Kieran Healy has done some further analysis of his incredibly interesting citation graph – this time specifically about gender. And the punch-to-the-gut headline has to be this:
Eighteen items in the top 500 are written by women, or 3.6 percent of the total. By comparison, 6.2 percent of the items in the top 500 are written by David Lewis.
In all, only thirteen fifteen female authors make it onto the graph. 13 15 women for a graph spanning 20 years. Nice.
*Update*:
Kieran Healy writes:
“I have corrected several errors in the dataset, and made some changes to make the citation counts more accurate. First, a phantom item credited to “Anonymous” and notionally appearing on a single page of Philosophical Perspectives had a relatively high citation count (it was the 119th-ranked item). It has now been deleted. Second, the raw data from the Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge citation database contains twelve cases citing “Christine Korsgaard (1998) Naming and Necessity”. These are in fact cites to Kripke (1980). Third, I have taken the three different ways Naming and Necessity is cited in the database and amalgamated them into a single cite to Kripke (1980). Finally, based on some further analysis I changed the cutoff point from the top 500 to all items with at least ten citations, so as not to arbitrarily exclude some items with the same number of citations as other included items. Now we have 526 items instead of 500. These changes are reflected in the discussion above. I thank Juan Comesana, Gary Ostertag, Laura Schroeter, and Dave Chalmers for help identifying issues in the raw data. I welcome further corrections.
These corrections and changes mean the tables change slightly and the network is rewired a little. Naming and Necessity is now the most-cited item. Item ranks have shifted slightly due to existing items being able to move up into the vacant slots opened up by deleting mistaken items or merging cites, and some new papers enter at the bottom. Two of these items are authored by women. If you quoted from this post prior to these changes, please check to see whether the numbers you cited have changed slightly.
The main upshots are that we now have nineteen items by fifteen women, out of 526 highly-cited papers in the dataset. Korsgaard has one fewer item (due to the database error), and two new items by women have entered the list at the bottom: one by Linda Zagzebski and one by JJ Thomson. The overall percentages are almost identical, however, because we now have 19/526 (~3.6%) items by women. And the 26 new items included two papers by … David Lewis! That makes for 33/526 or ~6.3% of the total.”
So 15 women instead of 13 women, but the same percentage.
Feminist Philosophers 