Women in Philosophy: Aiming for Greater Inclusiveness in Academic Philosophy

by Helen De Cruz

I’ve shifted institutions several times over the years (from Leuven to Oxford University to the VU Amsterdam to Oxford Brookes University). Each time I had to start over with a new support network, friends, and schools for the children. Such transitoriness is the nature of academic life, especially as dictated by temporary contracts, but one thing that has remained constant is that I am a member of the academic philosophical community. My community is international, mostly analytic, and mostly Anglophone, consisting of people connected through various ties of associations, workshops, conferences, graduate schools, and frequent travel.  Throughout my moves, being part of this community, facilitated by frequent travel and online, has been a source of comfort and fellowship.

Academic philosophy is not a huge community. Degrees of separation are typically very low. If you don’t know someone in the network, then likely you will know someone who knows them. “Wasn’t she a graduate student of X?” “I saw him present at Y.” “Should we ask Z? I’ve heard she works on this topic.”  As a result, academic philosophy – like other areas of academia and also the business world – is an intricate tangle of informal networks of connectedness, reciprocal relationships, and friendship.

Unfortunately, however, academic philosophy also exhibits cronyism and clubbishness. Invited presenters at colloquia and plenary speakers at conferences are often not purely chosen for the length of their CV or the merits of their work. Senior professors, when they are prestigious, can and often do exert influence to place their graduate students in tenure track positions.

If we conceive of academic philosophy in terms of a network, then the most central vertices consist of permanent faculty members at American, and to a lesser extent, British, Canadian and Australian universities, often ones that are considered top programs. They will work on trendy topics that find a friendly audience in the most prestigious venues. People at the center of this philosophical community benefit more from the informal exchange networks of invitations to speak at conferences, write for edited volumes, special issues, and the like. More at the periphery are people at universities that are not Anglophone, some more so (e.g., Poland) than others (e.g., the Netherlands), in countries outside Europe and the US (e.g., Singapore, South Africa), people in non-tenure track or non-permanent positions in institutions across the world, and people who work on unfashionable topics.

The cronyist and clubbish nature leads to exclusion of people at the fringes of academic philosophy. These networks aren’t likely going to go away (they can be altered though, as I will argue below). And also, networks are not all bad: they provide friendship, support, and other positive goods we associate with enduring communities.

Here I want to explore how we can make academic philosophy more inclusive, given these features. In this proposal, which does not seek radical reform of existing structures, we would include more people in the networks of conversation, and avoid excluding people who – through no lack of talent or persistence – find themselves at the fringes of it. I am not saying this is the only model (other ways of achieving it would require structural change), but the advantage of the proposal below is that it can be implemented by individual people and individual departments who desire some change in how we engage with each other.

One way to make academia more inclusive is to aim a better demographic representation of underrepresented groups. For example, the Gendered Conference Campaign draws attention to all-male conferences, panels, and edited volumes. Over the years this campaign has resulted in a reduction of the number of all-male conferences, or at least an increased awareness of them. I recall a friend, a tenured professor at another institution writing to me, “Could you please help me out. I’m organizing this conference, where we invited four male plenary speakers, and we didn’t think of inviting a woman! Do you happen to know a female academic who works on X?” Thinking of that particular topic, the names that came to my mind were all women! I was surprised that my friend had not thought of inviting any of them.  This experience, and others like it, indicates the GCC has helped bring women who do excellent work in the spotlight who would otherwise be ignored. The GCC is not an isolated effort in addressing gender imbalance.

But it remains challenging to think of efforts that might also improve academic philosophers’ demographic diversity on other fronts such as race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and language. Given that numbers for some underrepresented groups are very low, the equivalent of a gendered conference campaign, for, say, philosophers who are not white, is not feasible. Consider the whiteness of academic philosophy in the UK. A recent survey found that 95.2% of UK faculty members in philosophy self-identify as white. In the UK as a whole, the total white population is 81.9%. There are only three non-STEM disciplines in the UK with an even whiter faculty, sports, history and classics.

How then do we expand efforts for inclusiveness to academic philosophy more broadly? To make academic philosophy more demographically representative of the broader societies where it is situated we need to look at the underlying factors that have given rise to these patterns. It’s vital to accept that academic philosophy, like other academic disciplines, is not a meritocracy. Pretending that it is makes things worse for people who find themselves at the periphery. It is an invidious form of denialism – which is, of course, the first and most effective way of enabling injustice.

As I have argued earlier, academic hiring in philosophy shows prestige bias, whereby people from the most prestigious schools fill a large number of academic positions, and are almost the only ones to be hired at other prestigious schools. There is downward, but little upward, social mobility. Being admitted to a prestigious graduate school is not purely the result of individual merit, but is reflected in application patterns. People from disadvantaged milieus, including racial minorities, and from working-class backgrounds do not have the family support or social savoir-faire to apply to the best schools. People with disabilities or with caring responsibilities are constrained in the geographical range of schools they can apply to. As a result, people occupying the central vertices of academic philosophy show a skewed demographic, still mostly male, white, able-bodied, and from upper- and middle-class backgrounds.

Yet many members of the academic philosophical community continue to hold on to and actively promote a kind of faux meritocracy. They will often claim to be politically progressive (in particular, concerned with social justice and equality of opportunity), but their attention for prestige is not in line with their egalitarian sentiments. Failure to land a permanent position is still seen as an individual, rather than structural failure. Many people indeed fail as a result of structural inequalities, not because of lack of scholarly merit. There is still tolerance for misogyny, racism and sexual harassment. Also, often we do not stand up for people who try to defend themselves, or who try to defend others against bullying in the profession. While there is a widespread desire to improve the profession and to make it more inclusive, we do not want to rock the boat. That is the less pretty side of keeping a cohesive community.

The faux meritocracy is also expressed in a certain numbness (in a benign form) or exclusion (less benign) towards people who are at the periphery of the academic community. A friend of mine recently attended a conference with lots of philosophers from prestigious institutions. “I need someone I can talk to”, he said, “I haven’t spoken to anyone in two days”. “Why not?” I asked. “Well, as soon as I tell people I do not have a permanent position, people stop talking to me,” he said.

Sadly, this experience is not uncommon. This pattern of currying favor with prestigious folk is taught to graduate students. They are advised to “work” “the Smoker” – the reception at the APA –  finding senior people from prestigious schools to talk to, rather than engaging in interesting conversations with their peers. The first time I was at the Smoker in 2011, just having finished my PhD, I observed with anthropological curiosity the physical movements of people, where people from top departments were being crowded by large numbers of groupies, while graduate students and other junior folk shuffled around, talking to no-one, looking a bit lost while clutching their alcoholic beverages. Our faux meritocracy – in which we conceive of academic merit as purely dictated by excellence and effort, and not as a result of factors like luck, reduced access to education and networks, damages attempts to make philosophy more inclusive.

A key to making academic philosophy inclusive is to recognize its structural features as a community of people and then be prepared to challenge those features.

It is useful here to look at the ideas of the neo-Confucian philosophers such as Chéng Hào (1032-85) and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) (see Ivanhoe 2017), who see communities, even the universe as a whole, as intimately connected. We can truly flourish in properly sustainable ways only if we pay attention to all the parts. To pretend that adjuncts and other precariously employed faculty members, or people from institutions outside the US, UK, Canada, are not really part of our community is to exhibit numbness (不仁, buren, literally lack of feeling or lack of benevolence). Such a neo-Confucian outlook still allows for hierarchy among the different parts of a community, including the centrality of prestigious American departments, and yet would exhort us to pay more attention and to show benevolence and care for those on the periphery.

We could add to this Confucian claim that cultivation of the proper sorts of feelings requires both individual self-cultivation and structural changes (li, roughly ritual, ceremony, etiquette). For example, one could change seminar inviting practices to ensure one actually meets colleagues from less prestigious universities (e.g., non-PGR ranked universities in the US or non-Russell Group universities in the UK). Personal contacts matter – they cultivate fellow-feeling, and continued contact (e.g., through social media) can become a valuable source of information from those otherwise occluded departments. One’s personal contacts can develop into a broader collegial solidarity with members of such departments.

A related useful concept is José Medina’s concept of network solidarity, which draws upon Iris Marion Young and Larry May’s views on shared responsibility. Being part of a community of philosophers, we have certain duties to that community, including epistemic and non-epistemic duties. We need to be, in Young’s terminology, public-spirited, open to listening to the claims of others and not merely be concerned with our own gain. Particularly, we need to be open to people who are in disadvantaged and/or precarious positions and what they have to say.

Being part of a network of interconnected philosophers, we also need to recognize the impact of our work on the broader intellectual community and humanity as a whole; we are not isolated from the wider communities in which we practice philosophy. It may be a fun philosophical exercise to defend, say, climate change denial, but given the seriousness of climate change we need to consider the wider ramifications of doing so. Philosophers weigh in on debates about social issues such as transgender rights, and it is important, while doing so to think of the broader consequences on the various communities who are being discussed—they are people and not just parts of philosophical games.

Philosophers may not be powerful, but we do have some intellectual authority; we may hold more power than we think. This became acutely clear to me when, together with other philosophers in the UK, we objected to the UK’s Home Office (which handles immigration and asylum cases) use of arbitrary criteria such as knowledge of Plato and Aristotle as grounds for rejecting an asylum claim of a humanist who claimed religious persecution. We co-signed a letter and provided evidence for a court case, and as a result of our collective actions, the Home Office will now introduce mandatory training on how to evaluate asylum claims relating to freedom of religion. This is a substantial change, given how caseworkers had previously no script and no training. For example, at a session in British parliament, I heard testimonies about unsuccessful asylum claims where Christian converts were asked what color the Bible has (note: it comes in many colors) to evaluate their claim to asylum as genuine.

We can make a difference, and I believe we ought to make more of a difference in the wider world. There is a slow change in culture where topics such as sexual negotiation, micro-aggressions, and state-endorsed denialism are becoming worthy of philosophical discussion including in prestigious venues, but the change is still too slow. Next to this, it does not require extraordinary effort to talk to non-tenure track faculty and to acknowledge they are part of our community, and to involve them in a wider range of scholarly activities. Ultimately, this cultivation of benevolence, a key Confucian virtue, coupled with a genuine openness to be challenged in our preconceptions, will be to the benefit of all of us.

Here’s an example of how we can concretely do this, offered by Ian James Kidd (University of Nottingham) and reproduced with permission.

Kidd recently made a count of the gender balance and departmental origin of speakers for the University of Nottingham’s weekly research seminar series (65 speakers in total). While the gender balance was about 50/50 men and women, it turned out the vast majority of speakers (81%) came from the most prestigious UK universities (the so-called Russell Group), and only a small minority of speakers (4%) came from the less prestigious UK newer universities. The Nottingham data also tracked professional rank (so, three criteria – gender, rank, institutional status). This might lead us to think more carefully about the aims of disciplinary and departmental li. What is the purpose of a departmental research seminar? It could be:

(i) getting the department to pay for my old pals to come and visit, giving them a free meal, train ticket, hotel room;

(ii) creating a vibrant departmental research culture where we hear about new work by our disciplinary colleagues

(iii) entrenching inequalities of power and privilege in the discipline by giving lots of exposure, prestige, and epistemic goods to similarly privileged peers, for instance through helping them improve their papers, increasing their chances of being published, with further downstream effects such as dominance in the top journals and epistemic control of the discipline.

(iv) contributing to the cultivation of all members of the discipline – from a variety of departments (prestigious and less prestigious ones) – to do our departmental bit for the vitality of our wider community.

We claim to want to do (ii), and we do, but we also end up doing (i) or (iii). Ultimately, the focus on Confucian benevolence would say we should also do more towards (iv). Thinking about how we can make small changes to benefit the discipline, and by extension, the wider communities in which philosophy departments are situated, is something we will need to do more.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jon Robson, Ian James Kidd, Nathan Nobis, Richard Pettigrew, Kate Norlock, Kevin Schilbrack, Sara Uckelman, and Adriel M. Trott for comments to an earlier version of this piece.

Helen De Cruz is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. Her publications are in empirically-informed philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of religion, social epistemology, and metaphilosophy. Her overarching research project is an investigation of how humans engage in thinking about abstract domains such as theology, mathematics, and science, what it means for limited, embodied beings like us to think about these topics, and what epistemic conclusions we can draw from this.