Lack of affordable childcare…

…during the summer holidays reported on here, following a survey by the daycare trust.

Obviously the article isn’t aiming to say everything that one might say about childcare, but I found it interesting that there is NO mention of gender issues at all – the implications of the lack of childcare, say, for parents and in particular, given norms about primary care giving roles, mothers. Presumably widespread boredom of children isn’t the only consequence of the lack of childcare. Some parents must be doing a fair bit of juggling, or cutting back on hours, or double shifts in order to work around childcare…

(Again, see Okin for more related to this, and how such commitments, combined with the fact that women often take on the primary care-giving role, contribute to their exclusion from or hindrance in the workforce.)

Philosophy Journal Rankings

Important update: Thom Brooks, in comments has alerted me to the fact that the ESF is soliciting feedback about this list. I hereby urge you all to go give them some!  As noted below, they’ve changed the list before in response to feedback, so this is well worth doing. 

I’m a little late to this one– sorry– but it’s well worth noting here anyway. The European Science Foundation has come up with a ranking of philosophy journals, which you can check out here. There’s a lot for feminist philosophers to be annoyed about, perhaps most notably the ranking of Hypatia, the top English language feminist philosophy journal, as a B. This is particularly important because it is very difficult to publish feminist philosophy in other journals. (For some statistical evidence of this, see the stats in Sally Haslanger’s paper here, “Changing The Ideology and Culture of Philosophy”. For a bit of anecdotal evidence, at least re analytic feminism, try thinking about where you see analytic feminism papers appearing– overwhelmingly feminist journals, invited volumes, or invited journals. Or, if it’s appropriate to your case, compare your rejection rates for feminism papers with your rejection rates for others.) It can also be difficult to get publications in Hypatia taken seriously by one’s department: I know of at least one junior faculty member who was told that she needed to get some more ‘mainstream’ publications, despite her publication in Hypatia, the top journal in her field. A high ranking for Hypatia in a list like this could really help feminist philosophers struggling to get their work taking seriously. It’s worth noting, though, that Hypatia had originally not even been included on the list. SWIP UK and lots of others raised an outcry about this and other omissions to the provisional list, the British Philosophical Association took up the cause, and the new list is substantially improved, despite its flaws. For more discussions of these rankings, see Lemmings, Leiter, Brooks Blog, and Gone Public.