The figures for women in philosophy are dismal. Careful counting of the job offers recorded on Leiter’s blog suggest that just over 20% of the new hires are women. Anyone who hoped the hiring figures would provide some cause for optimism should be very disappointed.
Conference announcement after conference announcement demonstrates that women too often have few or none of the more important and visible roles. And as for occupants of any other under-represented group, the situation is simply worse.
So what can be done? This morning I followed a link from A Womyn Ecdysis to Left Turn and Andrea Smith’s essay on recentering feminism. The task of recentering philosophy is almost as daunting as that of recentering the medical system or the criminal justice system, but I wonder about recentering our efforts. I think for Smith that means that we think less in terms of simple inclusion and more in terms of empowerment, at the very least. What would the analogues of empowerment in academia be?
It isn’t hard to identify some of them. One would be paying attention to positions of power, where these include journal editor boards and keynote speakers. Another might be encouraging the disadvantaged members within a department to form some sort of cohesive group.
But I mention this to ask others for ideas. WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Here’s a passage from Smith’s essay, though the whole fairly short piece is worth a read!
As critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has noted, it is not enough to be sensitive to difference; we must ask what difference the difference makes. Instead of saying, how can we include women of color, women with disabilities, etc., we must ask what our analysis and organizing practice would look like if we centered them in it. By following a politics of re-centering rather than inclusion, we often find that we see the issue differently, not just for the group in question, but everyone.
An example of this re-centering is the way the national organization, INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, developed its analysis of domestic and sexual violence. We saw that it did not make sense to focus our strategies on involving the criminal justice system in addressing violence, because as women of color we are just as victimized by the criminal justice system as we are by interpersonal gender violence in our communities.
…
Many grassroots organizations are posing important challenges to how radical women of color should position themselves vis-à-vis the liberal feminist establishment. Fundamentally, these new projects and analyses do not start from or solely identify with the history and establishments of white liberalfeminism.
…. Many … grassroots organizations … are reunifying the personal and political, and struggling to provide immediate services in empowering forms, as well as building collective political strength.
Feminist Philosophers 
You should hang out in engineering circles, we would celebrate 20% since we still seem to exist mostly in the single digits. Perhaps you are leading the way?
Oh, the irony! At my university, the upper administration stepped in and moved a center I was building to the more supportive College of Engineering. Humanities had what many of us thought of as the dean from hell; he said I wasn’t supportive enough to be ‘a leader’ in ‘his’ college.
Of course, with a joint appointment in engineering, I increased the College of Engineering’s statistics on senior women by 100%.
Since I am a disabled feminist philosopher, I’m glad that the Feminist Philosopher bloggers continue to pursue this matter from a variety of directions, posing the question of underrepresentation in a variety of ways.
I agree with Smith that uniform solutions should not be sought to the complicated problems diverse groups of women confront. There will be no uniform solution to the problem of underrepresentation of diverse groups of women in philosophy because each group encounters group-specific biases, prejudices, and assumptions. Even well-intentioned feminist philosophers usually seem to completely overlook, fail to acknowledge, or minimize these specific biases and prejudices in their quest for the general solution to the problem.
Part of what seems to be at issue is an unwillingness to think that another woman’s experiences of discrimination, isolation, and exclusion within/from the discipline could be so different from one’s own, that another woman is disempowered in a way that one can take comfort in knowing she herself is not. I am always somewhat astonished when a nondisabled feminist philosopher gives me advice about the profession that completely evades, if not ignores, the issue of my difference from her/her difference from me, our positions of relative privilege and disprivilege.
How many feminist philosophers, especially those who work in bioethics, are prepared to confront the fact that bioethics, as a subdiscipline, is increasingly anti- disabled people, is an institutionalized discourse that aims to resolve the “problem” of disability through a biomedical response such as preventing the existence of disabled people? Let me be clear about what I am saying: there is a (growing) subdiscipline of philosophy that EXPLICITLY promotes discrimination against disabled people. It is jolting to me to read an announcement of some sort in which a nondisabled feminist bioethicist is promoting the work of one or another of the worst culprits in this regard. In 2005, the Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession organized a session at the Pacific APA on “disability and difference” which included some of these individuals. Can you imagine this committee organizing a session on lesbian and gay rights and inviting someone like Don Marquis to participate? What is required to “recenter” philosophy in regard to the institutionalized discrimination that bioethics generates?
Feminist conferences are still not properly or adequately accessible to disabled feminist philosophers. And some of these conferences seem to regard presentations on disability and disabled women by nondisabled feminists as “representation enough”. Of the presentations on disability and disabled women at the last two FEAST conferences, none seems to have been made by a woman philosopher who is disabled. JJ’s suggestion that disabled women and women of colour be taken on as keynote speakers and members of editorial boards is a good start. This would go some distance to address the question: “Who is setting the political agenda for feminist philosophers?” I know who is not. Come to think of it: how representative is the list of feminists who contribute postings (rather than comments) to the Feminist Philosophers blog? Since all of you use pseudonyms, this is difficult (though not impossible) to discern.
Let me make one minor correction to my post: the session of the Inclusiveness Committee that offended many of us was held at the 2006 Pacific APA, not the 2005 conference.
As to the constitution of FP, I can say this: We are on 3 continents. We range from graduate students to professors, and span a wide range of ages. At least one of us is disabled. We have bloggers who are from ethnic groups so under-represented in philosophy that to name these groups would be to identify the bloggers. We are in both academic and non-academic posts. And we are both women and men.
I’m glad you made the constitution of Feminist Philosophers explicit. It sets a standard that other feminist endeavours should attempt to reach.
This seems to be the key for me:
“it is not enough to be sensitive to difference; we must ask what difference the difference makes.”
“Inclusiveness” presumes that your critical paradigm is “neutral”. It’s not. It never is.
I’m a grad student myself in Theory and Criticism, and I TA’d for a Feminist Theory in the Social Sciences course this past year. I had an experience that made me realize something about difference. We read an article about coerced sterilization of ethnic minorities and poor populations of women. In reading this, and discussing how when (white, middle class) feminists focus on “reproductive rights” as meaning “access to contraception and abortion”, we erase the populations of women who for social and economic reasons can’t have families, who for them, reproductive rights would be enabling them to have families, not to not have them.
That experience really affected me as for looking at my own biases not only when I assess what issues I think are “important” but also when taking and articulating positions on an “issue” at all.
Apologies if this is thread-jacking, but I wanted to flag up something about Shelley’s original post.
I appreciate that the *appearance* of diversity can itself sometimes be important, but it’s simply unwarranted to assert that none of the feminist philosophers presenting on disability at various conferences/events were themselves disabled. The manifestation of disability is multifaceted, and (importantly) it can be both visible and invisible. Many people with invisible disabilities choose (for various reasons) not to publicize that they are disabled, and will often go to great lengths to appear able-bodied. So you can’t simply assert that someone is able-bodied from the fact that they don’t have an obvious visible disability. Doing so would reflect an extremely limitted understanding of the wide-ranging manifestations of disability.
Invisibly disabled wrote: “it’s simply unwarranted to assert that none of the feminist philosophers presenting on disability at various conferences/events were themselves disabled” and “you can’t simply assert that someone is able-bodied from the fact that they don’t have an obvious visible disability. Doing so would reflect an extremely limitted understanding of the wide-ranging manifestations of disability.”
I didn’t make the unwarranted assertion you indicate I did I actually wrote that “none *seems* to have been made by a woman philosopher who is disabled”. Nor do I have an “extremely limited understanding of the wide-ranging manifestations of disability.” Indeed, I would suggest that your use of the term ‘disabilities’ to refer to a characteristic or property of a person, and your use of the term ‘able-bodied’ to refer to non-disabled people evinces an outdated conception of disability, one that naturalizes a very political state of affairs.
My sympathies and support to Shelley. The world of professional philosophy is an absolute nightmare for people with visible and invisible disabilities, especially those without a tenure track job or tenure. At least if you are a permanent member of a department, no one can just knock you off. … In other disciplines you can actually talk about your disability frankly and honestly without a look that you have a completely unequivocally, unambigously messy and disordered body and mind. Professional philosophers can get so lost in mumbojumbo abstractions. If your body is disordered, what does that say about your mind? How can we know it is not disordered? And if your mind is disordered you must not be a pure Kantian being…… All compassion locked securely in the tiniest safe of the top floor of the ivory tower. …
Okay, sorry, thread-jacking again, but I think this is a point worth making. I should’ve included the ‘seems’ Shelley used when referring to her original post — apologies about that — but I think the basic idea isn’t affected by that. Since the spectrum of disability is so multi-faceted and wide-ranging, it’s just as (okay, maybe ‘just as’ is too strong here; if it is, substitute ‘in a similar way’) unwarranted to assert, based on the absence of obvious visible disability, that a person *seems* able-bodied as it is to assert that a person *is* able-bodied. There is no typical outward expression of disability — i.e., no standard way that disability ‘seems’ to outside observers. So saying, on the basis of someone’s outward appearnce, that they don’t seem disabled is unwarranted. They don’t seem disabled in certain specific ways, sure — but so much of what we try to do in raising disability awareness is to get people not to limit their conception of disability to specific versions of it.
I didn’t at all mean to accuse Shelley of having a narrow view of disability — I’m sure she doesn’t — and I should’ve been clearer about this. The point of the final sentence of my previous post (which is admittedly phrased to aggressively) is that *statements* like the one Shelley made can sometimes be *indicative* of a narrow view of disability, and it’s important to flag this up.
A final quick comment on the word-choice in my previous post and this one: I don’t think the use phrases like ‘having a disability’ reflects anything much at all. Using ‘disability’ in a way that suggests it refers to a property (even to a property of bodies, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t do that) doesn’t imply any particular view of disability. It’s still an open question what *kind* of property you’re referring to — nothing in the locution suggests that, e.g., the property is intrinsic. Some properties are socially constructed — so we could say, for example, so some people have the property of having a disability, but have that property in virtue of the way society functions. (I’m less happy with my use of ‘able-bodied’, but I’ve never found anything I like better.)
Moreover, it’s not outdated to espouse something other than the social model of disability. We can think that the philosophy of disability should have a uniform aim (justice for disabled people) without imosing a uniform metaphysics.
Okay, so wordpress just turned my punctuation into a random smiley. I hate the internet. . .
Ignore the smiley and the post should still make sense. Wasn’t trying to be ridiculously smug, I swear. . .
You will recall that the statement I made referred to the last two FEAST conferences at which (as I said) none of the presenters on disability and disabled women seemed to disabled. I was not making any statements, indicative or otherwise, that disability is not “wide-ranging or multi-faceted”. Rather, my statement was based upon that the simple fact that I know most of the women who were the presenters, and I know that they do not identify as disabled, nor consider themselves disabled. If you are one of the one or two I don’t know, then, you are the exception (or one of the two exceptions).
Since this thread (and I don’t think you hi-jacked it) is about the presence and representation of women (especially women from underrepresented groups) in philosophy, I would like to ask this question: do you think that lesbian philosophers would feel represented at a series of conferences in which all of the presentations on lesbians and lesbianism were made by straight women and closetted lesbians?
It’s interesting to me that you would think I was endorsing the social model when I referred to your conception of disability as “outdated”. Alas, fewer people have read my published work on disability than I would have hoped. For anyone who has read that work will recognize that the suggestion is misdirected since I (more than anyone else) have criticized the foundationalist assumptions of that model in print, in a number of places, as well as the conception of power it assumes. So, I’m not imposing any kind of uniform metaphysics.
Since Smith’s article was about recentering feminism and JJ’s post asked how we can recenter philosophy, centering is very much in the air around this thread. That is the motivation behind the use of the term ‘non-disabled’: it moves disabled people from the margins to the centre. It also says nothing about disability as an intrinsic property of individuals as the phrase “having a disability” does. If you don’t recognize that this is the case, I suggest that you read some of the (rather dated) juridical and policy documents in which the phrases “having an impairment,” “having a disability,” “having a handicap” were generated. A good place to start might be the original Intenrational Classification of Impairments, Disabilities, and Handicaps (ICIDH) which was introduced by the World Health Organization and used worldwide as an authoritative policy document from the 1980s by goverments, health professionals, bioethicists, medical personnel, and so on until disability activists and researchers finally forced revisions to it some twenty years later.
Okay, I’m going to try for fewer typos this time. The points in the response here are labelled (i)-(iv), the numbers corresponding to the paragraphs in Shelley’s previous post.
(i) Let me elaborate on what I meant by saying that a statement like ‘none. . .seemed disabled’ was indicative of limitted conceptions of disability. Importantly, by saying that I certainly didn’t imply that you (Shelley) hold such attitudes. In most conversations, and particularly in those carried out on blogs, the context of utterance is almost never the same as the context of evaluation. Your context of utterance for the statement in question, I take it, includes background information about several of the women who spoke at FEAST. But the context in which many (if not most) people will evaluate this statement doesn’t include any such information. In those contexts (i.e., the contexts in which most readers will be evaluating your statement), the statement is (or at least easily can be) indicative of restrictive conceptions of disability, which is what I wanted to flag up. Of course that doesn’t mean that you (the person who made the statement) hold such a conception, or anything like it. But given that (in many contexts) the statement you made *can be* indicative of narrow conceptions of disability, I wanted to highlight that such conceptions are exactly that — narrow.
(ii) I actually think the point reiterates nicely to the lesbian case. At a philosophy conference on lesbians and lesbianism, I should assume that I simply don’t know anything about the speakers’ sexuality unless they decide to explicitly tell me about their sexuality (provided I don’t know the speakers well on a personal basis). It’s not like you can spot a lesbian at 20 metres. And even some amount of personal information doesn’t trump this — I may know, for instance, that one of the speakers is currently in a relationship with a man, but this doesn’t allow me to infer that she hasn’t been/won’t be in a relationship with a woman at other times (as though there were some hard and fast boundary between straight and gay).
(iii) Sorry if the social model wasn’t what you were after — this was my best guess at what you meant by ‘a very political state of affairs’. I should emphasize, though, that this certainly doesn’t mean I haven’t read your published work on disability, since I don’t have any idea who you are. Your blog handle only gives a first name, and even if it gave a surname I’d be hesitant to believe it was accurate since, well, it’s the internet. I mean, I could tell you I’m David Lewis, but you don’t really have much reason to believe me.
(iv) On recentering, I think ‘non-disabled’ is worse, for exactly this reason, than ‘able-bodied’. I don’t want to define my friends that aren’t disabled by their lack of disability any more than I want to define my disabled friends by some perceived lack of functioning. If the latter is bad, then so is the former.
I do worry that the ‘able’ in ‘able-bodied’ might be read as having a normative or value-laden dimension, but I don’t think it’s any worse than the prefix in ‘disabled’. Like I said before, I don’t think there are any good terms here — short of reclaiming old ones or coining new ones, both of which have their disadvantages, we’ll just have to make due with the ones we’ve got.
(iv) I’ve read a fair bit of the literature that you point to, but I think it’s a mistake to suppose that words inherit their meaning from their historical context, even if that context is recent. The locution ‘having a disability’ may have had a certain meaning/connotation in its original context; that doesn’t mean it has that meaning/connotation now.
Moreover, ‘disabled’ isn’t (or isn’t obviously) any more property-neutral than ‘has a disability’. I can say of my friend that she is red-haired, and mean by this (or take as the truth condition of this) that she has the property of having red hair. And like I said previously: it’s an enormous jump from property to intrinsic property.
Invisibly disabled, while you claim that you “certainly didn’t mean to imply” that I hold such attitudes, here is what you wrote in your first post: “it’s simply unwarranted to assert that none of the feminist philosophers presenting on disability at various conferences/events were themselves disabled.” You were referring to what you were alleging was my unwarranted assumption. Your remarks about the context of utterance and the context of evaluation are beside the point. Despite your subsequent disclaimers you implied in your initial post that I was making this “unwarranted assesrtion” on the basis of (as you said) “appearances”.
You also wrote: “I actually think the point reiterates nicely to the lesbian case. At a philosophy conference on lesbians and lesbianism, I should assume that I simply don’t know anything about the speakers’ sexuality unless they decide to explicitly tell me about their sexuality (provided I don’t know the speakers well on a personal basis). It’s not like you can spot a lesbian at 20 metres. And even some amount of personal information doesn’t trump this — I may know, for instance, that one of the speakers is currently in a relationship with a man, but this doesn’t allow me to infer that she hasn’t been/won’t be in a relationship with a woman at other times (as though there were some hard and fast boundary between straight and gay).
You have misconstrued my example. I asked if you thought that lesbian philosophers (that is, ones who identify as lesbians publicly as I have identified publicly as disabled) would feel represented by straight women and closetted lesbians. I meant straight women whom these lesbian philosophers know identify as such (as I know the nondisabled women to identify as such) and closetted lesbians (if you are willing to grant that there could be such women) as analogous to you, yourself, who has now identified herself as a closetted invisibly disabled women.
The term “disabled” as it is increasingly used by disability theorists and activists is certainly not neutral. It is meant to a form of disadvantage imposed upon a person who is perceived as abnormal, pathological, deformed, and so on.
If your “best guess” is that my phrase “very political state of affairs” would have to refer to the social model, then perhaps you are not as familiar with the literature of disability theory as you would like us to believe. While the social model is increasingly used around the world, it is still very much associated with the disability movement in the UK. For instance, it has not been taken up by American disability activists and theorists to the extent that the ontology underlying the ADA has.
Shelley and Invisibly Disabled: It is usually Jender who steps in to ask that a discussion be stopped on the grounds that we try not to encourage such conflict. Let me suggest a slightly different approach in this case, where the underlying topics are important: please limit yourself to one more comment on the topic(s) and please, rather than prolonging the disagreement, say what you think are the important general points about disability/disability-studies that you are really addressing. If you wish to continue at all, that is.
JJ: for my own part, I would like to read more comments about recentering philosophy and empowerment.
An, thanks for your support. When I said that nondisabled feminist philosophers with whom I have been in discussion about the profession tend to ignore the issue of our differences and our different positions of power with respect to the discipline, I meant in terms of the obstacles, assumptions, and biases I confront which they don’t in large part because of the work I do — philosophy of disability/disability theory, which is far more marginalized (if not entirely unacknowledged) in the discipline than feminist philosophy. But I also meant that there are factors which I and other disabled women in philosophy face/have faced in terms of access to jobs, recognition in the discipline, etc. that never seem to get on the agenda of feminist philosophers, at least not in any discussion I’ve heard, read, or to which I have been privy. In my view, there is no association, committee, or subcommittee in feminist philosophical circles or the discipline more broadly that has the representation (at present) of disabled feminist philosophers required for those factors to even get on the radar of nondisabled feminists, never mind on their agenda.
can we get better numbers on hiring somehow? i don’t know if everyone reports their every philosophical move to leiter. and do we know what the numbers we have mean in relation to how many women phds we are graduating?
i was talking to a friend last night about an experiment in implicit association, in which h.r. directors, who totally believed that they were actively recruiting people of color, found that they (or their staff) tended to either disregard the applications of perceived people of color, or be more likely to do a background check on perceived people of color based on the applicant self-reporting, not that they had a previous felony conviction, but they *hadn’t.* many of these folks not only believed that they had no bias against perceived people of color, but that they were actively recruiting said folks.
this gave me pause in thinking about the state of philosophy. i think that the challenges we face are bigger than implicit assumptions. but this might do a little to counter those who complain about the “affirmative action” or “encourage diversity” statements on job notices as evidence of a hiring preference for women, one that clearly seems to *not be working.*
I really don’t understand the firm belief that ‘getting better numbers’ is going to somehow make things rectifiable. Someone recently said on the SWIP list that it’s important to get good statistics so that they can be shown to male colleagues, as a way of proving that things are very bad. But does anyone really think that will make a difference? Even Leiter, now and again, posts the (low) percentages of women faculty for the top 20 or so departments in the US. So, it’s not as if the men don’t know the situation of women beyond their own department.
I also do not think the situation will be accurately reflected by comparing the percentage of PhDs awarded to women in a given year with the percentage of jobs that go to women. The women who get PhDs in a given year are not the only women looking for jobs in that given year. The women who graduated the year before, but didn’t get jobs, must also be figured into the calculation, plus the women who graduated the year before that and still haven’t gotten jobs, plus the women who graduate three years before the given year but are still looking for a permanent job, and so on. Things are much worse, I suggest, than the ratio of women who graduate to women who get jobs indicates.
sk: there are some statistics collected by this blog:
http://knowledgeandexperience.blogspot.com/
My impression is that the APA keeps saying it will do better, and then doesn’t.
I think everyone would do well to take the implicit assumption test. The well-know black writer, Malcolm Gladwell, says on his blog that he came out with a negative attitude toward blacks, which indicates how pervasive and subtle bias can be.
I’m afraid that the guys are not really very aware of how few women and other under-represented group members there are in philosophy. I suspect they think you have to be white to do analytic philosophy well, with a very few exceptions, and that that may be conscous. As for women, well, they don’t really notice since there never have been that many women and, in any case, it fits there sense of things that women are elsewhere.
Just recently an illuminating situation has arisen: there’s an upcoming conference that’s pretty important in a philosophy field; it turns out that about 93% of the philosophy speakers are men. MUCH consternation has resulted, along with the men looking at statistics. They reckon that their field is as bad as economics as far as women go. I could swear they didn’t know beforehand.
I’ve been engaged in promoting women in my university for years and so, for example, if I see a group of male VPs going out to lunch and they wave or something, I’ll remark on the fact that the women are missing. I think they’d never notice otherewise, and they are completely clueless about what has to be done. It is very hard to solve a problem until the people with power know it exists and have some idea of what to do to solve it.
JJ wrote: “Conference announcement after conference announcement demonstrates that women too often have few or none of the more important and visible roles. And as for occupants of any other under-represented group, the situation is simply worse.”
I am all in favor for a “hall (or wall) of shame”. We could start it off with this guy who regularly organizes conferences or colloquiums which are comprised entirely of men. In early May, for instance, he ran an exclusively male event on the work of legal scholar Joseph Raz.
NEWCASTLE ETHICS, LEGAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY GROUP
Summer Seminar Series 2008
University of Newcastle
3rd July 2008
Professor Simon Cabulea May (Virginia Tech)
“Religion, Democracy, and the Liberal Principle of Legitimacy”
Research Beehive room 2.20, Old Library Building
7th July 2008
Professor Jeff McMahan (Rutgers)
“Killing Civilians in War”
Research Beehive room 2.20, Old Library Building
9th July 2008
Professor Robert Pippin (Chicago)
“Hegel’s Social Theory of Agency”
Politics Building room 111
Attendance at these seminars is free and open to all. Maps of the
University of Newcastle and Newcastle upon Tyne can be found here:
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/travel/maps/index.php Please direct any questions
to Dr Thom Brooks (t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk).
Best wishes,
Thom
——-
Dr Thom Brooks
Reader in Political and Legal Philosophy
Department of Politics
School of Geography, Politics & Sociology
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK
Shelley: i think you’re probably right; i asked out of annoyance at the assumption that Leiter’s world = philosophy in toto, as much as at the low numbers. but this seems to be a basic epistemological problem, in that we don’t believe women, whatever they say. we don’t believe them when they report sexual violence or harassment against them; we don’t believe them when they mark out sexism in the media; we don’t believe them when they report on the bad conditions they face in philosophy departments. or if folks do believe, they just don’t think it matters or that it’s a problem. so how can you get people to believe you? as a friend of mine put it, how do you welcome yourself into a language that doesn’t welcome you? (when it was in fact your language all along…).
jj: thanks for the link.
I think that Feminist Philosophers has become a great source of resistance and subversion of white, ableist, male philosophy. I have a suggestion for another way to continue this transformation of/in concrete contexts.
Since the hiring season (in North America at least) will soon be upon us, I think the contributors to FP should develop a list of best practices for hiring in philosophy (and for hiring disabled women and women of colour especially), a list to which feminist faculty can refer members of the hiring committees in their departments. The list would include changes in practice already suggested here (e.g., encourage electronic applications, conduct phone interviews) and would be an ongoing thread/project over the course of the next few months. Since not all hiring committees (or at least not all members of hiring committees) will recognize the need for such measures as the list stipulates, the list itself would be accompanied by summarized data, arguments and anecdotes about biases and gender schemas provided on the blog, links to articles such as Haslanger’s _Hypatia_ article, etc. How all of this information would be compiled in one place will need to be worked out, but I think FP is the ideal venue for such an endeavour.
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