Relatedly, a truly sexist and essentialist view of women's abilities in philosophy has reared its head on the blogosphere, and Showalter seems unable to respond to it effectively. Hope someone here can nip this in the bud. It's in the comments section.
Tara is referring to comments by commenter "Highly Adequate"–comments which include this one:
With regard to the research output of women, think of the study conducted not long ago showing that of the top 500 cited papers in philosophy, less than 4% were written by a woman, and all of those papers were toward the end of the list.
While the study’s author acted as though this indicated women were somehow being suppressed in philosophy, how does that get supported? Isn’t another take on it that women just aren’t producing high quality output?
Ask yourself: which of the papers written by the women actually might be important on their merits as the top papers on the list? If women are roughly 20% of the profession, why aren’t they producing 20% of the top papers? Indeed, if women represent 50% of the potential talent in philosophy, and one makes the reasonable assumption that it is the most talented women who will make it through the rigors of a philosophical career, then why are women not producing close to 50% of the very top papers? Where are the potential women geniuses in philosophy if not in philosophy? Doing social work? Teaching elementary school? Running around barefoot and pregnant because The Patriarchy? Where are they?
My reply: commenter "Highly Adequate" is trolling the site. His or her comments are absolutely pathetic. They are really not worth responding to. In such cases you should ignore the commenter. Trolls are aiming at exactly that: getting you upset or hostile, for example by making you object to an essentialist view of women's abilities.
Luckily, no serious philosopher that I know of holds this view. If anything, there is evidence that women have more long-range brain connections than men, which would allow them to come up with more original hypotheses than men. I don't trust those data either. But there certainly aren't any data showing that men have any advantage intellectually compared to women, especially not in the area of philosophy. So, just ignore the troll. Reasoning doesn't work in such cases. You encounter trolls once in a while on all sites. Sorry that it had to happen on your site.
New APPS 
10 responses to “Highly adequate women”
Thank you, Berit.
‘Highly Adequate’ is obviously a jerk. I don’t know about being a pure troll, though. If Larry Summers takes this seriously, why can’t HA?
HA says that there are no influential female philosophers doing important technical philosophy today. That strikes me as implausible, but fairly easy to refute. The problem is that I don’t work in a techy area. I was hoping someone else who does might be able to name some names. Or maybe there are some prominent women doing logic but working in math departments. I’d be very surprised if that wasn’t so. If HA keeps it up after being given some prominent names, I’m with you on the troll explanation.
One other thing: did anyone else see the post there that claims to be a ‘scoop’ from Tooley on why the site visit team was brought in to CU? If that story is true, then that’s kind of a big deal. Does anyone know? http://laughingphilosopherblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/how-the-site-visit-team-were-invited-to-colorado-the-scoop-from-professor-tooley/
Thanks. Sorry if this is old news and I’m just out of the loop.
LikeLike
I consider a lot of my work “fairly technical.” I have written on the knowability paradox, for example. Catarina on this blog does fairly technical work. Friederike Moltmann does fairly technical work. Just three examples. It’s obviously nonsense.
LikeLike
Thanks very much, Berit. Yes, it’s obviously nonsense, I never doubted that, have no fear! I just wanted a good list of women doing prominent techy philosophy to give as a reply. Thanks for starting me out.
LikeLike
Welcome to the site, JW Showalter!
LikeLike
Tara,
The following website has lists of women in philosophy by area of specialization. Many of those specializations are “fairly technical” and have lots of women listed.
http://www.womenofphilosophy.com/
LikeLike
Not philosophers, but linguists whose highly technical work is influential in philosophy of language: Irene Heim, Angelika Kratzer, Sally McConnell Ginet, Craige Roberts, Barbara Partee, Sabine Iatradou…. Philosophers of language: Robin Jeshion, Delia Graff Fara, Rosanna Keefe…. Philosophers of science: Nancy Cartwright, Jill North, Laura Ruetsche…. Philosophers of math: Penelope Maddy…
It’s not just nonsense, but obvious nonsense. I have a hard time believing that anybody minimally acquainted with contemporary philosophy could make such a claim in good faith.
LikeLike
On any list of good philosophers doing fairly technical stuff, should be Rachael Briggs, Elizabeth Barnes, and Meghan Sullivan.
Also, L.A. Paul, Heather Dyke, and Kristie Miller.
And that’s just me thinking of people in the Philosophy of Time. I’ll stop now before I have to take my socks off to keep count of great women doing good work in my (relatively technical) sub-sub-discipline.
LikeLike
Wonderful!
Thank you!
I already took off socks and gloves and my daughter’s as well.
LikeLike
Yes, oh my god, the list is so long. It’s so obvious. Thank you!
LikeLike
Producing a list of quality women in philosophy doesn’t address the argument being made about the citations, though. It does address somewhat the claim about the “standard deviation” argument concerning women and their philosophical/abstract work. But it seems the data about the citations is also explained by the same culture being criticized and reworked through social and cultural changes: a large portion of the people writing papers and citing other papers are not themselves acknowledging the quality work being done by their women/minority peers. If implicit biases are institutionalized in the discipline, then ignoring quality work by historically suppressed voices is just what we’ll see.
I’m stating the obvious, I guess.
I guess it bothers me that implicit to the reasoning about citations is the idea that quality work just will be acknowledged by everyone. That’s a pernicious fantasy. The history of philosophy is full of many cases of people ignored, ridiculed, and silenced while alive but later acknowledged for their depth and brilliance when discovered—we have no certain way of knowing how many very exceptional people were silenced permanently because they, for whatever reasons, did not attract the welcome of the crowd. I think Mill is right in On Liberty that we have to avoid the fantasy that truth will always out, will always survive its persecution, because it doesn’t take long to find in history instances where entire ways of thinking were wiped out for noble reasons. (Wagering an idea: perhaps that fantasy we find in such trolling or serious arguments, when combined with an insecurity of one’s own skill or influence, is what leads to strong language being directed at attempts to overcome this fantasy. We tend to hold on firmly to what binds us, if all we know are the chains, the crowds, and the shadows.)
Pointing to the citation evidence is useful—assuming it’s right—for those of us who are concerned about this, because the questions are exactly ones that should be asked. I mean, don’t we ask them? Why aren’t there enough women if there are quite a lot of them? Why is it so many women and minorities report being ignored, being silenced, while raising great points in our institutions? Do the microaggressions that happen in conferences, in departments, in classrooms extend to publishing? We also ask: are these the results of biases within the discipline? What can we do about it? How did this happen?
And there are a lot of steps and actions taken to find answers and address these things that don’t degenerate into sincere bigotry.
It’s also weird to me to think about how the criticism actually works. A group of “feminist philosophers” are exerting undue political influence to change an entire discipline towards accepting substandard or deficient philosophy—but it thinks of political action this way without acknowledging even the possibility that entire groups of privileged philosophers have already exerted undue influence to shape what counts as standard or sufficient philosophy. If a small group can do it and succeed, why can’t the privileged ones do it and why isn’t this present reality not the result of them having already done it?
Besides, if a small group of dedicated women, who supposedly statistically just aren’t as capable of abstract thought as the men who’ve been running the show all this time, are able to overturn centuries of thinking about things with well-placed instigations and political leverage, what does this say about those really talented men who allow it? Are they not paying attention? Are they compromised in some way? The logic seems to be that these men just aren’t as smart as they’re alleged to be or the intelligence does not extend to grasping political realities or how to manage them; otherwise, why would women be any more of a threat to thinking about things than they have ever been before? The best of the men will just prove the fruitlessness of the attempts as they demonstrate through philosophical superiority a mastery over the political forces threatening the discipline. It’s only during the dark times the inferiors try to up jump, and such dark times deserve their heroes, heroes who are willing to ask the hard questions, questions like why don’t women get cited as much as men.
It’s not a consistent position, but at some point, I think, we have to wrestle with whoever acts as the Callicles of our time.
LikeLike