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    In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)

    (Many thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this work) – There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than in other disciplines. While there are few hard data on this issue, a new paper by Dana Kabat-Farr and Lilia Cortina throws new light on this problem, looking at the correlations between gender disparity and harassment in a large sample of employees in the military, academia and the court system. Across all these fields, the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment. Gender harassment is defined as "a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes” about people of one’s gender". Concretely, "when comparing a woman who works in a gender-balanced work-group to a woman who works with almost all men, we find that the latter woman is 1.68 times as likely to encounter [gender harassment]." Remarkably, they found no correlation between sexual advance harassment (which we have been hearing a lot about recently) and underrepresentation.

    I think these data are highly relevant for the recent news about harassment in our profession, and that there are things to learn from it for concrete policies.


    The article also mentioned that women's career prospects are adversely affected when in overly male environments. By contrast, men who are in minority positions (e.g., nursing) have been found to enjoy an advantage of their minority position – this is well documented, and has been termed the glass escalator effect. The likely reason for this is that gender is a salient characteristic about people, and if one is in a minority, it is made even more salient. This makes positive biases about men and negative biases about women come to the fore. Interesting too is that "the gender composition of the immediate work context is a stronger predictor of harassment than higher-order measures of gender predominance in an occupation".  So, reassuringly, even if philosophy is a very male-dominated profession, individual departments can mitigate this to a great extent by striving for gender balance in their hiring and organization of events. 

    Concretely, I think these findings should lead us to be more ambitious about gender representation in conferences, departments, summer schools and other professional environments. The current aim of the gendered conference campaign is to avoid all-male speaker lineups. While this is a great aim, in light of the adverse effects of an overwhelmingly male environment, one should perhaps be more ambitious and aim for 1/3 representations. The same is a fortiori true for all male departments: one woman might make them look less egregious than an all-male department, but it would be better to have more women. 

    I feel most comfortable in situations where I can "forget" I am a woman – of course, I realize that I am and I am comfortable with my gender assigned at birth. But when I am in situations where I am one of the few women in the audience, or the only female speaker in a plenary session, I do feel reminded that I am a woman, and I feel extra pressure not to ask "stupid" questions, or to make a presentation that would measure up to what my male colleagues bring. In more gender-balanced situations, this feeling disappears and it does not seem to matter that I am a woman. Others seem to forget I am a woman too. To paraphrase Galatians 3:28, in philosophy, there ought to be no male and female.**

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    10 responses to “In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)”

    1. John S. Wilkins Avatar
      John S. Wilkins

      As for your paraphrase of Galatians, surely there needs to be an eponym? I’d suggest “In Aristotle, there is no male and female” but that would be contrary to fact…
      I never understood why anyone would have a problem with women in philosophy. Nearly every department I have been in has been roughly equal, and I didn’t ever see any gender bias (in either direction). Which, I suppose, goes to the thesis of the article…

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    2. JAB Avatar
      JAB

      Thank you for this post. I’ve just noticed that when we have only two female faculty
      in Department meetings of at least ten people, I can barely stand it.
      (As in, wanted to up and leave the room, and thought about leaving the field.) Now that another female faculty member has come back from sabbatical, I am having a much easier time not feeling ostracized in Department meetings.

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    3. Sylvia Avatar
      Sylvia

      Thank you for posting this!
      The correlation between gender disparity and gender harassment may be understood by a simple mathematical model, called the Petrie Multiplier. It was developed in the context of underrepresentation of women in computer science. The idea is that if there are two subgroups whose members are equally likely to occasionally make unfriendly remarks to members of the other subgroup, members of the minority subgroup have it worse, and this effect scales quadratically with the disparity ratio.
      This Petrie Multiplier model helps to see that the findings you report are consistent with the hypothesis that men are no more sexists towards women than vice versa.
      It is reassuring that the data suggest that sexual aggression is not correlated with gender underrepresentation. This cannot be understood by the above model. (One hypothesis could be that the likelyhood of reporting sexual aggression drops with the disparity ratio. But without data, this is just speculation.)
      Regarding your last point: I have the same sense of self-consciousness when I find myself among a minority of women. With an important exception: if I am the only woman in a group, I usually don’t give it much thought either. This may add to the problem: if someone is the only member representing a minority, this person may become even more reluctant to do anything about it than the members of the majority (to avoid being reminded of constituting a minority).

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    4. gradstudent Avatar
      gradstudent

      Thanks for the post, new material to think about.
      Just a personal note on your concluding remark: as a female graduate student in philosophy, I’ve never experienced unease or unusual pressure to perform well because I was the only woman in the seminar room or one of the few in the conference audience. I think this has been the case because I am so lucky I never met professors or fellow students that made my gender salient to me because of their way of considering, and responding to, my questions and objections, or my seminar talk.
      I’m not shy when it comes to asking questions, precisely because my most important professors encouraged me to do so and devoted equal attention to each participant. At the same time, I am aware that I often presents my comments with undermining preceding phrases like “Maybe this is a silly question, but…” or conclude with “…but probably it’s just I didn’t understood your point”. To me, these sounds like nice ways to put a doubt as a constructive remark, but I suspect these cautions are also aimed at avoiding overtly aggressive reactions or resentment. The observations about how being among a minority or being the only woman in a group by itself influences the overall atmosphere in a philosophy discussion room, even when no explicit jerks are around, made me look at my experience and behaviour under a partly different light. I indeed feel confident enough to deal with an all-men environment, since I enjoy discussing philosophy so much (!). But this confidence developed because I encountered very supportive teachers and colleagues that treated me simply as a philosopher. But I cannot know how I would feel (e.g. more relaxed, less self-undermining, more direct…) in a workplace with more women, for I have never had the opportunity to work in a balanced environment.

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    5. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Thanks for your observations: stereotype threat can work unconsciously, so that even if one is not aware that one has it, it can still operate, which may be indicated by the need to preface one’s comments (“This may be a silly question but…). Interestingly, at a career development workshop for female grad students in Oxford, one of the senior professors remarked that women do this more than men (I don’t have any data to back this up, but I have certainly found myself doing this), and she encouraged the students to resist this urge. I agree also, supportive teachers and mentors make a tremendous difference. Being supportive is a small step that members of any department can take.

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    6. Robin James Avatar
      Robin James

      I think it is also important to think about how women of color also have to deal with race-based sexual harassment, and that having white women and/or men of color around generally isn’t enough to have any of the amelioratory affects suggested above.
      Further, I don’t want others to forget I’m a woman–I want them to be very cognizant of patriarchy and its differential affects on me and on my male colleagues. Genderblindness just naturalizes patriarchy. Attention to the way gender and patriarchy organize things–from our professional behavior to the very texts and arguments we’re discussing-actually makes us better philosophers and better colleagues.

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    7. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Hi Robin: I agree with you. The problems of underrepresentation mentioned in the article apply a fortiori to women who are also members of other minority groups (e.g., women of color, trans* women etc).
      Perhaps my way of phrasing it (Forgetting I’m a woman) is not the best way to put it. What I mean is something like that my colleagues see me as a colleague and professional foremost, and not first and foremost as a ‘woman in philosophy’ (although I am). Also, that, although I need to remain vigilant about gender dynamics, I like to be in an environment where I don’t need to worry that I won’t be taken seriously because of my gender. The only way to achieve this is precisely to take gender into account. So I am not saying that we should pretend as if this isn’t happening. To give an example: I got an invitation to contribute a paper to a volume, edited by a senior philosopher (I accepted this invitation). He said that he made a point of inviting many women, because he wanted to achieve gender balance, but that this was not the reason he invited me. Rather, by thinking about how to make a more balanced volume in terms of underrepresented groups, he was convinced he could make a better volume, as it helped him to pick the best people (given things like biases that operate, where one is more likely to think about male names when thinking about a lineup). His tentative ToC was indeed very balanced, and precisely this sort of effort makes gender less of a problem – we can focus again on philosophy, something that is more difficult if his volume were yet another all-male or quasi-all-male volume.

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    8. Sara L. Uckelman Avatar
      Sara L. Uckelman

      the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment.
      “Results” is ambiguous here — are they arguing for correlation or causation? (I cannot access the article, only the abstract, so I cannot answer this myself.)

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    9. Helen De Cruz Avatar
      Helen De Cruz

      Sara: I am sending you the article. It’s true that correlation does not mean causation, but the authors clearly argue for causation throughout the article (as you can see in the abstract ” We interpret these results in light of theories of tokenism, gender stereotyping, and sex role spillover in organizations.”) Gender stereotyping, for instance, happens more if there is a gender imbalance. Gender is a really salient characteristic of people (typically, one of the first things people note about each other), and it becomes even more so if one gender is disproportionately represented – the people belonging to the minority gender are then ultra-visible as such. This brings out gender stereotyping, which may explain why women in minority positions fare worse, also career-wise than women in better gender balanced groups. For instance, a female lawyer in a lawfirm may be ambitious, which may lead people to see her as unfeminine. By contrast, a man who is in a female environment, as the authors note, actually enjoys an advantage: he is less likely to be harassed, and his career prospects are better than women who are in the same position. The reason might be (the authors speculate) that positive stereotypes about men (like leadership, competence) come to the fore, e.g., male nurses get promoted more quickly to headnurse because they are regarded as having leadership qualities their female peers lack.

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    10. Anonymous Avatar
      Anonymous

      Harassment as: “a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes”
      Been experiencing this for years as a graduate student on and off. There is virtually no way to stop vicious rumors once they have started, especially those which attack the character of female colleagues, fellow graduates, or related. One of the most problematic aspects of such trends is that they are extremely difficult to stop. After a few years everyone just starts to believe they are true. Who can be held accountable directly?

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