 times as productive to receive the same competence score as the average male applicant. When orchestras hold blind auditions, in which they cannot see the musician, 30 percent to 55 percent more women are hired.

Professor Hochster said he was not inclined to join the committee until Abigail Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies who is leading Michigan’s effort, made a presentation on sex bias to his department.

“I vastly underestimated the problem,” Professor Hochster said. “People tend to think that if there’s a problem, it’s with a few old-fashioned people with old-fashioned ideas. That’s not true. Everybody has unconscious gender bias. It shows up in every study.”

In the last three years, the mathematics department, regarded as one of the best in the country, has hired two women with tenure and promoted one associate professor to tenure, Professor Hochster said, bringing the number of tenured women to 6, out of a total of 64 tenured and tenure-track professors. Two more women are on a tenure track.

Some universities have put pressure on their search committees to broaden their pools of qualified candidates, especially when it comes to graduate students who could apply for junior faculty positions.

Another range of problems concerns  the network of information and the buddy system for getting work into the public arena:

Some universities have also taken note of the disadvantage that women face in negotiating salaries, laboratory space and money for research, as well as the importance of building a reputation by publishing in high-profile academic journals and getting invitations to speak at prestigious conferences. Men have naturally picked up such crucial information, as well as speaking invitations, from male colleagues and mentors because of their greater numbers and influence. For example, Columbia University is now bringing in retired senior academics to coach women on its faculty in such areas.

And there’s the problem of women the undervalued outsiders:

After reading in a newspaper that a biotech company was awarding grants to M.I.T. scientists, she asked a colleague if he knew how to apply for the money, she said. He told her he knew nothing about the grant, she said, though she later learned that he was urging another man in their department to apply for the money.

Professor Hopkins said she then went to her dean, who submitted her application to the company, asking for $30,000, The company gave her $8 million, which allowed her to expand her cancer research and led to the discovery of a pair of cancer genes.

 Solutions?  The article discusses a number, including very active recruiting at just about all levels.  But completely crucial is that we all become away of our implicit biases and what they are producing.  As I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, I failed the implicit bias test on women in science, or, more accurately, I showed a significant bias against women.  Grandads, uncles, brothers and calculus?  Fine.  Grandma, aunts, sisters and calculus?  Clang.*!*#!  With that knowledge, it becomes much easier to make decisions based on actual merits.  (Actually, it was pretty evidence to me before the test that I had the bias; people who need to think about taking such tests are those who implausibly think they haven’t internalized the standards of the society around them.)

Who wonders how Michigan’s philosophy department is doing?  Hmmmm.

Experimental Philosophy and the Absence of Women July 2, 2008

There’s a post over at Experimental Philosophy contemplating the dearth of women in the field, and wondering how to do better. If you have any thoughts on the topic, please go join in.

The structure of academia and women’s job prospects July 1, 2008

The Girl Detective has an excellent post up at Feministe, arguing that “the very structure of academia is hurting women’s chances at securing full-time jobs”. It’s largely based on her experiences as a white part-time English instructor on the US. I’d be very grateful for thoughts from others with different experiences.

Does philosophy have a woman problem? (Snort!) June 24, 2008

Collecting some news from comments and adding in a bit of our own, we draw your attention to:

1.  The Bad:  The four volumes of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics have no female authors.  At all.”But,” we hear frequentlly, “there aren’t any women doing metaphysics.  The lie is given to this by:

2.  The Good: A conference at Leeds on Ontology with excellent women metaphysicians from Cornell, Yale, Leeds and Toronto.  Cheers for the organizers, one of whom has been a frequent commentator here.

3.  The getting better.  First, the bad news.  The Society for Philosophy and Psychology is having its annual conference this week in Philadelphia.  There are no women philosophers among its invited speakers.  On the main program there are two women giving ‘contributed’ papers and one female commentator.**  The male philosophers on the main program total 29 (approximately).  There’s also a two-session workshop before the conferences in experimental philosophy, and there are no women philosopherss.

But then there’s good news.  When it was apprised of the problem of low representation of women, the Society’s executive committee determined to create a committee on diversity to try to understand philosophy’s exclusionary practices and to retify the problems they have caused, at least in the Society and in the field.

**There was a second woman asked to comment, we are told.  She declined the paper they offered, but said she’d consider a different one.  And that was the end of the correspondence. 

(Edited in response to Sally’s correction.)

Mechanisms of exclusion June 18, 2008

This blog is obviously very concerned with how philosophy is exclusionary in ways that appear quite independent of merit, given they are often applied to groups who are typified  by characteristics irrelevant to merit. 

There’s a link in a post over at What Sortsof People to an interesting article that summarizes a widely accepted account of exclusion and applies it to ‘disabled’ texts.  Texts are disabled when they are fall outside the norms created by “the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization.”

Though the article linked to is about translations, there are obvious connections and questions to be raised with regard to philosophy’s exclusions and what it accepts as legitimate texts.  Here’s a particularly relevant  part:

Informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of “disciplinary normalization” (1979), feminist disability studies interrogates the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization that sustain patriarchy, white supremacy, class power, “compulsory ablebodiedness,” and compulsory heterosexuality (McRuer 2002). These myriad, mutually reinforcing techniques of normalization subject bodies that deviate from a white, male, class privileged, ablebodied, and heterosexual norm. Seemingly unrelated technologies such as orthopedic shoes, cosmetic surgery, hearing aids, diet and exercise regimes, prosthetic limbs, anti-depressants, Viagra, and genital surgeries designed to correct intersexed bodies all seek to transform deviant bodies, bodies that threaten to blur and, thus, undermine organizing binaries of social life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender and racial identity) into docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of gendered, raced, and classed bodily function and appearance.

6. Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from monolingual textual expectations, and are thus deviant. They threaten to blur, and thus undermine, organizing binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). ‘Compulsory ablebodiedness’ requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual function and appearance.

7. When publishers, teachers, readers, or translators themselves require the translated text read ‘as if it were written in English’, as an ‘elegant’, ‘fluent’ ‘good’ poem ‘in English,’ they collude with and enforce such ‘compulsory ablebodiedness.’ And this is a best-case scenario, for too often publishers’, teachers’, and readers’ anxiety over translation as an incomplete, diminished, impaired version of an original results in translation not being published, taught, or read at all.

8. The effects of compulsory ablebodiedness on translation are intense and repressive. Translations are excluded from most publications, from most prizes, from most workshops, from most ‘English’ literature classrooms, and from most performances.

It’s a cliche now of people who are working on diversity that opening a field will enhance its creativity and energy. This idea has a lot of acceptance in corporations and, to some extent, in some areas of science. As NSF puts it:

The pursuit of new scientific and engineering knowledge and its use in service to society requires talent, perspectives and insight that can only be assured by increasing diversity in the science, engineering, and technological workforce.

But perhaps expecting many people to believe this gets it back to front; that is, in widening a field, one threatens the existence of the norms.

What do you think? (About academic sex and anything else) June 17, 2008

It might seem a bit early to do a “What do you think?” when the last one got no comments whatsoever.  But, as always, we are wondering what you are doing, reading, happy about, worried about, etc.  Conferences?  Papers?

AND ALSO Calypso has drawn my attention to some problematic developments in comments over at our good friends’ Philosophy Job Market Blog.  Someone has asked advice about their desire to sleep with a committee member. 

One problem that can arise when A WOMAN does that is that the guys think that she’s getting extra academic benefits in return for  sex and they’re mad.  And I gather at least one comment goes toward this.  I’m going to reserve my opinions here, because the point of this post is:

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

By the way, from what one can from the comments so far, gay sex is invisible in philosophy departments. 

 

Bark! Grrrrrrrrrr! Bark! UPDATED June 10, 2008

Apparently good old Barney doesn’t like teddy bears. He may not even have know this until he was supposed to guard a collection of highly prized ones. And then he did what a good dog has to do.

There may be times when a human being too wants to tear into prized icons, though hopefully not quite so literally.

Have a look at Leiter’s comments on a round table on modes of philosophizing in Eurozine.  You can tell it’s really weighty stuff from BL’s title:  “Four Philosophers Answer Questions about Philosophy: Its Purposes, Nature, History.”

Well, the guys (of course!) take up the big issues.  My favorite observation comes from Jonathan Barnes, who addresses the question of whether philosophy is relevant to real life:

But surely, you will cry, moral philosophy must impinge on Real Life? After all, we do ethics – as Aristotle says – in order to become good, don’t we? And surely logic must impinge? Isn’t it the science of reasoning? And don’t we all want to reason as sharply as we can? – Well, glance about at our colleagues. There’s Professor W, who has written some brilliant pieces on ethics: Is he more honourable in his philandering than my neighbour Bernard?

Not, I have to say, the example I would use. When thinking about whether working on ethics produces morally improved people, I think of the ethicists I know who are completely ignorant of how exclusionary their highly privileged pursuits really are. And who, quite frankly, do not seem to give a damn.

On the other hand, two women philosophers are mentioned in the article.

O, let’s just go to a library and consign some volumes to the flames.  Or tear them apart.

(Thanks to Calypso once again.)
 

UPDATE:  It is possible that this post was written in a fit of pique, but, thanks to Calypso, some more substantial issues arise in the comments.  Come join in the discussion!

Mentoring and Diversity June 9, 2008

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!

What we’re up against June 4, 2008

The CFP: An International Conference on Human Rights and Biomedicine.
The invited speakers: 10 men and 1 woman.
So, Robin Fiore wrote in expressing her disappointment at the sex/gender imbalance, and calling attention to the fact that women might have particularly important insights on topics in biomedicine (especially since, though she didn’t call attention to it, one of the suggested topics was “the protection of foetuses”.)

The reply:

Dear Robin (if I may),
Thank you for the interesting opinion. The conference organizers have extensively discussed the conference themes and speakers in advance. We agreed to select academics with an outstanding scientific reputation in their field of expertise. Secondly, for dialectic reasons we invited speakers with rather controversial ideas. Although the organizers recognize the scientific relevance of e.g., organ donation and clinical trials from a feminist perspective, our aim is - with all respect - to discuss the themes from a broader perspective. To comfort you, I can say that we have also had some suggestions to include shamanism and health care rights as a conference theme, but I
fear that the response would not be that overwhelming as it is now. Secondly, two other invited speakers were women but to capable/willing to write a contribution for the conference book, a precondition for invited speakers. Nonetheless, I feel confident that our colleague and friend Deirdre Madden will intrigue the audience, which exists for 61 percent of women! Finally, the organizers are open for your suggestions to organize a parallel session on femenist ethics.

Now, obviously part of the problem is linguistic. But linguistic error does not explain the apparent equation of feminism and shamanism. Or the thought that feminism is not a sufficiently broad perspective to be represented when discussing such things as “protection of foetuses”. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the CFP and the way that the Fiore’s email was handled, write to m.ghari@erasmusmc.nl and let him know. Fiore tells me, by the way that in the past conferences like this have been responsive to complaints of this sort. And she advises that it’s important not to provide cover for their lack of high-profile women speakers by organising a panel presentation with women and/or feminists. (And definitely not shamanists.)

The organisers are being invited to respond to this post in comments.

Update: As you can see in the comments, the organisers have now responded very positively. Hurrah! Well done everyone.

Gender Tutorials: Causes and Cures May 31, 2008

 I was reminded yesterday of Virginia Valian’s Gender Tutorials at a Hunter College web site.  All of them are worth going through; the second and third are especially imporant for understanding gender schemas and their effects, even effects on how one judges oneself. 

The 4th tutorial is about what you - students - can do.  I don’t think it is all right.  For one thing, she starts out by telling you that you’ll encounter a receptive environment if you suggest changes.  Well, maybe  in the sciences (tho’Mr JJ says “no”), but philosophy is thousands of years old, and I can tell you, a lot of people do not like new ideas.  BUT there are  some useful ideas about trying to improve the environment.  For example, TAs can ask the professor to introduce them to students in a way that increases confidence  all around.  Just the presence of more women helps, so you can ask that women be invited to give talks.  (She doesn’t say this, but I’d have some names in mind, and maybe even a list with some accomplishments mentioned.)

There are more ideas.  So see what you think!