Diversity in Philosophy Departments: Introduction

This is the first in a several part series discussing ways to improve diversity in philosophy departments. The other parts can be found here.

At least with respect to gender and race, philosophy departments in the United States are less diverse than most other departments in the university, both in their faculty and in their student bodies.  In series of blog posts to follow, several philosophers will discuss what can and should be done about this issue.  This post will present some statistics and general reflections.

I begin with gender and race because they are the most frequently studied and the easiest to find data on.  In its 2018 membership data, the American Philosophical Association reports 26% women among members responding to a demographic survey, 74% men, and 0.2% “something else”.  Similarly, in 2017, Schwitzgebel and Jennings found that 25% of faculty in U.S. departments rated in the Philosophical Gourmet Report were women and that 29% of philosophy PhD recipients placed in academic jobs were women.  Data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) shows that women have earned approximately 29% of philosophy PhDs since the early 2000s.  Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows that women have received approximately 32% of philosophy Bachelor’s degrees since the 1980s.

The decades-long flat trend lines among students give little reason to think that gender proportions in philosophy will dramatically change anytime soon, absent more assertive action or cultural change in the discipline.  Despite earning 57% of Bachelor’s degrees in the U.S., women constitute a minority of the “pipeline” into philosophy and may also disproportionately leak out of the pipeline, with progressively smaller proportions at more advanced stages of study and career.  The Data on Women in Philosophy group website contains detailed department-by-department data on faculty.

Data on race are more mixed.  In its membership data from 2018, the APA finds 80% of respondents identifying as White/Caucasian, compared to 60% in the general U.S. population.  Also in 2018, White students received 84% of PhDs in philosophy, compared to 70% of PhDs overall (excluding temporary visa holders).  However, the racial composition of philosophy undergraduates was close to representative of undergraduate degree recipients overall: White students received 60% of Bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and 57% of Bachelor’s degrees overall, across all majors.  NCES and SED data show that racial diversity among philosophy students has been increasing for decades at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

A closer look at these data, however, reveals that most of the growth has been among Hispanic/Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander students.  Black or African American students remain sharply underrepresented in philosophy, with approximately flat trendlines over several decades.  Currently, Blacks or African Americans constitute 13% of the general population, 10% of Bachelor’s degree recipients overall, 5% of Philosophy Bachelor’s degree recipients, 3% of Philosophy PhD recipients (only 10 total recorded by the Survey of Earned Doctorates in 2018) and also only 3% of respondents to the APA’s demographic survey.  American Indians / Alaska Natives are also underrepresented, constituting about 1.3% of the U.S. population, 0.4% of Bachelor’s degree recipients, 0.3% of Bachelor’s recipients in Philosophy, and 1.1% of APA members who reported their race.  In 2018, the SED recorded no American Indian or Alaska Native philosophy PhD recipients.

Other dimensions of diversity are less commonly measured, but data from Shelley Tremain suggest that people with disabilities are substantially underrepresented.  Anecdotal evidence and some mixed evidence from the SED suggest that philosophers might hail disproportionately from higher socio-economic status backgrounds.  As Bryan Van Norden has extensively documented, non-“Western” philosophical traditions tend to receive little attention in the philosophy curriculum in most departments.  Uwe Peters has recently argued that philosophy lacks political diversity.

One might think that these facts simply reflect a natural sorting by interest in a diverse but egalitarian society – that men are, for some innocuous reason, more likely to be drawn to philosophy and Black people less likely to be drawn to philosophy.  We ought not expect a perfectly even sorting of all social groups into all disciplines, even if no group faces disadvantages.

We should reject that perspective.  There is nothing about philosophy, as a type of inquiry into fundamental facts about our world, that should make it more attractive to White men than to Black women.  Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, and social groups.  If our discipline and society were in a healthy, egalitarian condition, we should, in fact, expect people from minority groups to be overrepresented in academic philosophy, rather than underrepresented.  Academic philosophy should celebrate diversity of opinion, encourage challenges to orthodoxy, and reward fresh perspectives that come from inhabiting cultures and having life experiences different from the mainstream.  We should be eager, not reluctant, to hear from a wide range of voices.  We should especially welcome, rather than create an inhospitable or cool environment for, people with unusual or minority or culturally atypical or historically underrepresented experiences and worldviews.  The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference.

Philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines, not among the least diverse.

In 2018, the Blog of the APA ran a companion series on the lack of diversity in philosophy journals, which readers might also want to check out. Here is the introductory post.

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.