you [women philosophers] will always end up philosophically on the subject of your gender simply because you will be seen as a woman first and a philosopher second.
– Anonymous (‘Soycrates’ Tumblr, 2015)
This frustration will no doubt feel familiar to many women in our discipline. Indeed, Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting contextualize their book The Philosopher Queens, which documents outstanding contributions from women philosophers over time, as a response to this common concern. Reflecting on the association between philosophy and maleness, they say that,
“A result of this is that women are often remembered as women first: they are seen more as women than they’re seen as philosophers. … we forget that they are principally philosophers.”
Things are often worse for other identities marginalized in philosophy; people of color, for instance, are appallingly inadequately represented in departments, syllabi, and so on; such individuals often find that they are boxed into their marginalized identities in particularly extreme ways. The nature of intersectionality means that these identities compound and intersect to create distinctive kinds of problems for how one is viewed.
In other work, I have analyzed this in terms of one’s marginalized identity attracting too much attention. There, I suggested that having one’s demographic properties made to be one’s most salient feature in inappropriate work contexts can, in addition to causing various problematic outcomes, constitute a subtle disrespect to one’s personhood. Here, I want to concentrate on responses to this issue—focusing on social initiatives like Women in Philosophy.
Two kinds of salience, two kinds of attentional content
To get to this worry, start by taking a look at philosophy syllabi, books about philosophy, philosophy departments across the world, portraits on the walls of those departments, and so on: you’ll notice a lot of men! Imagining a philosopher in one’s mind is likely to elicit an image of a man: either some generic picture of a bearded guy with his chin in his hand, or a specific man, like Plato, Kant, and so on. In other words, men are salient in philosophy. This is partly for statistical reasons; men are more numerous in the ways described above. It is also for normative reasons; men represent the dominant social stereotype of a philosopher, are stereotypically associated with traits valued in philosophy like rationality, and so on. This all tends to create attentional deficits for women, resulting in various concrete omissions: women are less likely to come to mind or be deemed sufficiently worthy when curating reading lists, for one.
To reconcile this with the suggestion earlier—that womanness in philosophy receives an attentional surplus—we should distinguish two contents of attention and two senses of salience. Privileged individuals in a domain are generally more salient than their marginalized counterparts as individuals and groups, but they rarely have their demographic properties made salient. We’re not used to thinking about Socrates’ identity as a man—he’s just a philosopher! In contrast, women in this profession generally suffer attentional deficits qua individuals and groups (they’re not generally who we think of first when creating our lecture slides, etc.). Instead, it is their demographic property—their gender—that is made central.
Different kinds of salience are associated with each scenario. Due to being the normative and statistical norm in philosophy, men are salient in the sense of being cognitively accessible when thinking about philosophers/philosophy. This kind of salience isn’t always consciously processed as such; we’re not standardly aware that we’re finding men easier to think of when creating our syllabi. Women philosophers are salient in a different sense. Their demographic properties are striking. Due to the statistical and normative abnormality of womanness in philosophy, this property pierces our attention. And this tends to come with a certain phenomenological profile; we’re more likely to feel our attention being pulled or grabbed by the statistical and normative outlying property, (sort of…) as when one feels one’s attention pulled by a bright red postbox on an otherwise grey street.
This then (unconsciously) activates and licenses various inferences that help to make sense of these different kinds of salience. When men in philosophy are salient in the cognitive accessibility sense, we often draw on dominant aspects of the social imagination to explain and justify this: men are easy to think of because they are natural, exemplary, good, ideal philosophers! (I develop a causal model along these lines elsewhere.) This grants various advantages to men; it can advance careers, increase one’s sense of belonging in the profession, and so on.
By contrast, when womanness is “striking-salient,” this tends to strengthen the idea that womanness is exotic and/or deviant; this is a socially licensed way of making sense of womanness piercing our attention as it does. Discussing another marginalized demographic property of being Black in philosophy, George Yancy echoes this latter claim of how such a normatively-laden signal-to-noise ratio tends to get processed. Commenting on his experience of moving in and out of spaces at APA conferences, Yancy captures the feeling of being “an ‘inappropriate’ subject situated within a sea of white faces” (7). It’s not hard to reflect on how this can result in disadvantage—disadvantage that will be meaningfully different for different vectors of marginalization.
Introducing the worry: compounding the strikingness of womanness
What can this tell us about Women in Philosophy initiatives, or various programs explicitly aimed at promoting and supporting women in philosophy? My worry, in a (large) nutshell, is the following. Part of the aim of such socially progressive initiatives is to overcome the profession’s systematic tendency to see women as women first, philosophers second. However, in combatting these issues, these initiatives often replicate that salience structure. They draw attention to womanness in, for instance, the names chosen for these groups, book titles that reclaim women’s overlooked voices, talks that invite women to talk about gender issues, and so on. My concern is that such projects can inadvertently end up entrenching the issues described in the previous section, where women philosophers’ gender receives an attentional surplus, where that gender is considered exotic and/or deviant, and where women fail to be counted as the implicit norm for the discipline.
I don’t think I’m alone in this worry; Buxton and Whiting are conscious of something like this when commenting on their wonderful book, mentioned in the introduction. They reflect on how, given the tendency to categorize these individuals as women first, “You might think … that a different tactic is required than the one we’ve pursued in The Philosopher Queens. Much of our work, and indeed other projects, have highlighted contributions of women philosophers as women philosophers. That is, their gender takes a central role … [as it does in the aforementioned bias].” Ultimately, they conclude that their book is still valuable despite this concern. I very much agree. Indeed, I have benefited immensely from the important work conducted through the initiatives mentioned in this post. Nevertheless, I want to delve deeper into the concern that Buxton and Whiting aptly tease out because I think it can guide productive conversations about the best strategies for socially progressive initiatives.
Start by considering a natural reply to the worry outlined. You might say: in a sense, these initiatives do make womanness salient. But this salience structure is embedded in diametrically opposed wider perspectives and lines of inquiry to those described in the first section. In progressive initiatives, drawing attention to womanness functions to highlight gender-based injustices in the academy, which can help to rectify those injustices, signal opportunities for solidarity, and so on. The salience structure’s functional role is different when it is uncritically adopted in a workplace—there, it leads to issues of exoticisation and deviance.
Motivating the worry: polysemes and counterspeech
While this reply gets something right, I don’t think it captures the whole story. Consider Eugen Fischer and Justin Sytsma’s work on polysemous word processing. One example they consider is the use of the term “zombie” in philosophical thought experiments, referring to a person who has a body like ours, behaves like us, and yet lacks conscious experience. This involves a definition of “zombie” that cancels many of the associations with the conventional, much more salient, Hollywood use of the term (i.e., that zombies have rotting bodies, lifeless faces, and no phenomenal consciousness). Despite the philosophy usage explicitly canceling these associations, Fischer and Sytsma find that philosophers hearing about philosophical “zombies” were much more inclined to attribute typical zombie features to the imagined beings (from rotting bodies to a lack of phenomenal consciousness) than they were when instead asked to imagine “duplicates.” This, they say, compromises the reliability of philosophers’ intuitions about the conceivability of philosophical zombies.
What is important for me, though, is the authors’ suggestion that when we encounter polysemes that have “unequal” senses—with one sense dominant and the other subordinate—and correct interpretation involves suppressing the dominant sense, “thinkers are liable to be swept along by stereotypical inferences, even when these are defeated by the context” (4). I hypothesize that this goes for salience structures, too. The salience structure that makes a woman philosopher’s gender particularly salient is “unequal,” insofar as one sense of this structure is plausibly much more dominant—namely, the sense in which a woman’s gender is appropriately her most salient feature, and where womanness is considered exotic and/or deviant. Using it in a new context, like Women in Philosophy groups, risks triggering inferences to the dominant sense despite being deployed in a context that explicitly rejects those inferences.
An alternative but related potential source of support for my hypothesis comes from Maxime Lepoutre’s work regarding counterspeech. Lepoutre hypothesizes that what he calls “negative counterspeech,” which repeats a false and/or harmful view in service of debunking it, will generally function instead to make that view salient and more familiar. An unfortunate feature of our psychology is that familiar things are more likely to be regarded as true. “But women aren’t submissive!” said in response to the misogynist, or “But immigrant group x aren’t parasites—they contribute a great deal to the economy!” said to the xenophobe, can be counterproductive counterspeech—these phrases end up strengthening the very view they seek to debunk by reiterating it. I worry that something similar is going on with the topic at hand. In fighting against the dominant bias that treats women philosophers as women first, certain initiatives reiterate a core element of that bias, insofar as they make womanness salient in the context of philosophy. This makes this salience structure more familiar, and thus more liable to be regarded as apt. Ultimately, then, it encourages us to feel that womanness is aptly striking-salient in the context of philosophy, something most easily made sense of by drawing on dominant aspects of the social imagination that position womanness as exotic and/or deviant in this domain.
If my predictions along either of these lines are right, they might help explain certain outcomes of the sorts of initiatives I’ve been discussing. Buxton and Whiting describe one motivation for their project: going to bookshops and finding almost nothing in the philosophy sections that include women. They return to those bookshops post-publication of The Philosopher Queens, and what do they find? There’s still nothing in the philosophy section! They say: “our book on great philosophers throughout history had been put in the section on women and gender studies.” A book executing the much-needed task of helping to fix a biased canon “was seen first through the lens of women’s issues, rather than philosophical ones.”
My suggested explanation is the following. The initiative adopts a specific salience structure, which makes womanness salient in the context of philosophy. This salience structure has an existing highly dominant sense: women philosophers’ gender is considered rightly striking-salient—something that in turn is rationalized by its being exotic and/or deviant. If we follow the work on polysemes, we might say that, dominant as it is, this sense will likely get triggered even when this salience structure is deployed in an explicitly subversive context—namely, one that draws attention to womanness to highlight gender inequalities in the philosophical canon, with the aim of making womanness less striking-salient and instead more accessible-salient. Or, if we follow LePoutre’s model, we might say that countering a dominant problematic bias (that women philosophers are and should be considered women first) by replicating the salience structure core to that bias (i.e. making women’s gender salient in the context of philosophy) can counterproductively function instead to make that bias more familiar and, ultimately, more likely to be considered apt.
Categorizing salience-adjusting goals
A different response you might have is to concede the problem, but say: this is a deeply unhelpful thing to highlight! In fighting against injustices connected to marginalization, one must make the marginalized identities in question salient somewhere along the way. Given the inevitability of this, why highlight this unfortunate byproduct? Furthermore, the hope is that the longer-term gains made through these initiatives are worth these short-term discomforts.
My hope, though, is that discussing these tensions can help us to reflect on our activist strategies in productive ways. In particular, grappling with them helps us to formulate explicitly the different salience-based goals we plausibly have (there are no doubt several others that tackle other assumptions, such as making non-binary identities salient):
- Make womanness, as a demographic property, less striking-salient.
- Make women, as individuals and a group, more accessibility-salient.
- Make manness, as a demographic property, more striking-salient.
- Make men, as individuals and a group, less accessibility-salient.
Separating these out encourages consideration of how these goals can conflict; in aiming for (2), we might frustrate (1). We can then generate conversations about how to avoid this. This might involve choosing different names for our initiatives that don’t focus on womanness. Or we might consider methods of contributing to (2) in ways that instead further (3); in expanding the canon, we might instead mention manness in the context of philosophy in a way that makes it striking. Here, the aim is for manness to become a subject for scrutiny, as opposed to receding into the background as an unmarked norm. Yancy has some creative suggestions regarding an equivalent for (3) in the context of race. One concerns a structured Socratic dialogue with students, forcing them to reflect on how their interests and passions, instead of being universal concerns, are shaped by whiteness—a process that gradually reveals to white students their demographic identities, making their whiteness striking and, ultimately, unfamiliar and exotic.
There is much more to say. In this brief discussion, I hope to have worked towards two goals. One is to clarify some of the discomfort that, in my anecdotal experience, many feel with certain socially progressive initiatives (even when being grateful for the benefits they deliver). The other is to contribute something to constructive discussions regarding the best strategies for these initiatives. I am very much uncertain about what these strategies ought to be, all-things-considered. Nevertheless, I think that the risk described in this piece is worth factoring into those judgments. I hope that there might be many inventive options that enable us to tackle all four of the salience-based goals described above in mutually-reinforcing ways—ways that don’t satisfy one goal at the expense of another.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Ella Whiteley
Ella Whiteley is a Lecturer in PPE at the University of Sheffield. Their research interests are primarily in ethics, social epistemology, and political philosophy. Specific areas include the normative dimensions of salience and attention, as well as the philosophy of work. Ella has published on issues relating to this blog post in Ethics, Philosophical Psychology, and Ergo.
