Gender-neutral interventions May 18, 2013

What are your favourite gender-neutral interventions that in fact help women in philosophy? The two I’m most excited about at the moment are principles of chairing discussions:

1. The One Question Per Question rule– those with multiple questions can have additional ones added to be back of the queue.

2. Favouring not those who raise their hands first, but those who haven’t been heard from yet– helps all those who may be a bit more hesitant to raise their hands, and (combined with rule 1) leads to a greater diversity of views being heard. Also helps immensely in interdisciplinary settings, because in some fields the convention is not to raise your hand until you actually have a question in mind (!).

On women students leaving philosophy early on. May 7, 2013

Figures on women in tenure/tenure track jobs usually put the percentage of women at 16 to 20%. Interestingly, the gap between men’s participation and women’s starts early in their undergraduate career. This phenomenon is proving hard to understand for a number of feminist philosophers.

There is an explanation given sometimes in computer science, and it might be worth considering here. The idea is that while men are often keen on abstract problems divorced from all other human interests, women are much less so. Like women in computer science classes, perhaps women in philosophy are considerably more engaged by questions that are not divorced from reality. We needn’t posit innate differences between men and women to ground such a result; differential training would be enough.

I read this explanation for CS sometime very recently and can’t remember where. It is also
in the excellent study of women in CS at Carnegie called Unlocking the clubhouse.

Let me give some examples for philosophy ; note I am not arguing from these examples. They are just illustration. (1)A women explained to me that she was interested in philosophy until they got to Hume’s account of the self. Presumably she didn’t want to spend hours arguing that she did have a self, as she understood the debate. (2) at a university where the women were expressing increasing dissatisfaction with their courses, I was approached by one of the male faculty about why this was happening. I said that he seemed to take philosophical discussion to be a matter of his standing on the top of a hill knocking off all the students until one knocked him off. “Yes,” he responded enthusiastically. “That’s what I do best.”

Note in the second example we can see two issues. One is whether women like the combative style – a well known question – and the other is whether knocking the professor off the hill is something they want to spend 4 years on. It is not exactly an abstract question, but one where it might be hard to say what its interest is. (Phyllis Rooney has a recent paper arguing relatedly that, to puT it roughly, the combative method is disliked principally because it changes the topic.)

Another case: on a recent blog I saw a reference to a prof who spent the semester arguing about a possible elephant on the table. That certainly could dampen my interests however cleverly it was done.

It could be that we have too many Intro teachers who like to demonstrate puilosophy’s lack of relevance. Given what is said about men in CS, irrelevance is not a killer of interest for many of them. But it may well convince women that they’d be happier elsewhere.

On being a black female postgraduate in the UK May 3, 2013

An important article by Janine Bradbury.

in a climate where only one in 13 (7.7%) university professors are from BME backgrounds, where only 50 out of a total 14,000 university professors in Britain are from black Caribbean or black African backgrounds, and only 10 of these are women, how much tenacity does one black female PhD student need to achieve her full potential?

Micro-Inequities: 40 Year Later April 21, 2013

There’s a good discussion of micro-inequities over at Psychology Today, cross-posted on NewAPPS. The post starts with the history of the concept, then moves on to adducing examples of micro-inequities (drawn from What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?), and to drawing connections with implicit bias research. It’s worth the read.

Here’s a taste:

Rowe noted that micro-inequities often had serious cumulative, harmful effects, resulting in hostile work environments and continued minority discrimination in public and private workplaces and organizations. What makes micro-inequities particularly problematic is that they consist in micro-messages that are hard to recognize for victims, bystanders and perpetrators alike. When victims of micro-inequities do recognize the micro-messages, Rowe argues, it is exceedingly hard to explain to others why these small behaviors can be a huge problem.

Thanks, S!

We need women in Philosophy because…. April 16, 2013

A great project described over at What We’re Doing.

Kissing Up, Kicking down and tenure. April 4, 2013

I heard the phrase “kissing up and kicking down” first during discussions about John Bolton, a Bush nomination for the US representative to the UN. Its meaning is probably obvious, but in case it isn’t, here’s a very brief explanation. It means being super nice to people with power over one, and taking it out on people over whom one has some power. The power needn’t be much more than a matter of rank or class. Someone who is rude to the cleaning staff, while super nice to higher administrators is following the pattern.

Bolton was said to kiss up and kick down; regardless of whether he actually did, the pattern can account for all those times when someone whom you know is a real sh*t is praised lavishly by people in important positions in one’s work or politics, etc. So one day I was thinking about this, and I thought I should ask whether I follow the pattern also. In fact, as a number of people at my university will affirm, I tend to kick up and kiss down. That sounds, I reflected, like a bad life strategy.

So I decided to discuss with various friends whether this was a bad strategy. And everyone said “but that’s what you are supposed to do when you are a senior tenured academic.” Is it?

We’ve gotten some correspondence here at FP that suggests some people do kiss up and kick down, and in particular, those who are department chairs, or otherwise in positions where having power can be important to the individual. And as in the case of Mitch Aboulafia at Penn State, a chair who supports faculty or students over the administration may have a short career as chair. (See our post here.) One person writing to us claimed that department chairs are too often prone to sell out in order to protect their power, and that this is having a bad effect on philosophy. Certainly one bad effect is that the old guard can keep a new area of study in a weak position, and this sort of action may accumulate across universities.

One question I have for our readers is whether they think it is true that, as I heard one chair put it, “I have to obey my boss.” Indeed, surely some of us have seen chairs quite happily engage in illegal activities because the “boss” wanted it. And one can understand at least one motive for doing colleagues in; namely, the dean or comparable administrator has the goodies. You have to be good to get them.

Looking at this topic isn’t just a matter of describing bad chairs. There is a larger problem. The justification for tenure is in part that it allows one to refuse to kiss up. But that supposes that getting fired is the only negative event we’d need to guard against.

Inside Higher Ed on APA efforts to combat sexual harassment March 29, 2013

An excellent story, here. Importantly, though, there’s an error: site visits are emphatically NOT just for departments with problems. They’re for anyone, including departments that already have an excellent climate and yet nonetheless want to improve/avoid complacency. Please do correct this if it comes up in your conversations with people.

Filling in the gaps March 28, 2013

There’s a nice follow-up from Peter Adamson on the women-shaped gaps in his history of philosophy podcasts.

Go check it out, here.

Gill Howie March 27, 2013

We are enormously sad to report the death of Gill Howie, who has been absolutely vital to SWIP UK, remaining on the executive committee throughout her illness.

From Barrie Dainton:

I am sad to report that Gill Howie died yesterday (26th March) after spending some time in the Marie Curie Hospice in Woolton. I will pass on any further news about her funeral and memorial.

Gill’s most influential work was in feminist philosophy, especially the intersections between Feminism, Marxism and Critical Theory. She published widely and edited a number of collections in these areas, including the widely read Third Wave Feminism: a Critical Exploration. She was series editor of the Palgrave series ‘Breaking Feminist Waves’, and recently published Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method (2010).

Her philosophical work grew out of her commitment to social and political activism. She served on the national executive committee of the AUT as well as of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy. She was a conscientious and approachable Head of Philosophy, who cared deeply for the health and vigour of the Department. She will be very much missed by her colleagues and students, by her two young sons, and all her friends.

More recently and in the light of her own experience of a long struggle with illness she led a number of interdisciplinary research projects aimed at exploring the philosophical significance of life-limiting illness. That she was unable to complete these projects adds to the sense of tragic untimeliness of her death.

Please leave your thoughts and memories of Gill in comments on this post.

Reminder: Distinguished Woman noms by April 1 March 24, 2013

Call for Nominations: Distinguished Woman Philosopher 2013

Each year the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy comes together to honor a woman philosopher whose contributions to the support of women in philosophy and to philosophy itself are outstanding and merit special recognition. A panel and reception celebrating the honoree’s accomplishments will be organized for the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, December 27-30, 2013.

Nominations should include a copy of the nominee’s curriculum vitae and a minimum of two supporting letters, which summarize the nominee’s contributions to philosophy and support of women in philosophy.

NOTE: Two-thirds of letter writers for any given nomination must be members of the society for women in philosophy, in good standing.

Please e-mail all nominations to Rochelle Green, ESWIP Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award Secretary (rmgreen1@ualr.edu) no later than April 1, 2013.