A philosophical gender divide

Philosophy department chair Daniel Garber has a problem.

"Women don't even come in the door," Garber said of his department, adding that he is "very conscious of the composition of the faculty” and is “definitely looking to attract more female professors” to the department.

While math and science departments have long been home to a disproportionately high number of male faculty members and students, in recent years humanities classes have typically hosted a larger female contingent.

Yet the philosophy department at Princeton mirrors a nationwide trend of attracting fewer women than other humanities.

Of the 63 undergraduate philosophy majors at the University, only 19 are female. Thirteen of the 56 graduate students in the department are female, while four of the 23 philosophy professors are women. The four philosophy professors who have received tenure within the past five years are male.

Garber first noticed the gender gap about 20 years ago while teaching at the University of Chicago, he said, noting that in earlier generations it was “very difficult for women.”

He explained that gender ratios in his field “reached a plateau” in the early 1980s and no progress has been made toward gender equality since then.

In 2006-07, women earned 31 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in philosophy nationwide, according to an Oct. 11 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The ratio of male to female students in the University’s philosophy department is significantly greater than it is in many of the University’s other humanities departments. Female undergraduates make up 86 percent of art and archaeology majors, 70 percent of architecture majors, 69 percent of English majors and 63 percent of comparative literature and religion majors.

Garber said there is a “presumption that men aren’t signing on [to other fields in the humanities] because they don’t want to,” but the gender discrepancy in philosophy “goes beyond preferences,” suggesting that “we’re doing something wrong.”

Philosophy professor Elizabeth Harman said “there has been a great deal of explicit and implicit sexism” in the field of philosophy, adding that “if a field has few women, that creates conditions that make it unwelcoming to women, so it is hard to fix the problem.”

Several students interviewed noted that philosophy involves more argumentation than other fields in the humanities. Even within philosophy, they noted, women tend to focus on the less analytical areas of moral philosophy and ethics rather than epistemology and logic.

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“Philosophy is much more about critical thought than actual attacking and arguing,” philosophy major Subha Perni ’11 said in an e-mail. But, she added, introductory classes “seem to involve aspects of aggression much more than my higher-level classes.”

Perni said she wonders if “women are being scared away by the precepts of these introductory classes.”

Jada Twedt Strabbing GS said she thought that "society often does not encourage women academically to the same degree that it encourages men academically, and one unfortunate result of this is that women may sometimes feel less confident in their academic abilities."

This tendency might be especially detrimental in philosophy "which historically has been more aggressive and involves the risk of getting your ideas shot down," she said.

Garber said he believes men and women are “not that different intellectually,” adding that he doesn’t think a biological or scientific reason can serve as sufficient explanation for the divide.

The difficulty in shifting this trend, Garber said, is that while everyone is “happy to admit that it’s a problem,” nobody can agree on how to address it. He added that gender might be a factor in admission decisions for graduate applications.

Kristin Primus GS noted that it helps to be assertive in philosophical discussions and said she thinks some women may not be accustomed to this.

“It would be a good thing if all women, not just women in philosophy, were more confident with their ideas,” she added.

Correction

An earlier version of this article inaccurately stated that Helen Yetter GS was the only female graduate student in her third-year gradaute class. In fact, there are four women. That version also inaccurately stated Yetter felt “very insecure” and wondered whether she’d only been accepted because she was a woman. The earlier article also inaccurately stated that Jada Twedt Strabbing GS said that women are generally less confident when, in fact, she said that society often does not encourage women academically as it does for men and that this may lead women to feel less confident in their academic abilities.