Mentoring: deadline approaching!

The Mentoring Project for Pre-tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy

There is mounting evidence that mentoring is important for success in academia. The Mentoring Project aims to build long-term mentoring relationships between eminent senior women and junior women in the field of philosophy.

Following a successful model developed by women in economics, the Mentoring Project will kick off with a three-day workshop involving small-group intensive working sessions interspersed with plenary panel discussions on professional development and work/life issues.

If you would like to apply, please send your CV and an abstract of the paper you will discuss with your networking group as outlined above to both directors listed below, by Monday April 4, 2011. Please include “Mentoring Project” in the subject line.

Louise Antony – lantony AT philos.umass.edu
Ann Cudd – acudd AT ku.edu

TPM: Women in Philosophy

A really nice article on women in philosophy, including interviews with Helen Beebee, Sally Haslanger, Jules Holroyd, Rae Langton and Jenny Saul.

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But I thought things would certainly change, given the importance of the feminist movement. I’ve been though the profession now and worked hard on the Committee on the Status of Women. I’ve worked hard in other forums like SWIP – the Society for Women in Philosophy – that were trying to advance women’s interests. After 30 years I was seeing that there wasn’t really that much change, and that made me mad.”

Haslanger is not alone. Women’s under-representation in philosophy has been well known for decades, but there does not seem to have been sufficient collective will to really grapple with the problem. Now, however, there are signs that things are changing. “There’s been a lot of momentum gathering in the UK dealing to a great extent with the under-representation of women in philosophy,” says Jules Holroyd, one of the organisers of a well-attended conference in Cardiff last November, on the issue of all under-represented groups, not just women.

The article covers a lot of ground: under-representation, implicit bias, stereotype threat, devaluing of feminist work, combative style (carefully distinguished from argumentative style), harassment and claims about differences in intuitions. And it does it well. The only disappointment is that it doesn’t present criticisms of the Stich and Buckwalter claims about intuitions– and Louise Antony made some excellent criticisms at the very conference the article is based on.

Still, a really good article!