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    Women in Philosophy 2004-2014: Which Programs Do Best?

    In order to update my post from January, I contacted Mark Fiegener of the NSF (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics) who was kind enough to supply me with information from the Survey of Earned Doctorates on gender for graduates of doctoral programs in philosophy using a shorter time scale: 2004-2014. Using this information, I can now provide a new list of programs with an above average percentage of women graduates in philosophy. Only 86 programs had sufficient data in this time period, and 35 had an above average percentage of women graduates between 2004 and 2014 (information from the other programs was suppressed by the NSF for reasons of small numbers/privacy). Comparing these 35 to the previous list of 39 programs with an above average percentage of women graduates 1973-2014, 11 of the 39 do not make the more recent list (CUNY, Emory, Harvard, Illinois-Chicago, Maryland, NYU, Pittsburgh, Rice, Rutgers, Stanford, and UMass Amherst), and an additional 2 did not have sufficient data to be included (Claremont and Tennessee), but 26 of the 39 show up on this new list. Update: Note that some of these 11 do have above average percentages of women in the APDA data between 2012 and 2015 (namely, Emory, Harvard, Illinois-Chicago, Maryland, and Pittsburgh). I will aim to do a full comparison with the APDA data soon. Of the 11 programs that became a focal point for my previous post (because of what I took to be an unwarranted call for their closure), 1 did not have sufficient data to be included, but the other 10 had an average 36.93% women graduates (compared to an overall average of 29.31% women graduates for the 86 programs included). Note: I did not attempt to obtain shorter time scale data for racial and ethnic minorities simply because of the small numbers involved, which would have meant suppressed information for most programs. Here is the list of 35 programs with a greater than mean percentage of women graduates for 2004-2014:

    Institution Men Women Grads 2004-2014 % Women
    University of Memphis 12 21 33 63.64%
    California Institute of Integral Studies     33     46 79 58.23%
    University of Oregon 20 25 45 55.56%
    University of New Mexico 7 8 15 53.33%
    University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 20 21 41 51.22%
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology 23 24 47 51.06%
    Binghamton University 36 34 70 48.57%
    UNC Chapel Hill 34 32 66 48.48%
    Michigan State University 17 15 32 46.88%
    DePaul University 20 15 35 42.86%
    University of Washington 18 12 30 40.00%
    Arizona State University 13 8 21 38.10%
    University of Colorado, Boulder 31 19 50 38.00%
    Stony Brook University 45 27 72 37.50%
    University of South Carolina 15 9 24 37.50%
    University of Utah 17 10 27 37.04%
    Georgetown University 28 16 44 36.36%
    Pennsylvania State University 35 20 55 36.36%
    University of Pennsylvania 29 16 45 35.56%
    SUNY Albany 11 6 17 35.29%
    Washington University in St. Louis 19 10 29 34.48%
    University of Nebraska-Lincoln 12 6 18 33.33%
    Yale University 22 11 33 33.33%
    Vanderbilt University 37 18 55 32.73%
    Temple University 29 14 43 32.56%
    UC Davis     17 8 25 32.00%
    Duke University 26 12 38 31.58%
    Loyola University Chicago 44 20 64 31.25%
    Bowling Green State University 27 12 39 30.77%
    Columbia University 50 22 72 30.56%
    University of Florida 16 7 23 30.43%
    University of Wisconsin-Madison 46 20 66 30.30%
    Johns Hopkins University 26 11 37 29.73%
    UCLA     38 16 54 29.63%
    Boston University 53 22 75 29.33%
    Totals and Mean Percentage 2,988 1,206 4,194 29.31%

    A spreadsheet with the data is here. 

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    3 responses to “Women in Philosophy 2004-2014: Which Programs Do Best?”

    1. anon Avatar
      anon

      Thanks so much for this work, Caroline.
      I would recommend that prospective grad students use this data in two ways: first, they can use it in the obvious way to see what the absolute percentage of women graduates is. But second, they can also compare the percentage of graduates to the percentage of women currently in the program and in that way attempt to determine whether there is greater attrition of women than men. This won’t be a perfect measure, of course, as percentage of women enrolled can fluctuate, but it can provide a bit of defeasible evidence about whether there is gendered attrition.
      And sure enough, when I looked into my own PhD program, I found that it graduates a smaller percentage of women than it enrolls, and I happen to know that their percentage of enrolled women has been consistent for many years, so fluctuations there don’t appear to explain the drop-off. This is consistent with my impression that women left the program at a far higher rate than did men.

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    2. Carolyn Dicey Jennings Avatar
      Carolyn Dicey Jennings

      Thanks for this–it is a good suggestion.

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    3. precariat Avatar
      precariat

      I take it everyone has seen Leiter’s unskewed, professionally objective assessment of this data?
      http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/05/alarming-data-about-schools-awarding-the-highest-percentage-of-phds-to-women-2004-2014.html

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