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Weiye Loh

TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine | The long road to equality - 2 views

www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1881

Gender Equality Philosophy Academia

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One reason philosophy has been less successful than other disciplines in overcoming these biases could be that the subject’s self-image actually makes it more vulnerable. “Philosophers have this special relationship with objectivity,” says Saul, “where we think that we’re better and more rational than everyone else. It’s very well confirmed that people are really bad at judging their own objectivity and systematically over-estimate it. But really interestingly, it’s also been shown that thinking about how objective one is increases bias rather than decreases it. If you form the explicit intention to be unbiased and not affected by gender and race, you will be more affected by these things.”
  • Philosophy has also been peculiarly indifferent to feminist thinking. “We are the anomaly in the humanities,” says Haslanger. “You can’t go through a graduate programme [in other humanities subjects] and be considered competent in those fields unless you’ve done some work on gender and race issues. Feminist work is mainstream. In philosophy that’s just not true. You could go through a philosophy degree to this day and never have a class by a woman, never have to encounter anything having to do with feminism or gender or race.”
  • One reason for this is that “many philosophers have the view that in order to be objective you have to be value-free or value-neutral and feminism is by its nature not value-free or value-neutral. So there are a lot of philosophers to this day who think there’s an inherent contradiction in the idea of feminist philosophy or feminist epistemology.
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  • one of the aims of objectivity, I think, is to get multiple perspectives on a phenomenon so that you can better understand it. If you just have a single perspective on the phenomenon, then that doesn’t protect you against bias. I think feminists have shown that knowledge practices in the contemporary west and throughout the history of philosophy have been exclusionary and have been problematic and have prioritised some kinds of knowledge at the expense of other kinds of knowledge in ways that reflect a bias. So what we’re saying is that we can achieve greater objectivity by bringing women and feminists into this conversation.
  • Beebee identifies as a further problem for women in philosophy “the kinds of highly aggressive discussion that you can often get at philosophy seminars – this is at professional and postgraduate level but maybe to some extent at undergraduate level as well. I think in seminars, at least in a lot of my experience, there is a very adversarial, confrontational approach that the audience has towards the speaker.
  • the aggressive nature of philosophical dispute is bound to work against any group that happened to find itself in a minority. “If you behave in a very aggressive and competitive way towards someone who is already in a marginalised group, that’s going to make them feel uncomfortable, even if they’re just as competitive and aggressive as you.”
  • Finally, Stephen Stitch and Wesley Buckwalter have suggested that women typically have different intuitions to men in a number of canonical thought experiments. Writing in the previous issue of tpm about “Gender and the philosophy club”, they suggested “Since people who don’t have the intuitions that most Club members share have a harder time getting into the Club, and since the majority of Philosophers are now and always have been men, perhaps the under-representation of women is due, in part, to a selection effect.”
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Apr 11
     
    "Women start out not too badly under-represented," she told me in Cardiff. "About 47 percent of undergraduates in philosophy in the UK, single or joint honours, are women. That goes down to about 30 percent at PhD level, then it drops to about 21 percent at permanent staff. It's more than 21 percent at junior lecturer level and it goes down to about 15 percent at professor level."
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