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.)
Feminist Philosophers 