52 thoughts on “It’s THE place to be for legal philosophers”

  3. to play devil’s advocate (and thus beat others to the punch), it could be partly owing to the fact that international dos like this are probably harder for some female academics to get to. much easier for a bloke to jet off to [italy? was it italy?] for the week, in general.

    shall we ask them what’s the story? invite the committee to comment on it?

  6. i mean ‘i’m on it’. was that a freudian slip? anyway, here’s the email i just sent:

    Dear Conference Organizing Committee,

    I am writing on behalf of the Feminist Philosophers Blog. Your upcoming conference has come to our attention (via http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/girona-may-2010.html), and unsurprisingly, we find it somewhat troubling. Brian Leiter reports that your conference is ‘the place to be for legal philosophers’. It seems unlikely to us that there are no female legal philosophers, so we are at a loss to make sense of the fact that, of your invited speakers, not a one is a woman. We would be very keen to see representation of your committee in our discussion of the conference. As such, we would appreciate it if some set of your committee members could follow the link below and join us in discussing the problem your conference is having.

    https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/its-the-place-to-be-for-legal-philosophers/

    We are an anonymous blog, but as you can read on our site, ‘we are a variety of genders. We are from a variety of ethnic/”racial” groups. We are students, post-docs, temporary lecturers, permanent lecturers, tenured professors, untenured professors, and philosophers with jobs outside academia. Some of us are disabled. We have a variety of sexual orientations. We are on 3 continents. We work in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, experimental philosophy, equity policy, history of philosophy, analytic and continental philosophy. Oh yeah, and feminist philosophy.’

    Thank you in advance for your contribution to our discussion of your conference.

    Best Wishes,
    extendedlp

  8. Great letter, elp. I’m about to borrow it (with suitable revisions). I hope you don’t mind!

  9. Once you start to see it, you see it everywhere. What about those?
    And I hope the legal philosophers spring into action, after your letter, elp… otherwise it will be just as I predicted would happen when the religion philosophy orgraniser (I am bad with names) said we should check with the organisers first: that they would just let it sit in the inbox.

  10. but i think he’ll still have been right that it’s good policy to check first. if they don’t care to weigh in on the issue, that’s significant and informative. we’re not out to stick it to anyone, after all.

  11. Actually, I read them as suggesting we should check before even mentioning it on the blog. I think I’m pretty much with elp here: blog, then call it to people’s attention, then think about what to do next. But this is a place where reasonable feminist philosophers can and do disagree, some thinking we should do something more confrontational initially, and some thinking this is still too confrontational.

  12. btw hippocampa, one of the five talks in the conference you’ve linked to is by a woman. i don’t know enough about this field to know how underrepresented women are at 20%. might not be so far off. (?)

  13. jender, yes, as i recall he was upset that we didn’t check before posting the email addresses of the organizers and sponsors. this is slightly odd, as those email addresses were found right there on the wide open internets; it’s not as if we were publishing street addresses. but i think it’s a fair point that an attempt should be made to find out if there’s an innocent explanation before encouraging others to voice outrage. we should find out whether there’s cause for outrage first and whether the organizers are the correct target for it.

    eg with this conference, who knows but all the big female names in legal philosophy happen to have procreated all at once (like that high school pregnancy pact in new england) and are all going to be home breastfeeding at the end of may. or something like that.

  14. Let me comment on the topic of “what we should do”. I think that developing a policy that fits into the norms of reasonable academic behavior is just fine. And certainly it can be stressful to write an outraged post, as I am in a position to know.

    However, we are in fact dealing with a situation that has inflicted a lot of damage on women in philosophy. The damage is monetary in part, because all these things make a huge difference eventually to one’s cv, merit pay, ability to negotiate a higher salary, and so on. But the damage also has other at least equally important dimensions. The fact that one gets these opportunities to get one’s work discussed can up the quality of the work.

    In addition, with women excluded, the similarities of views and approaches appears to go up; this is bad for the field and it results in sometimes very difficult situations for women who want to present a different view.

    Further, the standards for being someone people listen to get skewed. As a very well known female philosopher remarked to me that the last but one pacific APA, once we stop being sexy, we aren’t noticed!

    And then there’s just the psychologically great strain of occupying a marginal position. It’s pretty awful to move through a social world where one has about 50% of the effect that guys can have.

    (Totally off the top of my head: It’s often remarked that women in professional positions can feel they are not real or authentic – e.g., real philosophy professors or real scientists. I think this is usually attributed to grounds for self-doubt, BUT it suddenly occurs to me that this could be due to the fact that one has less social presence as a professional.)

  15. I agree with everything you’ve said, JJ!

    And elp, I do love the breastfeeding hypothesis.

  16. sorry, i should say that i don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with drawing attention to a troubling situation, even if it’s not clear what the cause of the particular situation is. that seems totally legitimate. but i also think it’s both right and helpful to try to bring people into the discussion who might have insight into what’s going on in a particular case. i think it was a bit of an eye-opener for all of us to find that the organizer of the philosophy of religion conference (and i’ll apologize too; i can’t think of his name either) was eager to discuss the matter with us. fingers crossed others do likewise!

  17. Thanks, Jender. elp, I think the breast feeding hypothesis might turn out to be one of the more plausible ones.

    I was going to add just a bit about the question of justice from the other side. I think we have to keep in mind that not asking women is a very, very standard practice, like feeding the meter (as it’s called here, I think) or parking for 40 minutes in a 20 min space. And feminists who object are very often accorded the respect of the cops who put tickets on cars. E.g., none.

    As long as you don’t get caught, few in the profession apparently care. Of course, irritatingly enough, even one’s friends can be chastising if one gets caught with a ticket, and there’s often the twit who lectures one about how not to get a ticket. However, a ticket – and our call-outs – do very little real and lasting damage.

  18. To the matter of the negative consequences of women’s exclusion, it should be added (a point mentioned, I think, by jj else where) that it does nothing to encourage female grad students or those just starting jobs out of PhD’s to see such male dominated conferences.

    As to how much of an impact these call outs have – I’ve been pleasantly surprised to have spoken to two different conference organisers in the past two or three months, who have been conscious of the need to ensure a suitably diverse line up of speakers. I don’t know if this was prompted by the discussions here. But pleasing nonetheless.

    If these call-outs prompt people to at least consider this when organising conferences, that’s a start – maybe a drop in the ocean, but the philosophy ocean isn’t so enormous that a fair few drops couldn’t start to change things. (perhaps I’m just in optimistic mood right now…)

  19. i think it’s great to use this forum to make clear to people why this is an important issue; why it’s important (and *legitimate*) to actively try to include women in conferences. it could be that some people unreflectively would look on going after women contributors as a sort of ‘profiling’ to be avoided.

  20. I wonder if we should do something like a fact page on this and maybe on other topics. It might be enough to have a diary that collects up various comments.

    Quite a few people don’t keep up with comments and so probably know that we’re concerned about conferences but won’t have seen the discussion here about why.

  21. Bravo. I am glad to see all these naming, testifying and confronting activities, but let’s not forget the need to get ourselves on conference program and planning committees, on search committees etc., to make sure consciousness is raised early and initial invitations are diverse. That will avoid the parking/mete enforcement analogy.

  22. jj, i think it’s an excellent idea. mr lp also had the idea that we should save and post some of our deleted comments; might help to explain to some people why we blog anonymously! maybe these things could be combined (along with other info) in a FAQ page?

    robin, quite right. perhaps we need to make an effort to encourage people who are planning conferences to spread the word about their plans so that they can avoid this ‘i couldn’t find any women’ issue?

    and just to update everyone: i’ve contacted both the organisers of this conference, and one of the invited speakers; the speaker has declined to discuss the conference on our blog, and the organisers have so far not replied. hasn’t been very long, so it could be that the organisers simply haven’t received the email, or haven’t yet had time to reply. we’ll see.

  23. elp, I haven’t heard from the mental causation conference people either. I’m wondering it would be appropriate to contact funding agencies.

    Robin, thanks for your suggestion. Some of us have organized conferences/workshops, etc. But I bet we could do more.

  24. I do like the idea of a page about inclusion of women and conferences. This could contain our reasons for caring about having women at conferences, and responses to frequently asked questions, including both objections to the concern and queries about how to get more women at conferences. One thing elp emphasised in our discussion, which I liked, was making it clear that one thing we really want to do is to find out WHY women aren’t being included so that we can think about the right remedies. So we should be sure to tell conference organisers that we genuinely want to know why they don’t have women– we’re not just asking them to come over here and get pilloried by us. This can serve as a way of gathering information, as well as spreading awareness of the issues.

  25. Jender, I had written a longish note admiring your capacity for generous interpretation, but wondering whether there are good reasons for not including women. Then a fuse blew, and I lost it (i.e., the comment, not my temper). Second time around might not be very good:

    One reason I fear may be operating is that the conference organizers in effect want people who have been keynote speakers at other conferences. Given the access women have to such venues, there’s a self-perpetuating exclusion of women possibly going on.

    There is another and disturbing factor, quite likely related, which is a kind of invisibility that women can have. I’m not sure the following came out clearly during one of our recent discussions. It was claimed by an organizer that there weren’t any analytic phil of X women in Britain, which was important because of costs. In fact, a highly respected women in X is at Oxford. There’s some way in which she just wasn’t seen.

  26. jj, re contacting the ahrc: i’ve been convinced it’s not the best way to go. i’ve heard a rather convincing argument that it’s wrong to say that their giving a grant to the female philosopher who used it to organise this all-male conference is not a case of the ahrc helping women. in other words: we mustn’t write to them claiming that they’re not helping women in the field by giving a grant for something like this because their giving big grants to women–whatever the women go on to do with it–does things like get promotions and prestige for the women who get the grants. and we don’t want to make them feel like we don’t think that’s a good thing. yes. i think agree with this. it seems, anyway, like a very muddy issue to me. but the upshot, i think, is that it’s not clearly something we want to go complaining to the ahrc about.

    and now, re generous interpretations: surely this invisibility you describe is related to this whole issue of implicit bias? (here’s a link to collection of posts on implicit bias, in case anyone needs catching up: https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/implicit-bias-a-collection-of-our-posts/ .) and i think that’s a really good example of a possible cause of womanless conferences that’s such that, rather than condemning the organisers, what would be best to do is to dialog with them and help them to see where implicit bias (biases they probably don’t reflectively agree with) might be misshaping their conferences.

    another way in which a conference organiser might innocently exclude good women philosophers: implicit bias, or sexism, or *whatever* makes it such that good women in the field aren’t promoted as they should be. and THEN perfectly well-meaning conference organiser comes along and organises a conference where the chosen speakers are all quite senior. SO, no one is excluded because of gender; the organisers might even have thought to themselves ‘ach i wish we had some women in the mix’, but alas, no women in the field or sub-field, as it happens, have the sort of seniority that they’re shooting for.

    i think this latter two-tiered exclusion (if you will) is exactly the sort of phenomenon we would want to discover so that it could be remedied. it wouldn’t make any sense at all to condemn or shame the organiser. but it would make all the sense in the world to investigate thoroughly what happened so that solutions–eg, making sure folks know that *it’s*okay* to pick a somewhat junior woman so as to counter this phenomenon–could be appropriately devised.

    and now i think i’ve prattled on long enough :).

  27. Elp, the point about contacting the grant source is v. Strong. I’m much less sure about the others. The Oxford person is as senior as you get, e.g.

    I am also less sure about innocence, but my iphone is a poor medium for arguing that.

  28. right, but that could be an instance of the first sort i mentioned. where, like you say, the woman is invisible, and we might want to suppose that that invisibility has something to do with implicit bias on the part of the organiser(s): when they think ‘prominent philosopher of x’, the image they form in their head is–without them even realising it–a man. so they miss the woman because she’s automatically different to the vague notion they’re working with at the early stages of planning. if they reflected on this image they form, they would surely disagree with it. but, sadly, people don’t always reflect on all of the steps they make in the process of making practical decisions. if we could discover that this sort of thing is happening for some people who plan conferences, we could work to bring it to their attention that they might be in danger of falling into this implicit bias trap, and thereby decrease the likelihood they will (by causing them to reflect).

    do understand, i’m not for a moment implying that the end result is non-bad. all-male conferences are a bad thing. they should be condemned and we want them not to happen. it’s just not, i don’t think, clear that the bad thing necessarily points to a bad person being the cause of it.

  29. elp, I think we may have a deep disagreement about the empirical facts. E.g., you’ve said:

    when they think ‘prominent philosopher of x’, the image they form in their head is–without them even realising it–a man. so they miss the woman because she’s automatically different to the vague notion they’re working with at the early stages of planning. if they reflected on this image they form, they would surely disagree with it.

    I’m not sure that’s how people are thinking when they plan conferences, but there’s some evidence against the idea that making people aware that they have implicit biases equips them to act against them.

    Also, there’s been an enormous amount of research done on how women get left out; this has been one of the wonderful effects of the NSF Advance program. There are, in addition, lots of guidelines about how to change the situation. Unfortunately, we’re a group without the resources that are generally needed to implement their recommendations.

    I’m completely willing to go along with the idea that all the blog will do is to document the exclusion of women and ask people to behave in a different fashion. I think it may have little effect, but social activism is not part of the mandate of the blog.

    On the other hand, people without resources have tried other tactics, including putting their bodies on the line. I’m quite fascinated by the idea that we should drap our bodies across the lectures at these male only conferences. It would, however, blow our anonymity.

  31. jj, i should make clear that i don’t know what the empirical facts are. so, one mustn’t take my for-examples as claims; i’m just throwing out possibilities. so, i don’t think our disagreement is factual so much as prudential. i also wouldn’t want to be taken as claiming that flagging up biases is the remedy for those biases. if there’s research to show that it’s not, then i would advocate some other solution. (and yes i think it’s even intuitively implausible that simply saying ‘hey you have these biases!’ makes the biases go away. helping people to see what concrete actions they can take to counter the bias seems, superficially, to be a more plausible solution.) all i’m advocating is that we try to work with people to solve the problem. and i’m not even advocating that as the end of the road; just as a first course of action in each individual case.

  32. I tend to think social change requires both slow persuasion and (metaphorical) bomb-throwing.

  33. I agree with Jender. “Change from within” and all that …..

    But sometimes it takes a “bomb” to wake folks up and make them pay attention.

  34. I think we all must make sure to take female conference organisers to task as well. So, while we may “Huzzah!” when a female philosopher wins or is awarded a rather hefty grant to put on a conference, we shouldn’t count that conference organiser being female as any sort of mitigating factor should the conference line-up be just as dude-heavy as all the others. Presumably, the thrust of most of our claims has to do with visibility of female philosophers and the consequences of its presence and absence rather than the gender of those organising the salient activities germane to visibility. Simply put, let’s get the gender imbalance for speakers sorted out, then the imbalance in the audience sorted, then perhaps we can turn our attention to the imbalance in conference organisation.

  35. Hear ye, hear ye! Through Leiter, I was directed to another conference, which is THE place to be for Nietzsche (check Leiter’s page for the original link):

    http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/events/nietzsche_mind_conference

    Since the plenary speakers (and the conference organizers, it also appears) are the only ones listed but the CFP is on this page, maybe spread the word to women working on Nietzsche to get them to submit? They probably won’t get a fancy picture of them posted like through this webpage, but it’d be something.

    The conversation on this blog has been/is excellent. What’s really starting to bother me, though, is not even just the widespread absence of women from philosophical conferences, but also how “influential” people in the discipline (whatever that may mean) are spinning x, y, or z conference/publication/meeting as being particularly ambitious, insightful, or worthwhile. Because these meetings don’t often contain women, an implicit conclusion is (yet again): Women may attend conferences, but when they do, they’re not at the top ones, or they’re not featured speakers. So in addition to the invisibility of women in our profession, this added problem of “elite” conferences being exclusively male tells me that men do excellent philosophy, and women only decent.

    Of course, I could stop reading Leiter’s blog, CFPs on other websites, and such, but then I just wouldn’t be aware of these things, and I won’t bury my head in the sand.

  36. jender and j: totally agree, but bomb throwing before asking questions, to my mind, makes for a lot of bombs thrown in the wrong direction. also, as i’ve said over and over, it seems to me that there might be people _unwittingly_ involved in the exclusion of women–through bias, or social ignorance, or chance or being a part of the same industry we are (ie, one where women have traditionally been excluded, and so can very well be thin on the ground) or what have you. throwing bombs at the likes of them is (a) inappropriate and (b) counterproductive.

    cpt. darling: i agree with what you’re saying, but don’t forget that grant receipt can sometimes mean promotion for women…which can mean high profile, which can mean conference invites, which can mean one more woman who *is* included. so it’s not as black/white as saying no women are helped if she doesn’t invite women.

    mel: nothing more charming that declaring your own talk “the place to be” for people in your field, eh?

  38. Meanwhile, have any of those people responded to the invitation to come and discuss things on here yet, or responded in e-mail about why there are so few women in the conference?

  39. none of the organizers for this conference (the phil of law one) has replied. one speaker has replied via email declining to comment on the blog. what i’ve heard is that the conference speakers are all contributors to the corresponding anthology, and that there are no women speaking at the conference because there are no women’s contributions in the anthology. the person from whom i heard this seemed to think that this was a perfectly reasonable and innocent explanation for the lack of women at the conference. anyone who would like to share careful, specific, explanatory comments about the reasonableness of this explanation is encouraged to do so. i bet there are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t see the problem. (honestly wouldn’t see it. ie, need it carefully and thoroughly explained to them, so that they can be right-headed on the matter.)

  40. Just a quick note: I do realise that I have agreed with both of two people who are disagreeing with each other. This may be due to my extreme harriedness and sleep-deprivation this week, but I suspect it’s actually due to the fact that I really haven’t made up my mind about what I think is the best way to proceed. Argh! I hate being indecisive about things that matter.

  41. Jender and elp: I certainly think some organizers proceed without thinking at all about gender, but I’m not sure that makes them innocent.

    Compare: “Without thinking, she sprinkled ant poison on the children’s cereal.” There are various ways this can be made true, and some of them definitely involve culpability.

    Some lack of thought is culpable. When do we get to the point of culpable lack of thought/ignorance in philosophy? The absence/exclusion of women has been discussed by women in philosophy for about 30 years!

    One of the things we haven’t mentioned as harm is the harassment that young women too often get in situations where male hierarchies provide the basic social scaffold. Is it rude and unfair to act to mitigate that situation? Or are we to assume that conference organizers don’t know that a number of young women will experience pressure/invitations to be perks? And, even worse, may feel flattered, even though they may well experience the enmity of their own male peers?

    Is it alright that conference organizers just don’t think about issues such as the safety and well-being of the most vulnerable members of our profession? Or OK if they think it’s all amusing?

  42. OK, it’s confession time now. I once organised an all-male conference without noticing it. And I’d been teaching feminism and working on behalf of women in philosophy for some time. I do in fact consider myself culpable for it. But it’s not the case that I didn’t care about women in philosophy– I just really screwed up. So do people of good will sometimes stupidly organise all-male conferences? I would say ‘yes’.

  43. So what would I have done if called out on it by a blog like this one? I like to think I’d show up and say “Oh shit– I really screwed up.” But I might have been so mortified that I stayed away entirely.

  44. Jender, I didn’t mean for my comments about culpability to connect directly with some sort of action or even decision about posting. And clearly people of good will can make mistakes.

    As far as action goes, I think it isn’t a good idea for the blog to be displaying a series of actions that make some of us very uncomfortable. So that seems to me to settle it.

    I wonder if we would feel that if the situation was about race, not gender.

  45. I think it’s hugely, enormously important to separate the desire to express anger about the broad fact of exclusion from the desire to achieve change in particular cases, or to support particular people in becoming a bit more thoughtful and aware.

    I think when we express our anger and frustration *through* the attempts to change real situations – which are inevitably complicated and involve imperfect human beings – we risk doing those people an injustice, at worst, or maybe just making them too angry to change.

  46. You know, I’m not actually totally clear on what specific policies are being debated at this point! But I’m also not sure we have to have policies on this. If we have a diversity of approaches, why not just use that diversity of approaches and discuss and debate them, serving as useful role models of productive disagreement.

  47. I’ve been thinking about the concerns about injustice being expressed here, which seem to me important. I’m not sure that social change is going to take place if one is very careful about not embarrassing people. Still, it is not good to be one of the few people in a group who is willing to press for change in a way that makes others uncomfortable.

    I can still remember vividly the first time I was organizing sessions at a conference and suddenly realized that all the people I had thought of were men. Fortunately, the realization hit me before I acted, so I did ask women. The thing is, that was 25 years ago and change has been extremely slow.

    Somehow I’m also reminded vividly of a form of protest that jj-son pointed out to me in NYC. Some lawyers were ripping off poor working class clients; when this was discovered, a gigantic rubber rat might show up outside their office:

  49. The giant inflatable rat is AWESOME. I wonder what the right thing would be for philosophy conferences?

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