Women in philosophy

Although women have engaged in philosophy throughout the field's history, philosophy as a profession was long closed to women by law and custom. Even today, philosophy departments are disproportionately male.

USDE reports

U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly "the" least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender. [“Salary, Promotion, and Tenure Status of Minority and Women Faculty in U.S. Colleges and Universities.”National Center for Education Statistics, Statistical Analysis Report, March 2000; U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 2000–173;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:93). See also “Characteristics and Attitudes of Instructional Faculty and Staff in the Humanities.” National Center For Education Statistics, E.D. Tabs, July 1997. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 97-973;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF-93).]

Although reports indicate that philosophy as a professional field is disproportionately male, no clear, unequivocal data exists on the number of women currently in philosophy, or indeed, on the number of men in philosophy, and it is debatable how to define what it means to be ‘in philosophy.’ This can variously be defined as the current number of Ph.D. holders in philosophy, the current number of women teaching philosophy in two- and four- year institutions of higher learning either/both full-time and/or part-time (no one data set exists which measures these), or the current number of living women with publications in philosophy. The lack of clear data makes it difficult to establish gender proportions, but the consensus among those who have tried to arrive at an estimate is that women make up between 17% and 30% of academically employed philosophers. [U.S. Department of Education statistics in above-cited reports seem to put the number closer to 17%, but these numbers are based on data from the mid-1990s. Margaret Urban Walker's more recent article (2005) discusses the data problem and describes more recent estimates as an "(optimistically projected) 25-30 percent."]

NCES reports

The National Center for Education Statistics' 2000 report, "Salary, Promotion, and Tenure Status of Minority and Women Faculty in U.S. Colleges and Universities," estimates in Table 23 that the total number of “History and Philosophy” U.S. citizens and full-time faculty who primarily taught in 1992 was 19,000, of which 79% were men (i.e. , 15,010 men in history and philosophy), 21% were women (3,990). They add, "In fact, men were at least twice as likely as women to teach history and philosophy." [NCES (2000), previously cited.]

In their 1997 report, " [http://nces.ed.gov/pubs97/97973.pdf Characteristics and Attitudes of Instructional Faculty and Staff in the Humanities] ," NCES notes, that about "one-half of full-time instructional faculty and staff in 4-year institutions in English and literature (47 percent) and foreign languages (50 percent) were female in the fall of 1992, compared with less than one-half of instructional faculty and staff in history (24 percent) and philosophy and religion (13 percent) (table 4).” In this report they measure Philosophy and Religion in the same data set, and estimate the total number of full-time instructional Philosophy and Religion faculty and staff in 4-yr institutions to be 7,646. Of these, 87.3% are male (6675 men), 12.7 are female (971 women). [NCES (1997), previously cited.]

The 1997 report measures History Full-time instructional faculty and staff in 4-yr institutions to be 11,383; male:76.3 (8,686 men);female: 23.7 (2,697 women).The numbers of women in philosophy from the two studies are not easily comparable, but one rough method may be to subtract the number of women in history in the 1997 report from the number of women estimated to be in 'history and philosophy' in the 2000 report. Doing so suggests that as a rough estimate, 1,293 women are employed as instructors of philosophy.

The 1997 report indicates that a large portion of all humanities instructors are part-time. [ NCES (1997): “Forty-two percent of all instructional faculty and staff were employed part time by their institution in the fall of 1992. Forty-five percent of [all U.S.] humanities faculty were employed part time.”] Part-time employees are disproportionately female but not majority female. [NCES (1997): "Part-time faculty members were more likely to be female (45 percent) than full-time faculty (33 percent), although the majority of both part- and full-time faculty were male (55 percent and 67 percent, respectively."] Therefore, considerations of full-time employees only necessarily leave out data on many women working part-time to remain active in their field.

Other reports

In 2004, the percentage of Ph.D.s in philosophy going to women reached a record high percentage: 33.3%, or 121 of the 363 doctorates awarded. [ [http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/issues/sed-2004.pdf Hoffer, T.B., V. Welch, Jr., K. Williams, M. Hess, K. Webber, B. Lisek, D. Loew, and I. Guzman-Barron. 2005. Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: Summary Report 2004. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center. (The report gives the results of data collected in the Survey of Earned Doctorates, conducted for six federal agencies, NSF, NIH, USED, NEH, USDA, and NASA by NORC.] )]

ee also

*List of female philosophers

References

Further reading

* "Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy" by Linda Martin Alcoff. Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

External links

* [http://www.csulb.edu/%7Ejvancamp/doctoral_2004.html Tenured/tenure-track faculty women at 98 U.S. doctoral programs in philosophy on a website maintained by Julie Van Camp, a professor of philosophy at California State University - Long Beach]