Katharina Nieswandt directed a team of philosophers and psychologists (Heather Maranges, Maxine Iannuccilli, Ulf Hlobil and Kristen Dunfield) who developed the first inferential-statistical model (more on what that means below) of determinants of the under-representation of women in philosophy. The team previously published a précis of their findings with our friends at the blog of the Canadian Philosophical Association. We followed up with some questions of our own.
Can you tell us more about what an inferential-statistical model is and what the significance of making inferential rather than descriptive statistical analyses might be for our understanding of why more men than women major in philosophy in North America?
The results of descriptive analyses are descriptions of the sample, whereas inferential analyses license inferences from the sample to make claims about the whole population.
E.g., one may find that the percentage of women in sample S drawn from population P has risen by 3% over the past 3 years. Now, the following three points are important in order to interpret this finding correctly. First, this is a finding about S, not P. Suppose, I sampled 100 philosophy undergraduates at Concordia University. Then my finding immediately licenses claims about precisely these 100 participants but not claims about the whole population of which I take them to be a sample—such as all North-American philosophy undergraduates. In order to make claims about P, i.e., in order to draw inferences about the population from my sample, I need to conduct inferential analyses. Mathematically, this means that I calculate how high the probability is that my findings are pure coincidence, caused by idiosyncrasies of the (randomly selected) sample. For all results that we reported, this probability, the so-called alpha error, is ≤ 5%; i.e., we used a significance level of p ≤ 0.05, which is standard in social science. Our findings may hence, with high confidence, be interpreted as true of North-American philosophy (and psychology) undergraduates. A second important point to understand is that the same principle applies to any comparative claim. Is an increase of 3% a meaningful difference; i.e., did the gender balance improve, or is it perhaps a mere coincidence of my sample? To answer such questions, one would conduct the same kind of test for this question. A third important point is that inferential analyses require well-constructed study designs because alpha errors accumulate. Thus, if I run dozens of tests on my data set, my total risk of error might be quite high. (Compare this to the following risk: If I bike home from work today, there is a small risk that I will have an accident—for convenience, let’s assume it’s 5%, too. But if I bike home from work on 20 days in a row, then these small, independent risks accumulate to a total risk of 64% that I have at least one accident, because: 1 — (0.95)20= 0.64) A common strategy to prevent this is to specify in advance a fixed number of hypotheses about causally independent effects. One way to do this is to formulate one’s hypotheses as a model that specifies simultaneously, for all factors that one measures, which factors influence which other factors. There are statistical tools that then allow one to test such a model as a whole, as well as the individual hypotheses that it comprises.
For the topic of demographics and diversity in philosophy, very few results of inferential statistical tests exist—among the few papers are: Conklin et al. 2020, Schwitzgebel & Jennings 2017 and Paxton et al. 2012. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present an inferential model.
The lack of reliable, interpretable data is, I believe, a serious impediment to change in our discipline. Departments, university administrators, professional associations and others who want to improve gender ratios need to rely on sample findings, anecdotal evidence and their own job experience as to what might help, rather than models and numbers of which we can reasonably expect that these are true of the population of philosophers or philosophy students.
Let me add that descriptive statistics are, of course, legitimate and useful. We just need to be aware what numbers license what inferences and what makes numbers trustworthy.
The study compared philosophy to psychology students. Do you think there could be other reasons besides the atmosphere of the field such as women students are more focused on the perceived usefulness of a degree for a career?
Let me start by clarifying what model we are proposing. The model does not say that there is a certain atmosphere in philosophy that causes women not to enter the field.
We propose that the influence of gender on choice of major (philosophy versus psychology) can be explained by three factors: (1) brilliance beliefs, (2) sense of belonging in the field, and (3) combativeness, systematizing and prioritizations. The third factor’s influence is via the second.
Brilliance beliefs (Leslie et al. 2015), sense of belonging (Good et al. 2012) and systematizing (Baron-Cohen et al. 2003) are well-validated constructs; combativeness and prioritizations are our additions (which we validated according to psychometric standards, such as reliability—something that is necessary in order for the results delivered by a measurement instrument to be meaningful). In a nutshell, we found that (1) beliefs about how intellectually talented one is as well as about how much intellectual talent the discipline requires are an important determinant of majoring in that discipline, as is (2) the overall impression that one fits in well in that discipline, which in turn is determined by (3) how strongly one takes oneself to incline towards pursuing debate even at the cost of interpersonal harmony and to incline towards abstract, analytical thinking, as well as by how little one takes oneself to care about making money and/or having a family.
In other words, undergraduates who say they value money and/or family are less likely to feel at home in philosophy than in psychology. As it so happens, more women than men show these prioritizations. In this sense, yes, I’d say you’re probably correct in that women students are more focused on the perceived usefulness of a degree for a career.
Could there be other factors apart from the three we found? Yes, this is very much possible, and our team hopes that there will be future studies by others who add to, confirm, or refute what we found. I should stress, though, that the factors we propose are not ad hoc hypotheses. They come from a systematic literature review, and they are the ones that our data corroborated.
We surveyed 400 articles, not just from philosophy, but also general literature from education studies and psychology, on questions such as what makes people choose a major, what determinants of gender gaps have been found for other fields (such as STEM), what influence role models can have etc. We formulated hypotheses based on this previous work and constructed a pilot questionnaire. Based on the results, we then fine-tuned the hypotheses and the questionnaire. The resulting model contains the factors that panned out.
We are furthermore confident that the sample is representative of the North-American philosophy/psychology undergraduate population. Study participants came from departments all across the USA and Canada and from schools of all types (large state schools, ivy leagues, small liberal arts colleges etc.).
I should add that there are plausible determinants for which our study could not test—e.g., because they’d require a longitudinal design or many more participants than we had. The influence of role models is such an example.
The study found that the typical philosophy student perceives themselves as systematizing, as brilliant, does not value having a family, nor making money, compared to the typical psychology student and that more men than women hold these traits. As you reflect on the field, do you think that philosophy in general should encourage women to adapt these values or loosen the association of these values with the study of philosophy?
Most philosophers reading this will understandably be more interested in our study’s pragmatic than scientific value. Unfortunately, one has to be very cautious both with drawing inferences about interventions from foundational research, as well as with basing such inferences on a single study. The first step for our discipline should probably be to get a better picture of the facts on the ground, which would be achieved by more studies and more data. Professional organizations like the APA can do a lot here through fairly straightforward measures, such as compiling reliable statistics on topics such as enrollment, specialization, placement, promotion, publications, grants, etc.
Replying to the question on a more general level, however, the following seems true: What students believe about their abilities and preferences, and what they believe a field to require and deliver, strongly influences whether they will choose that field. I would think that this is rational behavior, provided one’s beliefs about self and field are accurate.
The hard question for us philosophers hence is: Do we think that students’ beliefs about either self or field are inaccurate? For the beliefs about self, that might be the case: Women are less likely to believe that they are brilliant (in our and other studies), e.g., even though they enter university with a better GPA. Perhaps measures that strengthen intellectual self-confidence could help here. For beliefs about the field, however, I am not so sure. Is it wrong to think that there is no money in philosophy? And is it wrong to prefer money over the life of the mind?
My utterly personal and speculative overall take-away from our data is that women’s emancipation had a paradoxical effect in philosophy. More women than men now attend university, and many of these young women want a high-profile career, but philosophy doesn’t strike them as a discipline that would offer this. Many philosophy departments (mine included) try to demonstrate that philosophy can be profitable—e.g., with statistics about law school admissions or earning statistics by major, on department websites or during recruitment events. However, while it might be true that a philosophy undergraduate degree fares comparatively well here, the impression that an academic career path is financially risky does not strike me as wrong.
Do you think it matters that people can be wrong about their brilliance? One thing I wondered was whether philosophy students, Socrates not-with-standing, are more prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or perhaps that sense of brilliance is what students feel like they need to affirm to justify their choice of major. Here again I wondered if the study suggests philosophical teaching could become more inclusive by discouraging students from thinking they are brilliant!
These are important questions for future research, which our study does not address. We took, if you will, a snapshot of people’s beliefs at a certain point in their life and career. What causes them to have the perceptions or preferences that they have at this point—nature or nurture, a certain subject culture they encounter at university, a self-image with which they arrive at university, etc.—all of these would require different study designs. Different causal hypotheses are compatible with our data here. Further studies are hence needed, and this holds even more for the question of interventions.
Regarding accuracy of people’s beliefs, I can tell you that we found a mild association of self-brilliance beliefs with GPA, in the sense that, across genders, those with a higher GPA are slightly more likely to believe that they are brilliant. In other words, there is mild reality check on one’s self perceptions here if we accept GPA as a proxy for actual as opposed to self-perceived brilliance. But people can certainly be wrong about their intellectual talent, and there are various medium-strength gender effects, one of which I already mentioned.
Regarding the development of people’s beliefs, we found that the further students have progressed in their degree, no matter their field, the less likely they are to perceive psychology as requiring brilliance, while their brilliance perception for philosophy is the same. In other words, university socialization increases the divide between the two fields.
What do you make of the fact that prioritization of family is associated with prioritization of money and negatively with systematizing? That particular (dis)association fascinated me.
We found a medium-strength positive association between prioritizing family and prioritizing money. Perhaps I’m cynical, but this did not surprise me. According to Lino et al. 2017, the cost of raising a child in the US was a quarter million USD in 2015, college not included It would only be realistic of undergraduates to believe that a preference for family necessitates a preference for money, and perhaps that is the causal direction of the association we found—as I said, we couldn’t test for causation. Speculating further, such an effect, if it exists, could be aggravated in the US by the cost of college, in the sense that prospective students not only know they will need lots of money to provide for their future family but also that they will furthermore need lots of money to pay off their own college debt.
The medium-strength negative association between prioritizing family and perceiving oneself as systematizing is more surprising, but it fits well with the psychologist definition and the operationalization of the latter. Baron-Cohen et al. (2003) define “systematizing” as what we might call an analytic interest in abstract matters, and they oppose it to “empathizing,” which they define as, we might say, an emotional interest in other people. Our findings confirm that the two properties are (somewhat) opposed; we found a medium-strength negative association between systematizing and empathizing, and we found a medium-strength positive association between empathizing and prioritizing family. The resulting picture hence is that people who take more emotional interest in others are more motivated to have children, and that people who are into abstract thinking tend not to take such an interest.
Let me add a comment about method here. Philosophers will find much to criticize, both in the psychologist definitions of the two properties and in the idea that the two properties are opposed to one another. (Couldn’t someone be a sharp and caring person?) The questionnaire items by which people evaluate themselves on both properties, however, do reliably produce two negatively associated dimensions; i.e., people who score high on systematizing items score low on empathizing items and vice versa (though this negative association is far from perfect). This “systematizing quotient” was validated in half a million people (Greenberg et al. 2018); it does pick up on some difference. A questionnaire can have good psychometric properties (the three big ones are: objectivity, reliability, and validity) even if a typical philosopher may (rightly) think that the constructs that are measured stand in need of conceptual clarification. It is important not to run these issues together.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.
Katharina Nieswandt
Katharina Nieswandt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She specializes in metaethics and political theory.
She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and a Diplom (= M.Sc.) in psychology from the Universität Trier. She received full fellow- and scholarships from Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society, the Newcombe Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Jesus College, Oxford. She has published in various philosophy journals, including the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. As PI or Co-PI, she has acquired half a million Canadian dollars in grants and donations. She was tenured at Concordia within four years.
Adriel M. Trott
Adriel M. Trott is Chair and Associate Professor in Philosophy focusing on ancient, continental and political philosophy. Her work focuses on how ancient philosophy can be a resource both for diagnosing contemporary conceptions of political life, of being human, of nature and of gender and for presenting alternatives to these accounts. Trott is the author of Aristotle on the Nature of Community and Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation.
