Diversity and Philosophy Journals: Introduction

by Nicole Hassoun, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Subrena Smith

Unfortunately, philosophy is among the least demographically diverse academic disciplines in North America (women-in-philosophy.org). For example, women in all of academia account for 39% of tenured/tenure track faculty, while women in philosophy account for 25% of tenured/tenure track faculty (Wilheim, Conklin, and Hassoun, 2015). Black people are about 13% of the U.S. population but only about 4% of tenured philosophers (Botts et al. 2014). Disabled people also appear to be dramatically underrepresented in academic philosophy (Tremain 2014). Such disparities reflect a structural problem in the discipline: The fundamental questions of philosophy are not of less relevance to people depending on their race, sex, ability, and so forth; nor do we believe that people in academically underrepresented groups have less of value to say.

By some measures, the best-known academic journals in philosophy are, as a whole, even less diverse than are faculties of philosophy. For example, the data suggest that while approximately 26% of philosophy faculty are women, only about 13% of the publications in elite journals in the field are by women (Schwitzgebel and Jennings 2017), and less than 1% of authors in elite journals are Black (Bright 2016).

Academic journals are crucial gatekeepers for the discipline. Publication in journals as a graduate student can improve the odds of landing a tenure-track job. Publication as an Assistant Professor is often important to winning tenure. Publication as an Associate Professor is often essential for promotion to Full. And a highly-cited journal article is one of the highest tokens of prestige and influence. The discipline as a whole is unlikely to change until the extreme lack of demographic diversity among authors in highly visible academic journals is repaired. If we are going to improve the diversity of the discipline, it is crucial to improve the diversity of our journals. Changing the publishing practices even of a few dozen influential philosophy journals might have a large impact on the discipline.

We should all want to change this pattern of exclusion. We should all want philosophy to reflect the different people that constitute it. But for this to happen philosophers and journal editors will all need to agree that philosophy is damaged by not including a rich array of practitioners. It cannot be the case that because one is disabled, one is assigned to a non-White racial group, or one is gendered non-male that the substance and value of the philosophy one produces is diminished, less than, or not on a par with publishable work. It is time, past time, that the discipline addresses this problem that affects actual people’s lives.

Although the APA and other organizations are pursuing active initiatives to improve the diversity of the discipline, for example through diversity grants and workshops, little has been done discipline-wide that focuses directly on authorship in journals.

In the five weekly-published posts that follow, the editors-in-chief of five journals – Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Mind, Sophia, and Theoria – reflect on demographic diversity in the discipline and on their experiences with attempting to improve diversity in their own journals. We will conclude the series with some practical suggestions of practices that journal editors might wish to consider if they want to diversify their authorship.

Suggestions, objections, and contributions welcome at dataonwomen@gmail.com.  More data on women in philosophy are available here: http://women-in-philosophy.org

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References

Botts, Tina F. Liam K. Bright, Myisha Cherry, Guntur Mallarangeng & Quayshawn Spencer (2014). “What is the state of Blacks in philosophy?” Critical Philosophy of Race 2 (2):224-242.

Bright, Liam Kofi (2016). “Publications by Black philosophers in the Leiter top 15 journals 2003-2012”.  Blog post at The Splintered Mind (Jan. 18).  URL: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2016/01/publications-by-black-authors-in-leiter.html

Tremain, Shelley (2014). “Disabling philosophy,” The Philosophers’ Magazine 65(63), 15-17.

Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Carolyn Dicey Jennings (2017). “Women in philosophy: Quantitative analyses of specialization, prevalence, visibility, and generational change” (2017), Public Affairs Quarterly 31, 83-105.

Wilhelm, Isaac, Sherri Lynn Conklin & Nicole Hassoun (2018). “New data on the representation of women in philosophy journals: 2004–2015,” Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1441-1464.

Nicole Hassoun

Nicole Hassoun is a residential fellow with the Hope & Optimism Project at Cornell University and an associate professor in philosophy at Binghamton University. Hassoun is the author of Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations and head of the Global Impact Health project, in addition to her work with the Demographics in Philosophy project.

Eric Schwitzgebel

Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures. His areas of interest include philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, epistemology, metaphilosophy, and metaphysics.