I just read through all the recent comments about hiring policies and gender.
Over the last few years, I have been on three search committees. In those searches, we did our best to interview an equal number of men and women. Since more men applied, the interview bar for men was effectively higher than the interview bar for women. I endorse this policy. It is an important and concrete measure we cab take to improve conditions for women in philosophy and resolve the pipeline problem. Given what I know about searches at other institutions, it is also utterly common. There is no shame, I think, in admitting any of this. I wish I could say this with my real name, in fact. But I am writing anonymously to protect my recently hired junior colleagues from stereotype threat (no one wants to wonder whether they were an "affirmative action hire").
To the men on this blog complaining about these kinds of hiring policy, I have some unsolicited advice:
Complain all you want on the anonymous blogs. Let it all out. But also get to work. Revise your writing sample. Defend that dissertation. Get published. Network. It may feel unfair for women to get a leg up in the hiring process, but this does not mean that you will not or cannot get a job. You'll simply have to work harder. Some white men will waltz into jobs after spending many years in graduate school without much to show for it (no finished dissertation, no degree in hand, no publications, no record of successful teaching, etc.). But this will become increasingly uncommon, I think. Hiring policies favoring women and increased competition from other men on the job market will ensure as much. So strap on your "grim realist" helmet and prepare to work harder than you may have thought you'd have to work when you started this whole philosophy gig. There's probably not much more you can do. That sucks, but it's the truth, so far as I can tell.
Finally, be shrewd about how you complain on anonymous blogs. Venting here is sort of like primal scream therapy. That can be good for your well-being. But know that everything you say here will also be used to further justify hiring policies that favor women ("in a climate where men can say crap like this on the blogs, we need even more policies to ensure that women get an equal chance at being hired!"). And more hyperbolic complaints about unfairness will only prompt snark (think about those t-shirts and mugs about taking delight in "white male tears"). Don't give people an excuse to do this.
Sorry for the unsolicited (and paternalistic, and obvious, and annoying) advice. I suppose dishing this out is my own way of making peace with the policies I have supported.
While I don't agree that the interviewing practice described here is justified, this is a reasonable, honest, and welcome (at least by me) post. The advice sounds just right, too. Thanks, 10:08. I hope you contribute more.
Seconded. I would add one more piece of advice: acknowledge that you probably benefit from bias at points throughout your career, too. A lot of these discussions feel like people are pointing to affirmative action policies as evidence that those that benefit from such policies gain unfair benefits. But according to at least one kind of justification for these policies, the point of them is to try to correct for pre-existing unfairnesses.
So if you're a white guy upset about women and minorities benefiting from hiring practices, it might be a good idea to think about the whole picture, rather than just the end game. There are probably ways in which you've had it easier along the way merely in virtue of being white and male. (Think about things like networking with prominent philosophers - most of whom are white and male. How many of them have asked you to go for a drink to discuss work? Or invited you round to their house? In my experience, these kinds of casual relationships, which often lead to opportunities, are far easier for young guys to come by than young women.
I'm not trying to start a discussions about who exactly has it better or worse (those discussions always seem pretty pointless and unresolvable) - I just wanted to put it out there that it is worth thinking about ways that you might have benefited, as well as ways in which you haven't.
10:53, you're probably right about networking advantages enjoyed by white male graduate students. But I'd guess that has quite a lot to do with the social and professional costs--living in a basement, exile to Mexico, etc-- that prominent white male philosophers would incur were they to invite a female grad student out for a drink or visit them at home.
"I'm not trying to start a discussions about who exactly has it better or worse."
Your entire comment was about urging white male philosophy graduates to not be upset about what they perceive as unfair hiring practices, as they already have a leg up relative to everybody else.
1:01, notice that 10:53 does not say that men should not be upset by unfair hiring policies, but only that men should not forget that there also are some benefits they receive disproportionately because they are men. That's compatible with still thinking that affirmative action is an unjust practice. You're right that the end of the comment is a bit rhetorically weird and seems to pull the ladder up that it just climbed, but at least the comment was much more thoughtful than the "check your privilege, shitlord" stuff we often get from feminist-friendly posters here.
No, it wasn't. The point was that hiring practices are the end of the story, not the beginning. Affirmative action policies are often designed to compensate for bias that happens earlier in the process. So it misses the point if you focus only on the affirmative action policies themselves, rather than acknowledge the possible bias that they are designed to compensate for.
It is, of course, incredibly difficult to work out if we are over- or under-compensating, which is why I said I was not trying to start a discussion about who has it better or worse (that is, better or worse overall).
I read 10:53 more as giving psychological advice than as engaging in oppression olympics. Her goal is not to show that certain hiring policies are ultimately justified. Instead, it is to offer helpful mental techniques for dealing with those policies. Something like, "here, meditate on these facts, and you might feel better about your situation"
"So it misses the point if you focus only on the affirmative action policies themselves, rather than acknowledge the possible bias that they are designed to compensate for."
They focus on the hiring practices because most of the opposition to their claims (from what I have seen) comes from people who don't believe that women are given preferential treatment. You can only complain about the unjustness of of something if people accept it exists.
10:08 Thanks for this post. I was the OP on the last thread that brought up the issue of what I called "hypocritical hiring practices."
It is posts like these that should dispel the illusion that these sorts of hiring practice are being used.
I think they are unjust, but that is another debate. I just want everyone in the profession to at least be honest enough with themselves to admit that this is what is going on.
In the last thread, look at all of the dismissive and sarcastic comments I received. People are in denial, and when you bring it to their attention they get very defensive.
I also agree with you "unsolicited advice." But I suppose my point is that this is precisely what's so frustrating about the hiring climate: one can do everything you say (have a PhD in hand, multiple good publications, and extensive teaching experience) and still get passed over for a woman who has a comparatively less accomplished record.
I do not think that is right. But thank you for admitting that this is not at all uncommon practice among selection committees.
Women are 57% of all college students, and at many types of institutions the number is between 60% and 70%. One advantage of hiring a woman philosophy professor is that, on average, they are better at recruiting women students to the major, something that allows us to teach more upper level classes (because we have more students) and that allows us to compete better with other departments for resources, including tenure track lines. This too is a consideration, but one we aren't allowed to discuss frankly.
Like 4:41, I am frustrated that people deny the existence of such policies. But I also think they are fair. In a department with 8 men and 0 women, surely hiring two women would benefit the department more, all other things being equal, than two more men. It might even benefit the department more if all other things _aren't_ equal! But we're supposed to pretend that departments don't think like that, and that every woman who's gotten a job recently has done it because she's just flat-out better at philosophy than every man she beat. That's not true. She's a better fit and benefits the program in a way that a man couldn't; that should be enough to justify hiring her!
10:23: This is 4:41 here. Though disagree with your view, I respect your honesty.
Until more people are open about all this, there's no way that anything constructive can be done about how we should proceed and whether these sorts of practices should be allowed and encouraged.
The fact that the APA is trying to sweep the data under the rug is an example of the kind of lousy white-washing that needs to change.
I agree with 10:23, and think this is the discussion we need to be having. A couple of points:
a) In this hiring climate, every position has a huge number of highly qualified applicants. If the department feels like they would benefit from a gender or racial balance, or by having someone from Prestigious U, or by having someone from a local or working-class background, or whatever, and they can get a highly qualified person who meets that need, is there a good reason for them to not do so?
b) Some schools that may be similar to what 10:23 describes, may feel that their current gender imbalance is due, in part, to biased practices in the past, and as a result, feel like it's OK to correct the imbalance with biased hiring practices now.
c) If the hiring climate was very different when the current faculty were hired, a number of them might have been hired with few, if any, publications, so they may not feel like giving low priority to that qualification will have negative results in the long run.
d) For good or ill, gender has been a hiring qualification in our society for a long time. It used to be the norm that want-ads had separate sections for jobs for men and women. More recently, I've been on committees at my children's school in which young men were hired over more objectivley qualified women specifically to get a more gender-balanced staff.
So, I think the question is: what factors are committees justified in taking into account, and is gender (race, prestige, class, political orientation, age,...) among them?
" One advantage of hiring a woman philosophy professor is that, on average, they are better at recruiting women students to the major" So you're saying that female students are sexist and we should pander to that sexism. This is indeed exactly one of the double standards that feminism has successfully imposed.
" In a department with 8 men and 0 women, surely hiring two women would benefit the department more, all other things being equal, than two more men.". Obviously not. Sex is irrelevant.
I know a female philosopher who went on the job market every year for 7 years, failed to land a tenure-track job, and is now leaving philosophy. Does this anecdote reveal any new trend that we didn't see in the data? No. Does the OP's anecdote reveal any new trend that we didn't see in the data? No. Does the data show that there is slight bias towards hiring women? Yes. Is it fair? I'm not sure. Is this bias the reason that we are all so bitter, vicious, and resentful? No--that's just because the job market sucks. Should the job market be this bad? I don't think so. I think philosophy is valuable enough to society that there should be more jobs for philosophers, so it's a huge problem that the job market is this bad. While we can worry about gender bias if we want to, it would be a shame if we didn't at least talk about the much larger problem.
One more semi-tragic thing is that many of the people that strike out on landing a job as a philosophy professor have a lot to offer society if given the right streamlined training. They are usually remarkably good writers and critical thinkers (not necessarily in the 'rational' sense, but in the 'analytical' sense).
Indeed, women are held to lower academic standards in philosophy job hiring. As we know from the data for 2012 and 2013, " ... by and large, men publish more than women do: The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8. The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0. The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5. The median number of publications for a man hired was 1. .... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men".
The data confirm a lot of people's anecdotal impressions.
Is this the new justice? I hope not.
It is disheartening and insulting to sit in a department placement scheme meeting, for instance, and listen to the placement director's stern advice that one will need this or that to be competitive on the market and know that the placement director should be qualifying every statement by saying "assuming you're a man."
There is a blatant double standard in hiring practices, and I don't know why so many 1) deny it exists or 2) downplay its significance if they do admit it.
For everyone who thinks this isn't happening or admits that it does but thinks it's okay, stop by the Royal Oak on Woodstock and talk to the guys in their late thirties with families who have to move somewhere new every year or two and barely scrape by on post docs because they can't land a permanent assistant professorship.
Tell them that they deserve to be passed over for a woman with virtually no publication record, no post doc, and sometimes still ABD simply because the female candidate supposedly had a "glowing letter" or showed "real promise."
I can guarantee if you did, you wouldn't be able to finish because you'd feel ashamed of yourself. These policies have real consequences: there are real people who bear the brunt of what you think are harmless (even good) hiring practices like these, and to so cavalierly deny the real harm they inflict is unconscionable.
For all the rhetoric about justice and fairness we hear when it comes to other issues, you can be pretty cruel when it comes to this one.
I posted this on the other thread ,but I'll append it here too, because I don't want it to get lost in the fray, and I'd love to get the pooper posse's take on it.
The first thing to note is that it is totally irrelevant whether I think highly or not about my own promise (or indeed even whether that self-appraisal is accurate). Instead, what matters is what my objective record indicates about that promise and also what my letter writers say about it.
The issue of letters leads us back to the key question that I keep raising which everyone seems to prefer to ignore: why should we believe all this talk that female candidates are winning interviews and hires on the basis of their having letters that claim they're "this generation's Kripke" (this turn of phrase isn't the way I point the point, but rather the way in which someone objecting to me chose to put it)? I see absolutely no reason to believe this is really the case, and if it is the case, there are plenty of reasons for thinking it is a nefarious practice anyway!
There are at least two related reasons that explain why.
To begin with, as you yourself say, not everyone is sure to be the next Kripke, so why do DOZENS OF WOMEN GET HIRED EVERY SINGLE YEAR on the supposed basis that they are the next best thing despite their having otherwise inferior files when compared to a slew of male candidates? Surely selection committees should know that these letters can't all be true, and that they deserve to be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
Everyone knows that letters these days are notoriously overinflated in their praise, so why should a letter of recommendation somehow trump the fact that the candidate has essentially nothing objective to prove that they even deserve the high praise? Presumably search committees request that one send in a CV and a publications list because one's ACTUAL accomplishments--rather than speculation about the candidate's "potential"--should carry comparatively heavier weight.
So, even if we grant that these sorts of letters are not pure fiction but actually exist, and even if we grant that they in turn explain why otherwise seemingly unqualified female candidates land the jobs that they do, one has every right to still ask: IS THAT JUSTIFIED?
There is a real danger in hiring practices like these. They are essentially no different than the sort of "insider dealing" that went on for decades at prestigious places. I know a bit about that first-hand because I currently study at one of the places that is nearly synonymous with the images that talk of the "old boys" club conjures.
If we justifiably decry those days, and I presume that you do, why should we be okay with effectively the same practices simply because it is now women, rather than men, who benefit?
4:53 and others keep talking like having a lot of publications is in and of itself evidence that a person should do better in the job hunt. But no, a lot of stuff that gets published as philosophy is not good philosophy.
Given men are likely to be more aggressive than women in sending things out, I don't think that the stats people are showing that say male hirees have more pubs than female hirees shows anything. If they are publishing a bunch of useless crap, who cares? One might say: well the publications show that more people (namely, the referees at the journals) besides their graduate department and letter writers think that the writer is a good philosopher. But no, that's not how it works apparently. A lot is getting through that is not really quality philosophy due to the way that the refereeing process is working.
Publications now suddenly don't matter anymore because we would have to acknowledge that many female candidates are unqualified for the posts they receive, if publications do.
So, away with publications and back to secret letters of recommendation!
It's the new nepotism, but that's okay, because, hey, now it's women who profit and not men!
Publications matter, but a lot of what is published is crap. And graduate programs at whatever rank in Leiter are doing a poor job if they are tellling their students to publish too early. The main problem though, or so I hear, is that referees of journals are not paid for what they are doing, and the range of referees is narrowing. They are doing a poorer job. Also, of course there are many journals where someone can publish and call what they're doing philosophy, when it is not. Publications are one measure of success and promise, but better to publish a lot later rather than earlier, unless the published piece is in Analysis or something where the point can be made in a few pages.
10:31 I never denied that much of what is published is crap. But surely not ALL of it is. The point is that there ARE men who have written many fine publications, and that they are nevertheless being passed over for despite their achievement and productivity for women who have NOT published.
Why?
And why are there so many in the philosophy world who deny this is taking place?
It is anyone with a dash of common sense that it occurs, so it is insulting to be told that it doesn't.
10:31, "Publications matter, but a lot of what is published is crap. "
One can control for this by looking at publications in the highest quality journals. Amongst such journals, men hired publish around three times as much as women hired do. From the data for 2012 and 2013 job hiring analysed at genderandprestige, "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications".
Well, that evidence is in favor of the view I put forward, since elsewhere you report when ALL journals are considered, the spread between the men and the women is greater. The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals, shows that part of what is happening in the case of all journals is that men are simply sending out work more often and more aggressively, even if it is not the best philosophy.
And, opinions may differ as to whether this is desirable or not in a colleague, viz that he/she be aggressive in sending material to journals or whether he/she develop ideas more thoroughly first. I lean towards the latter, because I see a lot of crap philosophy and I see people who have produced it getting promoted, to my great surprise.
You seem to be missing the force of this data 12:59. Publication record is a metric used by committees to judge applicants when evaluating academic philosophers. No one thinks its exclusive or overriding, but it is used. What data we have shows that women junior hires in 2012-3, across Leiter-rankings and prestigious journals, published at significantly lower rates than men. It's not that women are getting more jobs than men at comparable publication levels -- women are getting a BOOST with less qualification for the one metric we can measure. This needs an explanation, and what-ifs about quality don't cut it because high-quality journals are agreed by all to be a reliable proxy for quality of publication. Of course that proxy is not perfect, and crap gets published everywhere. But you have given us no reason to think that women are getting preferential treatment because the men who are out-publishing them are publishing crap. And anyone who has been on a junior committee over the last few years knows that's nonsense. Instead, it's looking like more people are owning up to the preferential treatment women are getting. It's certainly been my experience that this is an open secret.
OP you really need to stop saying things like this: "To begin with, as you yourself say, not everyone is sure to be the next Kripke, so why do DOZENS OF WOMEN GET HIRED EVERY SINGLE YEAR on the supposed basis that they are the next best thing despite their having otherwise inferior files when compared to a slew of male candidates? "
Because guess what - given, the actual raw numbers, MORE MEN THAN WOMEN get hired EVERY YEAR on the basis of things like letters and writing samples despite them having worse CVs than men who DON'T get hired.
"Everyone knows that letters these days are notoriously overinflated in their praise, so why should a letter of recommendation somehow trump the fact that the candidate has essentially nothing objective to prove that they even deserve the high praise?" Because they didn't bother to submit a writing sample with their application, like everybody else did?
Maybe you only think people are downplaying the significance of the data we have because you're really hyperbolic about it. Talking about 'unqualified' female candidates doesn't help. In this market, there are probably at least a dozen qualified candidates for every post.No one is suggesting that anyone hire an unqualified candidate.
My department hired an full time lecturer two years ago that we hoped would convert to tenure tract in a year. We desperately wanted to hire a female philosopher. Of the 100 plus applications we got (late in the hiring cycle), we had SIX women turn us down for interviews because they got jobs between the deadline date and our selections for interviews (a couple of weeks). We then interviewed as many as we could, but they just weren't right for us, and two dropped out (they already had jobs). So we didn't get to hire a woman and we really, really wanted to hire a female philosopher. The job didn't turn tenure track, and if we had hired a female philosophers, I believe it would have. I really wish we could advertise for a job and have it say "only non-white dudes need apply." A symbol on job ads would be great. That would save the white dudes from unnecessarily applying and it would save a lot of work by the hiring committees.
And fuck me the applications were so good. You could have easily replaced our entire department with accomplished people from that pool of applicants and not missed a beat. It made me really sad for the discipline that so many good, accomplished people can't get jobs while some worthless pieces of shit have jobs. We have a dude like that in my department. It fucking pisses me off, but I digress.
I would like that. I applied for a job last year that was one of only three in my AOS. I didn't get an interview. They interviewed 8 women and 2 men, and flew out 3 women. The woman who got the job was ABD (and still hasn't defended) with no publications and hadn't ever taught her own class.
They clearly had no intention of hiring a man. And you know what? That's fine with me. I think women bring something to the table that men just can't, simply because they are women.
I just don't want to waste my time applying for a job that I have no chance of getting.
'White dude', and even 'dude', definitely qualify as slurs by now.
"I think women bring something to the table that men just can't, simply because they are women." If that something isn't philosophical or teaching ability then it's irrelevant. And if it *is* philosophical or teaching ability, then we don't need positive discrimination, do we?
"If that something isn't philosophical or teaching ability then it's irrelevant."
I disagree. Here are two: they can better attract undergraduate women to the philosophy major, and they can better mentor undergraduate women who are philosophy majors.
"they can better attract undergraduate women to the philosophy major, and they can better mentor undergraduate women who are philosophy majors." Just because young women are sexist is not a reason to pander to their sexism.
If it's true that more men stay and your basis were *genuinely* doing whatever increases numbers then you would be arguing for discriminating in favor of *increasing* male numbers. Indeed, you would do very well increasing numbers of men by advertising that you're not going to subject them to all the feminist bullshit. The fact you are not making this kind of argument shows this is all just a blind for anti-male sexist discrimination.
If anyone out there has been on a hiring committee that favored women in some way (as 10:08 PM and 10:21 AM have), please tell us about it here. These stories are very interesting.
I am a very reliable source. We've given female candidates preferential treatment on every hiring committee I've ever served on. Sometimes we'll offer jobs to women from cognate fields just so that we can hire a woman. Once we offered a tenure track position to a woman that had been dead for four years. (She even got tenure! She only published, like, two articles, but she did come from a Leiterriffic department.) My friends tell me that my experience is common.
Nah, are you Poopy Girl having another tantrum? From the objective data for job hiring in 2012 and 2013,
1. "The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8. The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0. The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5. The median number of publications for a man hired was 1".
2. "... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men."
3. "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications."
4. "The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring: Against lower prestige male applicants. For high prestige female applicants. As noted above, the correlation amongst those hired between being unpublished and gender is statistically significant."
As I said in another comment, that stat is uninteresting until we know the quality of the publications. And I don't think we should assume they are good quality.
12:53, "... that stat is uninteresting until we know the quality of the publications."
Dismissing objective evidence is not a good strategy. It makes those doing it look scientifically ignorant. As you know, on average, an article published in Nous or Phil Review is, other things being equal, of higher quality than one published in some obscure place. The statistics concerning high quality publications show that men hired into these jobs have published at around three times the rate of women hired into these jobs. Similarly, through the whole cohort of those hired into TT/post-doc from no prior in 2012 and 2013, lower prestige males have around 1.7 publications, while high prestige females have around 0.6 publications. For women, the majority (54%) had 0 publications.
These are statistically significant and measurable levels of gender discrimination, based on data collected by CDJ.
I don't think you understood my reasoning. I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats. You are the one dismissing what the stats are saying by oversimplifying in your analysis.
And btw, "lower prestige males" ? Holy fuck. What kind of aliens am I dealing with here? Who talks that way about human beings?
Let me repost from another thread just above what I alluded to at 12:53 just above:
Well, that evidence is in favor of the view I put forward, since elsewhere you report when ALL journals are considered, the spread between the men and the women is greater. The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals, shows that part of what is happening in the case of all journals is that men are simply sending out work more often and more aggressively, even if it is not the best philosophy.
You seem to be missing the force of this data 1:23/12:59. Publication record is a metric used by committees to judge applicants when evaluating academic philosophers. No one thinks its exclusive or overriding, but it is used. What data we have shows that women junior hires in 2012-3, across Leiter-rankings and prestigious journals, published at significantly lower rates than men. It's not that women are getting more jobs than men at comparable publication levels -- women are getting a BOOST with less qualification for the one metric we can measure. This needs an explanation, and what-ifs about quality don't cut it because high-quality journals are agreed by all to be a reliable proxy for quality of publication. Of course that proxy is not perfect, and crap gets published everywhere. But you have given us no reason to think that women are getting preferential treatment because the men who are out-publishing them are publishing crap. And anyone who has been on a junior committee over the last few years knows that's nonsense. Instead, it's looking like more people are owning up to the preferential treatment women are getting. It's certainly been my experience that this is an open secret.
1:17 I agree with you that this kind of language is gross. But it is just shorthand lingo to describe the terms in which hiring decisions are made today.
So if you think it is bad that people have been reducing to thinking and talking in those terms (and I agree with you that it is), then I think you should consider the climate and causes that make those sorts of de-humanizing turns of phrase sadly handy.
In other words, as much as you might understandably think that the way 1:13 speaks is problematic, this just goes to show that you are dealing with people who are products of a culture that has decided it makes perfect sense, and it not at all problematic, to hire someone with a vagina simply because they have a vagina.
I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats.
The data for job hiring in 2012 and 2013 shows statistically significant measurable gender bias, relating to high quality publications in high quality journals. For high quality journals, men hired publish at roughly three times the rate that women hired do. Your counter-assertion is,
(*) High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles.
Could you prove this peculiar assertion, rather than merely assert it without evidence?
And btw, "lower prestige males" ? Holy fuck.
Departmental prestige is defined in terms of Leiter rankings: "These were coded as "Leiter prestige bands" A to F follows: A: 4.5-5.0 ...".
"The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals,"
No, the exact opposite. The spread is higher, not lower.
To repeat, on average men publish around double the rate to women. However, for higher quality journals, it is around three times the rate.
Here's something my department did: commit itself back in late 1990s to a policy of hiring at least one female TT member for every two new hires. There was at the time only one female TT member of the department. Most of the other department members were unhappy with this state of affairs. So it was decided: in every second hire from that point on, the person hired would *definitely* be a woman, and in every other hire, the hire *could* be a woman if we objectively thought she was the best candidate (though in practice, one of the 'other' hires turned out to be a woman anyway because she was neck-and-neck with a male candidate and we had to decide between them, so the search committee decided that her being a woman would be a deciding factor: it would get us closer to male-female equality more quickly, etc.)
In other words: women make up 1/5 to 1/4 of the applicants to our positions, but they have a >50% chance in one out of two competitions in our department, and a 100% chance in the other competitions. Someone better than I am at probability can work out the exact advantage my department gives to female candidates, but it's fucking enormous.
I also know of several other departments and search committees that do things rather like what our department is doing.
So, we know that there's a huge advantage to female candidates from the overt practices and preferences of SCs and departments and from 'market boost' programs. And we also know that the results turn out this way by looking at the Dicey-Jennings data, as others here have shown ad nauseam.
We can have a sensible discussion about how fair this is. But on the 'Do women have an advantage' question? It's not even a question. Women do have an absolutely huge advantage. Let's face it. Who exactly is denying it at this point? Why make believe this isn't happening?
Well I do appreciate that you acknowledged something close to my actual position.
I think two claims are getting mushed together in all this. (1) Women get preferential treatment in hiring (2) Different rates of journal publication while ABD shows that women get preferential treatment where preferential hiring means less qualified philosophers are getting hired.
I was not denying (1). As another commentator pointed out, maybe on another subthread: affirmative action is no secret. I was denying (2) was established merely by pointing out that there are different rates of publication for ABDs.
You have to take into account that the spread (though it still exists) is much smaller when you only look at high quality journals as opposed to all journals. And you have to take into account that men are probably more aggressive in sending out material to get published anywhere it will get published. Finally, you have to take into account that working on material meant to be published while ABD is not necessarily the best means to producing high quality philosophy in the long run, and in fact may be antithetical to it.
Yes, journal publication is an "objective" manner of measurement, and that is why we use it in tenure cases and cases of promotion. But it does not follow that it should have the same importance in hiring in junior positions. There is art and experience that is involved crucially in these judgments. If we followed your suggestion that we should rely heavily on these "objective" measurements for hiring decisions we might as well leave philosophers out of the hiring decisions and just let accountants or business adminstrators do it.
"I agree with you that this kind of language is gross."
Referring to higher prestige versus lower prestige departments is not "gross". It is a measure of a certain kind of prestige status, just as a sociologists and economists measure socio-economic class, as A, B, C and so on. Are sociologists and economics who study class "gross"?
It is lower prestige status males who are suffering gender discrimination, while higher prestige females are benefitting.
"I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats."
did not say this:
"High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles."
And by the way what the fuck is a "counter-assertion"?
(You say:
Your counter-assertion is,
(*) High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles.)
This language of "rebuttal" "counter-assertion" and especially "counter-argument" I do not get and do not like. It makes it seem that the positions with all their attendant claims are already carved out and claimed by political parties, with no room for refinement of views and give and take. In short, it is political, in the worse sense of political.
1:55, you assumed something without evidence, and called your assumption a "meaning". It is not a "meaning". It is an assumption: namely that higher quality journals do not, on average, publish higher quality articles. So perhaps you might provide some evidence for your assumption?
Meanwhile the evidence that, for higher quality publications, hired men publish around three times the rate that hired women do, remains the same: "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications."
Thanks 1;47/1:43, that's helpful. It's exchanges like this that make me think the metablogs are good for the profession, even if we have to wade through some femscat to get to it sometimes.
We're on the same page concerning your (1), I think, and I agree that (2) is the issue. But as you can see from 1:55 below, you're wrong about what the data shows. The difference is more, not less, pronounced when we get to the high-quality journals. There women receive an even greater boost relative to their proportion in the population. This is what needs an explanation. On your view, women junior hires receive a boost relative to their representation in these venues because men send more stuff out, and because so many *more* men are publishing philosophy in top journals that is so bad it harms their standing relative to women. But vetted publication in prestigious journals is a proxy for academic merit, and though no proxy is perfect, you have given us no reason to think that the philosophical potential of male candidates is so undervalued because their material, published in high-quality journals, somehow casts a pall over their future prospects. Your proposal beggars belief as an explanation of the phenomenon. It just doesn't work. The stories people are telling here are a far better explanation for what we're seeing, don't you think?
Let me just note, in the interest of better communicating, that I deny something implied by your last paragraph. I don't take myself to be giving any prescriptions about what dimensions to use in assessing candidates, and I certainly don't think we should 'rely heavily' on publication record, as you say I suggest. My points are far more prosaic. I'm pointing out that, of the data we have (some of 2012-3), one metric of assessment (publication record) shows that women are receiving some kind of systematic overcompensation. I'm not saying that publication record is (or should be) the *only* thing that matters in hiring. And who knows, maybe other things explain the bias we see, and maybe the bias washes out if we look at more of the candidate pool. But given what we do know, it is no explanation to suppose that men are publishing so much crap in top journals that unpublished women look that much better by comparison.
Finally, I just want to say that I'm sympathetic to some of the things people have said by way of justifying these hiring practices, and I'd like to hear more about what people think on that score.
1:43, "You have to take into account that the spread (though it still exists) is much smaller when you only look at high quality journals as opposed to all journals."
The spread is much higher for these journals, not lower. Men hired published at around three times the rate women did, for these high quality journals (0.42 to 0.14). While, on average amongst those hired in 2012 and 2013, men published around double the rate (1.5 to 0.8).
So, the spread is higher for the higher quality journals.
But the first report on this blog about the spread in the case of the top journals was that it was LESS of a spread than in the case of all journals. Then some of you people appeared to switch it on me, now claiming that the spread is greater in the case of the top journals. I think some of you are playing fast and lose about what stat exactly you are reporting so I am going to have to really study things before I say anything more. But by way of conclusion I'll just say this: Frege was mostly right, but he got some things wrong. What he was mostly right about most people ignore and they make a big deal out of the things he got wrong.
Some of what his interpreters and elaborators, anyway, believe about meanings is probably inconsistent with his concept/object stuff and the latter is probably a better guide for understanding the structure of (all possible) thought.
Prominent feminists in philosophy have been claiming that women face discrimination in philosophy and in job hiring. Is there any objective evidence of this? A few years back, Carolyn Dicey Jennings collected "placement data" for nearly all hires in 2012 and 2013. As she herself noticed, it appeared to contradict the feminist assumptions, revealing anti-male gender discrimination. The data was then analysed in detail, at genderandprestige, which included analysis for bias around prestige status too, based on Leiter rankings. It yields statistically significant evidence of anti-male gender discrimination in philosophy job hiring.
Executive summary: the social science of philosophy job hiring contradicts the feminist narrative.
Right, but everyone above seems to be arguing that this is itself a result of affirmative action. People actually engaging in affirmative action is not evidence that there was no bias in the first place. (That's like waiting til the air conditioning cools the room down, and then using that to claim that the cool air in the room contradicts the claim that it was ever hot in the first place).
It seems to me there are three possible justifications for this kind of affirmative action: 1. Correcting for historical bias (ie, that which affected earlier generations of women) 2. Correcting for past bias (i.e., bias which affected this generation of women prior to them being on the market) 3. The fact that, for whatever reason, being a woman is in fact likely to make the department better in some way (for example, mean that the candidate is likely to help attract more female students, or whatever)
I can't really see any justification for (1). But (2) seems at least plausible. And I don't see why anyone could have any objection to (3). It is already the case that considerations that have nothing to do with raw philosophical ability or raw teaching ability play a role. Like, does this person have family in the area and so is likely to stay long-term? etc.
Affirmative action is illegal. Now perhaps there are some wildly different cultural assumptions about this (e.g., on the US "left"). But the US is an extreme outlier in such matters. For all reasonable people, affirmative action is both immoral and illegal.
Well, (3) above wouldn't, strictly speaking, be affirmative action. If 3 were true, then being a woman would better qualify you for the job. This is clearly fine in circumstances like this. It's not illegal,presumably, to hire a woman to play Juliet.
And it would be good to not be parochial about it. There are many countries that are not the US in which affirmative action is legal in some circumstances. So I don't think you can just declare to the rest of us, on the basis of what happens in the US, that " For all reasonable people, affirmative action is both immoral and illegal."
"There are many countries that are not the US in which affirmative action is legal in some circumstances."
Employment legislation in North America, Europe and Australasia allows special caveats based on protected characteristics, agreed: e.g., hiring certain groups of social workers. However, other things being equal, the law says that you cannot harm/damage the employment rights of an individual based on a protected characteristic to which they belong.
Scenario (3) is affirmative action - but why should a department wish to attract more female students? Why not attract more male students? Should psychology departments hire more men to attract more male students, given the preponderance of female academics in the area? Or many other areas, including the biological sciences, social sciences and humanities. No. That would be illegal.
Commenters above keep assuming that feminism - an ideology - is true. But feminism is not true. It is false. In the educational system, the conditions are extremely favourable towards girls and women. It is not 1950 and not 1980. It is 2015. It is girls, and women, who receive preferential treatment and huge advantages.
That comment doesn't make a lot of sense, 3:59. I also doubt you have extensive knowledge of employment legislation of all the countries in NA, Europe and Australasia. In any case, that is beside the point: what we're discussing is this: on the assumption that the practices described (wanting to hire a woman, etc) happen in philosophy, is there something wrong with these practices?
If you want to call it affirmative action if you take into account some characteristic that better qualifies you for a job, then fine, call it that - but it doesn't settle the question of whether it is immoral. It seems like you are not aware of this, but departments often do take into account these kinds of characteristics - like whether someone has ties to the area, and is so likely to stay long term. Also, as for why a department would wish to attract more women - well, again, perhaps you're not aware of this, but philosophy departments don't have much trouble attracting and retaining male students. They do have trouble retaining female students. Student numbers are very important for a department.
Also, I don't see that anyone is assuming anything about feminism.
4:28, you said before, "The fact that, for whatever reason, being a woman is in fact likely to make the department better in some way (for example, mean that the candidate is likely to help attract more female students, or whatever)"
Can you justify this? You assume there is a justification for "helping attracting more female students".
Why should "more" be attracted rather than, e.g., "fewer"? What is the "right" number? How is that "right number" justified? What justifies any form of intervention?
I said that that was a possible justification. So on the assumption that it was true, it might justify the kind of policies we're discussing.
But it's not nuts to think that departments are justified in caring about student numbers, and that given that the evidence shows that philosophy departments don't have much trouble retaining male students but do have some trouble retaining female students that steps they take to retain more female students would boost student numbers overall.
The "right" number is, roughly, as many as possible. The more philosophy students we get, the more upper division courses (more fun, interesting) we can teach, the more tenure track lines we gain (or at least avoid losing), the better our general standing in the university, and so on. Women undergrads are the biggest market at our school, and yet we have trouble getting them. The idea is that if our faculty makeup were 6/3 men to women, we would have better odds than if it were 9/0 or 8/1 men to women.
Why is this "trouble"? It seems to me to be a choice based on aptitudes and inclinations. One concludes that it is "trouble" only if one thinks it isn't a free choice, but rather one somehow based on, e.g., structural oppression, etc, etc., etc. I see no objective evidence for this. In fact, in 2015, all the evidence points the other way.
There's no reason for socially engineering other people's decisions, merely to make feminists happy. If female undergrads prefer psychology to supervenience, then: so what? Let them choose as they please.
Surely you don't mean exactly what you say in that first part, 5:06. Suppose that the difference between always hiring the most qualified candidate and always hiring only women is 1 additional student in the latter case. There's a tradeoff here between considerations of fairness in hiring and enrollment outcomes (at least, if the claim about male faculty not drawing as much female enrollment is true). We shouldn't look at just the one side and mindlessly aim to maximize it. Of course, this also works in the other direction. If departments hire without paying any mind to enrollment, things will also get ugly.
5:13, 'don't have much trouble doing something' is a colloquialism that just means that the dept. doesn't have much difficulty doing something. I think you're reading far too much into one word. The point is simply that philosophy depts seem to attract fairly equal numbers of men and women, but that after first year classes, a lot more women drop philosophy than men do. So, one thing philosophy departments could do to try and keep student numbers up is to take steps to try to keep women dropping the major. If you want another explanation that doesn't use the word 'trouble' read 5:06.
I don't know why you keep dragging in stuff about feminists and feminism. No-one's trying to engineer people's choices to make feminists happy. People are trying to engineer choices in order to increase the number of students overall who take philosophy courses, for the reasons that 5:06 identifies.
I haven't been in this particular thread, but I did post at 11:48 above in a similar thread.
I think it's interesting to consider where fairness and morality comes into these hiring decisions. Given that there is a glut of candidates for every job, and that hiring committees have an abundance of qualified candidates, when are they justified in using factors other than objective merit in research and teaching? In business in general, there's no expectation that the most objectively qualified will always be hired - there's even such a thing as being "over qualified" hurting you.
So, to go back to the question I raised at 11:48, "what factors are committees justified in taking into account, and is gender (race, prestige, class, temperament, political orientation, age, personal hygiene...) among them? If not, why not? If so, in what circumstances?
5:24, " So, one thing philosophy departments could do to try and keep student numbers up...."
This is the crucial point - why? Why not just let them go? They tried it and didn't like truth tables, supervenience, etc. Fair enough. So why not try to attract students on the basis of the discipline itself, and not on the basis of their gender?
The reason for aiming marketing at female students is to maximize the probability of getting smart students. This assumes that intelligence is evenly distributed over the two sexes. Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal. If the general population of university age in your community is mostly men or mostly women, then this wouldn't hold. For example, if you were in Alaska or the Yukon or a place where a lot of military people were pursuing an undergraduate education, I wouldn't recommend trying to get 50/50 majors.
Just so I'm clear on this argument for preferring women candidates:
You're saying that, if it turns out that female profs attract more students, and in particular more female students, then that justifies deciding in advance to hire a female philosopher.
So, if we do the research and it turns out that we'd be likely to get more female students, and more students in total, with a male professor, then we can justifiably decide in advance to hire a male candidate.
And even if we found that in general we'd get more students by hiring a woman, but that we have a make applicant P who would get even more students, then we need to hire P and we'd be wrong to not consider P on the grounds of his sex.
Right? Or are you just making up bullshit rationalizations you don't believe in to justify a morally bankrupt conclusion you selected out of blind, stupid and unapologetic sexism?
6:13, you need to do a better job of allowing your interlocutors to have subtle differences in the positions they hold. If the position you find yourself debating is made up of claims x,y,z, u,v, w, and then someone comes along and explains or argues for claim y, you don't need to get all worked up about it as if she were also thereby defending x, z, u, v, and w as well. Your last paragraph there indicates that you think you're giving a knock down argument but it's against a conclusion that was not stated in 6:02. 6:02 made an argument indicating why we should try to get more female students. That's all. The argument could be recruited to support the position of those who think that that's a reason to give preferential treatment of female candidates for jobs, but 6:02 did not make that argument. It could be that even someone who thought that we should give preferential treatment to women candidates AND who agreed with 6:02's argument would also agree with you that preferential treatment should be given to really good male teachers, or ones who were good mentors for women. Again, try to separate out different theses before you get all worked up.
I don't think anyone's saying that we need to do anything like you are proposing merely on the basis of student numbers. Just that it is a consideration that it's reasonable for a department to take into account.
@6:01 "Why?" Self-interest. If the number of majors is low enough, administrators can decide we don't need as many tenure lines as we have, or even a department at all (maybe we get absorbed within religion). Put another way, if the commentator from above is right that women don't have the aptitude or inclination from philosophy, that would look like a pretty good reason to administrators to cut some philosophy jobs for fields that are more in demand for students (who are a majority women).
@6:13: my own view is that the case for preferring women candidates (other things being equal) is overdetermined. I suspect in advance you'll reject several of the arguments I find compelling, given your apparent views. But an additional argument is student recruitment.
6:02, "The reason for aiming marketing at female students is to maximize the probability of getting smart students. This assumes that intelligence is evenly distributed over the two sexes. Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal."
Maybe you can explain this probabilistic argument in more detail. If "smartness" in a population is probabilistically independent of a separate variable (e.g., gender), the distribution of that variable in a sample makes no difference to the expected value of "smartness" for that sample. The sample could be, say, MMMM or FFFF and the expected "smartness" is the same each way. So, no particular distribution maximizes smartness. Have I missed something?
So you think that in a university of 30,000 each of the following is equally likely?
(a) all the students with an IQ above the median are boys (b) roughly half the students with an IQ above the median are boys and roughly half the students with an IQ above the median are girls.
Not sure why it's supposed to be embarrassing. The implicature of the question in 1:46 is (correct me if I'm wrong please) that (b) is more likely. That is correct. Is the problem supposed to be that this probability is not the relevant one? I could not understand exactly what was supposed to be at issue, which is why I didn't not chime in. (Well, that and laziness.)
Yes, relevancy is the issue. In particular, nothing in the preceding comment implied that the commenter would think (a) is as likely as (b), and in fact one would have to believe the opposite of what 7:30 explicitly stated in order to believe that. I.e., if we have probabilistic independence, (b) is strictly more likely. (This is all ignoring the fact that (a) will be literally impossible at most universities, which have fewer than fifty percent men.) It is true that if intelligence and gender are independent, *the best possible smartness sample* is much more likely to be close to half-and-half than it is to be close to all-or-nothing. *But so is the worst possible smartness sample.* So gender distribution can't say *all* that much about intelligence.
Okay, I think I agree. The commenter may have been confusing the chance of getting the best smartness sample given equal distribution with the chance of equal distribution given best smartness sample. But, I don't think I understand the original argument, so I'm not confident.
The original argument, from 6:02PM, concluded, "Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal."
But this conclusion is incorrect. It does not provide a basis for aiming to target either females or males. The other arguments mentioned appear to be equally groundless. As we know, female and male undergraduates try out truth tables, supervenience, split brains, Gettier, utilitarianism and whatnot. But females tend to dislike this stuff more than their male peers do. So, they go off and study psychology, biological sciences, social sciences/humanities instead.
Why not just let them go? Let them do as they please, instead of trying to socially engineer a social system already close to statistical equilibrium with respect to the uncoerced choices, interests and aptitudes of undergraduate students.
Would a female student be more likely to stay in philosophy after a course with a decent female teacher picked to fill a quota, or a great male teacher who would have got the job in a fair contest? Why assume it's the former? Without this assumption, this argument for anti-male sex discrimination fails.
If it's true that more men stay and your basis were *genuinely* doing whatever increases numbers then you would be arguing for discriminating in favor of *increasing* male numbers. Indeed, you would do very well increasing numbers of men by advertising that you're not going to subject them to all the feminist bullshit. The fact you are not making this kind of argument shows this is all just a blind for anti-male sexist discrimination.
So, people are discussing the issues above, which is great, but tangentially - is the OP still pretending he's a grad student on the market at 'arguably' the top school in the world? Because there's just no way someone who writes that is a final year student at NYU. Guy writes either like he is 50 or 17 and trying to sound 50.
Unless you're interested in getting to the bottom of his particular case, does it matter? Most of the discussion that's still going on is, as you say, about the broader issues, none of which depend on anything suggested by his particular story. We have data. There's no need to focus on a narrative that might be made up. I think people are currently doing a nice job of ignoring a lot of irrelevant noise that's being posted here.
I am glad that I've been able to start the conversation I have. This is an important topic, and it is one that people in private mention quite a bit, but it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
I seem to notice an incipient pattern of bias in favor of young female authors at peer-reviewed journals (e.g., at Ethics).
The NC might be doing this in response to the revelation that the bias in hiring is actually not in favor of men, but in favor of women. The NC solution? Give publications to women so the anti-male bias can no longer be proven.
We can't be certain yet that this is going on, but I think we should pay a lot of attention to what makes into the journals this year and next.
So, according to you, a group of people noticed CDJ's data, thought well, we better fix that, and then pressured ethics into selecting more papers by women to fix it?
And your evidence for this is just that you 'seem to notice' a pattern? So what, you read a few issues and there were a couple of articles by women you thought were not very good? And on this basis, you're spreading conspiracy theories which smear the reputations of those who edit a particular journal, and cooking up conspiracy theories? And in the process, insinuating - on the basis of no evidence whatsoever other than your own 'noticings' (not on the basis of anything to do with the actual work whatsoever) that young women in general who have published in Ethics recently do not deserve their publications? Not cool, 3:59.
3:59s statement of the concern seems like overreaching, perhaps irresponsibly so. But remember that Jessica Wilson and Meena Krishnamurthy have both publicly supported gender quotas at journals. The latter even wrote a paper about it. So as crazy as it sounds (to me), apparently this is something being considered in at least some circles.
Sure, and if you (or 3:59) wants to have a discussion about those papers, have at it. But it's not cool to go round insinuating stuff about specific journals (and authors) like 3:59 did
OP: what is your evidence? Are you claiming that junior women are disproportionately over-represented in Ethics? Could you provide data on this? Ethics only publishes 4 or 5 articles per issue, and 4 issues per year. It should be pretty quick for you to look at the last few issues and show us the demographic percentages for authors. This is just descriptive data - it doesn't even requiring commenting on the quality of what has been published.
3.59 is exactly on point and the idiotic and pompous tone policing of 4.15 and 4.32 is timewasting nonsense. Tone police this, 'not cool' arsehole: Go screw yourself.
Now for something on point: The journals have been under relentless feminist pressure. 3.59 has put his finger on a very interesting additional motive for that pressure.
Can you explain what you mean by 'tone policing', 4:26? I can't seem to make sense of it from your usage. You seem to be saying that if A makes anonymous comments which smear someone's reputation, or if A calls B an arsehole and tells B to go screw himself, and B asks A not to do those things, then B is the one who deserves criticism?
I wonder whether the NC will be for or against this firing. On the one hand, we should always believe people who tell us they've been sexually harassed. On the other hand, this is a woman.
Who cares what the NC would say. I wonder if her politics are progressive and thus attracted the ire of someone in the high school system who then decided to ruin her, aided in the fact that there were a couple disgruntled students who were having to work harder than they wanted to. Louisiana, poor Louisiana.
Impossible, Justice Whineburg assured me that all the talk of chilling academic freedom was baseless speculation. For all the feminist support for these policies, the two of the most recent and prominent professors to suffer them were both women (Kipnis and the above LSU professor). Puritanism has always struck the defiant woman the hardest.
Puritanism has always struck the defiant women the hardest.
I think there's a lot in that. The amount of ire and vitriol against Kipnis from the NC was extraordinary. The claims about retaliation were pretty obviously nonsense even before it became clear that the dating claim was true (at least, if by 'dating' we mean dating). So there was a bit of an explanatory vacuum, and I think a lot of NC people were just incensed that a woman, who must look progressive at least to a lot of 'non-enlightened' types, was openly mocking their most precious and beloved ideas. There was a lot more bile about Kipnis on FB than there was when Tooley broke ranks, and that's saying something. It reminded me a bit of some of the reaction to Paglia back in the day.
It is, of course, a disgrace she's been fired. Can't work out what "a slang term for vagina that implies cowardice" is. And "the committee found that her adult language and humor violated university policies that protect students and employees from sexual harassment, " is why sexual harassment is bollocks. Sexual harassment is what anyone wants it to be. Once you let the totalitarian leftists in (and that is what letting the feminists in is doing), this is what you get.
The CDJ data set doesn't prove that men are discriminated against in hiring.
Of course, it's still *possible* that men are discriminated against in hiring (and if so, the data set makes sense). Possibly women are discriminated against in getting papers accepted in journals. Possibly both of these are true.
Possibly the average quality of the papers of men and women is different, which might explain the disparity. Possibly men aggressively send out papers, but possibly they don't. Possibly the average quality of the papers is the same across sexes, either way. We don't know!
Possibly some men are discriminated against and other men are favored. Possibly some women are discriminated against and other women are favored. Possibly both!
It's a shame that evidence underdetermines theory. It's also a shame how quickly everyone forgets this. It's a shame that underdetermination is out-of-control-extreme whenever statistics are used in political discussions. It's even more of a shame that few seem to consider this.
I, for one, ignore all studies that say children do better with gay parents than straight parents. I also ignore all studies that say straight parents are better for children than gay parents. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? Maybe I'm just an anti-science ignoramus.
I suspect women have a pretty big edge on the market, but this is mainly my impression from the culture in my department and online. I don't know, but I suspect. But ultimately, I don't care. I'm not a justice-zealot. I recognize that life is unfair, and I'm okay with that. If I turn out to be a new Kripke (I won't, just saying) then I'll get a job. If not and I don't, my life will probably be okay, because I'm relatively intelligent, and I can figure out something.
I dislike feminism, but as an old-fashioned male chauvinist, the complaining here seems unmanly. It's unfortunate to miss out on a job, and perhaps even more so if someone not as qualified gets the job you want. But to all the non-feminists here, do we want to match the new infants sniffle for sniffle, sob for sob? With all due kindness and courtesy to my masculine counterparts, be men about it.
For the information we have for 2012-3, women received preferential treatment in hiring. That information is limited to publications and prestige of PhD, both of which are admittedly poor measures of overall merit. But it's not nothing, and for the dataset we have the bias in favor of hiring women is robust. These are all facts that no 'manly man' need deny. As for your counsel, it is better sent to the scolds and dissemblers who can't be bothered to let their narrative become beholden to the facts.
Kind sir, all you have is a gap in publication rates, a gap between men and women. Your explanation might be true. Alternatively, it might be the case that the men and women hired are of equal quality (however that might be measured). On this alternative scenario, it might be that the publication rate of men is inflated by prejudice against women by academic journals.
The disparity in publication rate can be explained in these two opposing ways, and we have no data that shows one explanation to be more plausible than the other.
Now, maybe it's implausible that the journals would be prejudiced against women and not the hiring committees, and perhaps we should lean toward your explanation. But that's just speculation.
Maybe instead women are generally shy wall-flowers who have great material that they are too timid to share with the world, and so they don't get published as much as men. And maybe hiring committees see these women's writing samples and are convinced by the excellence of their work.
And these are just two crude possibilities. There are thousands of factors at work that we can't isolate. Maybe men from the top 10 are relatively disadvantaged, and those from 11-29 advantaged, and from 30 on down disadvantaged. Maybe research schools favor women and others don't. Maybe SLACs and community colleges strongly favor women. Maybe all of these things are true, but are masked in the limited data we have because in the social sciences evidence radically underdetermines theory.
I am sympathetic. I really am. But this complaining won't help.
Sniffle for sniffle 8:00? It is not zealotry to draw attention to the fact that a political movement that regularly pleads the victimhood of its constituency is composed of people who are, by and large, pretty privileged.
There's nothing odd or contradictory or hypocritical about saying that a person is a victim in one respect even if they are privileged in others. Privileged is a relative term, victimhood is not. For example, a wealthy black man living in the US is privileged in many respects compared to a poor white man living in the former Eastern Bloc. But this doesn't mean that it is somehow a mistake to point out that black men in the US, even sometimes very wealthy ones, are often victims of racism.
By all means, draw attention to it. But there's no need to make a habit of complaining about it. A little more light-hearted humor would help too.
Think about it for a minute---they'll never take pity on you. Attempting to tug on their heartstrings won't work.
Instead, maybe try waiting for opportune moments when something obvious and absurd crops up, think of a funny way of describing this absurdity, and don't overdo it. I don't know if they can feel shame, but at least we'll get a laugh.
Maybe's don't help 9:19. The data shows something. You can ignore that, as you seem to be inclined, but you cannot throw a bunch of 'maybes's into play and ignore the plausibility of the one explanation that already made sense and which the stories here give testament to (and which,, ironically, you attest you suspect is true). Namely, that women have a pretty big advantage on the market. If you want to ignore all this, that's your decision. But take the 'manly' stuff and put it where the sun don't shine
I agree, 9:28. Men in philosophy, while privileged in some respects, are victimized by the preferential treatment that women enjoy in hiring. 9:19, do you consider the testimony of those who serve on hiring committees that they treat women differently evidence? Sure, manliness and all that, but the degree of skepticism you'd need to genuinely think there's nothing going on here is pretty silly.
It may be hard for you to tell 9:38, what with your head so far up your ass, but I'm about the last person one would call 'dour.' Thanks for confirming that you're just here to cheerlead, though.
9:54, I don't really understand your response (what jacket?), but I suppose I was wrong to call you dour. You now don't seem mature enough for so serious a feeling. --8:00
I agreement with the general thrust of your post. The amount of butthurt on here lately can't be justified by the CDJ data, which admits of multiple minimally plausible explanations and is limited in ways the seem to prevent us from easily identifying any particular explanation as the best one. More to the point, even if we could identify the "women are knowingly and regularly given an unmeritocratic advantage on the market" hypothesis as the best one, the apposite response would not involve crying about it on the internet.
Suppose, however, that the CDJ data could be supplemented with other data (say, testimony from people on search committees) which would make the "women are advantaged" hypothesis look more plausible than its closest competitors. If we had good reason to believe that women enjoyed significant advantages in the hiring process, that would tell against the new consensus narrative. If you hold the view, as I do, that new consensus ideas/practices are invidious and damaging to the profession, you might think there's a good reason to care about hashing this stuff out (even if the butthurt here is unwarranted and unbecoming of grown men).
I have no personal stake in the question of whether women enjoy market advantages. Indeed, I have a tenure track job I'm rather happy with. But I'd prefer that my discipline not be taken over by political zealots, incompetents, and people who bemoan philosophy's "culture of justification." And I don't want to have to feign agreement with such people to avoid being personally attacked on internet fora. Thus, I think it's certainly worth thinking through the CDJ data, even with it's acknowledged limits, insofar as may help us to make a cumulative case against a central new consensus view; namely, that women in philosophy are tremendously disadvantaged.
Amazing that I lost out in interviews to someone who uses the word "butthurt". That makes me more "butthurt" than any amount of anti-male sexism in hiring practices.
Ok, that's fair. But I think we need to keep modest goals in mind. A large fraction of tenured faculty (the new infants) won't care no matter how good a case we make. Let's write them off now (politely).
If we take our time making a calm case, while showing a sense of humor, then maybe we can win the silent plurality out there that just wants to do philosophy and get along. And I agree completely that our thesis needs to be that it's false that women are significantly disadvantaged. Let's avoid arguing that it's unfair for all the men out there -- even if the latter happens to be true (and I don't know that it is), our goal should just be that hiring committees pick the best candidate, not the correct set of genitals. But if that's going to happen, we can't go off half-cocked with CDJ's dataset. That's not a smoking gun.
But we'd need to keep in mind that it's also a political campaign, and if the silent plurality sees weeping PC infants on one side and embittered, complaining men on the other, they'll likely side with the babies. So we'd need to see a bit more maturity from this crowd to make our plan work. Which should be doable because we're supposed to be the adults in this dispute.
Thanks for the tone of moderation. We could all use more of it.
And am I right to think the big question is whether men and women are getting TT jobs and postdocs etc. at a rate proportional to their overall numbers? That seems like an easy bit of info to collect. It would be good to put this to bed.
What exactly would seeing that one number put to bed? Women are given preferential treatment at stages before and during the hiring process. You're not entitled to the presumption that proportional representation in placement must mean that our professional practices are fair.
Here's why, 7:55: you're conflating the kinds of affirmative action policies people are talking about with all-things-considered preferential treatment. Affirmative action policies, of the kinds described - like explicit decisions by hiring committees to interview women, etc. - are (usually) designed to cancel out biases, or cancel out disadvantages that happen earlier in the process.
So, unless you think that the average male student who begins grad school is more philosophically talented than the average female student who begins grad school - and there is no reason to believe this - we should expect that hiring rates would be proportional.
If they are in fact proportional, then we have reason to believe that particular policies which give preference to women are not unjust, because they are part of a set of overall policies/practises (conscious or unconcsious) which lead the the result one would expect if the overall set of policies/practises were fair.
I'm familiar with the usual rationale for affirmative action. Perhaps you've heard that the practice is hardly morally uncontroversial, and also that many don't think it actually has the effect of leveling the playing field that you claim. You're right that it's worth figuring out if the result of hiring is proportional representation. I was only taking issue with your suggestion that seeing a number settles the matter.
Sorry, I should have made it clear: that wasn't my original suggestion. Perhaps 6:36 had a different explanation in mind. But I take it that the explanation I gave is the usual reason why people think proportionality matters.
And sure, I know it is controversial. All I was doing was explaining why evidence of proportionality gives us reason to believe certain practises are justified, and also pointing out that calling any of these policies 'preferential' looks like it begs the question, if the rationale for such policies is to ensure that no particular group does in fact get preferential treatment all-things-considered.
The reason I think proportionality settles the matter (or at least that it's reasonable to believe that it does) is that if the hiring numbers were NOT proportional, then it seems like there are two competing explanations: either the average woman doing philosophy is less talented than the average man (and we've got no reason to believe this) or there is either conscious or unconscious bias affecting the way that women's talents are evaluated (or vice versa).
The second explanation is something that is unfair, and should be corrected for (so, to be clear: if it turned out that women were being hired wildly out of proportion to their numbers, I think we should correct for that to - because I don't buy the possible justifications for affirmative action that would permit this).
Maybe you have another explanation, but it seems to me that if you think finding out whether the numbers are proportional wouldn't settle the question, then you have to think that the gendered differences in talent scenario is plausible, and there's just no reason to think it is. So that's why the numbers settle the matter.
Thanks for clarifying, 8:55. That's all reasonable enough.
Preferential actually doesn't seem like a biased term to me, since if you're right, preferential treatment within one stage may be morally required. But perhaps it's better termed something else, like corrective preferential treatment. Both sides could agree that that's what's going on, it's just that they disagree about whether it's justified.
I don't have another explanation because I don't know the social science on this, or even if there is any. But surely no issue this complicated is settled with the armchair plus one number. I'd more readily grant that you'd have a justified mild presumption in favor of your conclusion. To me, 'settled' sounds too close to saying no reasonable person would continue to look at evidence except as an academic exercise.
Yeah, what I meant by 'settled' was closer to this: not that no reasonable person would continue to look at evidence, but that given that the only explanation that would mean the numbers don't settle the question is one we have no good evidence for, we should take it as settled unless this kind of evidence is forthcoming. But to be honest, it also seems pretty unlikely that we would get evidence for the claim that there is such a disparity in talent that in a pool (of those already interested enough and talented enough to go to grad school) with more than twice as many men as women, the average man is still likely to be more talented than the average woman. Even those who argue for claims like the claim that women are on average less interested and less good at, say, mathematical or spatial reasoning would have a hard time coming up with a scenario which would support this hypothesis.
So this is obviously pretty rough (because quanitative GRE scores are probably not a very good predictor of philosophical talent) but from what I remember, something like 30% of women and 70% of men score over 700 on the quant section. This is pretty similar to the numbers in philosophy. So even if you are pretty generous about whether this kind of evidence is relevant, we should expect that of the pool of men and women in grad school, the average talent according to this measure is about the same.
So not only do we not have evidence that given the 30/70 split in philosophy, the average man is likely to be more talented than the average woman, we have at least some evidence that this is not likely to be the case.
Right 9:31, and if your GRE score explanation is correct then we should be more cautious about imputing bias and discrimination against women, qua women, in the profession. Remember slatestarcodex's takedown of Leslie et al's claim to have found substantial evidence for a gender gap due to perceptions of 'genius' in different careers in January:
I should be clearer about this: I really don't buy the view that men are inherently better than women in terms of philosophical talent. I gave that example for this reason: even *on the assumption* that there is this kind of difference (along with the kinds of assumptions I've seen before, that for example women are just less interested in philosophy) none of the evidence people point to to support that assumption supports the view that given the gender breakdown we have, a lack of proportionality in hiring could be explained by something like discrepancies in talent.
So it's an 'even if accept the kind of evidence people point to, it still doesn't support a particular claim about what fairness in hiring would look like' argument.
I don't think the GRE explanation is correct, nor is it robust enough to support any skepticism about bias, or whatever - that's a whole separate issue. I was just using it as an example of the kinds of evidence people who do support the differences-in-intrinsic talent view point to, and pointing to the fact that even this isn't enough to get the claims that would need to be supported when we talk about proportionality in hiring off the ground.
I think we are on the same page 10:17. If the breakdown of gender in PhDs is the same when looking at who gets hired, then that's evidence that the job market is not favoring women overall. And if that proportion is correlated with quantitative GRE scores then that is evidence that whatever the quantitative GRE score is tracking is valued by professional philosophers. In neither case would the evidence be dispositive, but it would be important to consider that evidence if we had it. All the more reason to be looking closely at the facts, it seems to me.
Yeah, and I think that's the sticking point for people who believe that the hiring data shows that women get all-things-considered preferential treatment. Because the only way to make the difference in publication rates go away would be if women were hired in a lower proportion to their proportion in grad school. And then it seems like that would be prima facie evidence of unfairness elsewhere in the process.
There is something that I think we're missing in just focussing on hiring, though. As far as I recall, women and men are still getting jobs in numbers roughly proportional to their numbers in the discipline. So unless you think not just that women in general are naturally worse at philosophy than men, but that *amongst those who decide to pursue til PhD graduation and go on the job market*, women are on average less talented at philosophy than men, then it doesn't seem like women are getting preferential treatment overall.
One explanation that you don't consider here is that less talented women are more likely to be admitted to graduate programs than are less talented men. (Indeed, I know of one top 20 school that proudly admits to having gender quotas for admission.) So if the quality of the initial pool of grad students is skewed in this way, a proportionate outcome on the job market still suggests preferential treatment.
I didn't explicitly consider it because it doesn't seem very plausible. Because it would have to be not just that less talented women are admitted, but that less talented women graduate. And do you really think it is likely, say, that for any group of 200 people interested enough to pursue philosophy, evenly split along gender lines, the 70-80th men are likely to be more talented at philosophy than the 20th-30th women? Because something like that would need to be true for your hypothesis to be plausible.
It does seem plausible to me, and I don't think you have to hold sexist views about the distribution of intelligence in the general population to think that. Here are a few reasons why.
First, as we're often told, women disproportionately stop taking philosophy classes after the introductory level. It is possible that what's being selected for in further enrollment is intelligence, but I doubt that, and many of the dominant narratives around that issue seem to reject the thought.
Second, the numbers I've seen show that women are disproportionately likely to be admitted to graduate programs (i.e. based on ratio of women:men in the applicant pool). It could be that what I've seen reported isn't representative, but that's what I've see.
Third, what happens once people enter programs is going to be very difficult to collect any good data about. So dismiss this if you like, but in my program there are no shortage of examples of women being treated differently with respect to program requirements--e.g. passing comprehensive exams while admitting to have never read X, and having never heard of X's most-discussed idea, where discussion of X has dominated the subfield for 50 years and is featured heavily on the comprehensive exam reading list. I'm afraid this last claim will really tick you off, and perhaps rightly so, but that's just what I've seen, and why the explanation does seem plausible to me.
It's not that it 'ticks me off' it's that I don't see the point of relating anecdotes like that. First, from my perspective it is both anonymous and an anecdote, so I have reasons to take it with a grain of salt. Secondly, you seem to already have the view not just that there is likely to be some disparity in talent between men and women, but a vast disparity. So there are worries about confirmation bias.
In any case, I don't see how you have said anything to support the claim that it is plausible to expect that there is such a vast disparity in talent between men and women. You still need to show why you think it is that of those determined, interested and talented enough to pursue something to PhD, you think it's likely that the 8th most talented man in any group is likely to be more talented than the 3rd most talented woman. This is not just a disparity, its a huge disparity amongst those who have already shown both interest and determination. Can you explain why you think your first and second speak to this issue? Because I don't see why they are relevant.
10:43: as I understood it, you asked me to explain why, starting from a roughly equal distribution of potential talent, there is such an unequal distribution of talent at the end of a PhD program. So the point of the 3 reasons was to explain the widening gap at various stages. All of this, again, is meant only to suggest the plausibility of an explanation.
At the stage of post-intro enrollment, the thought was that perhaps vastly more gifted women than men find something else to study. That could be because of harassment, not connecting with or being inspired by the professor, cultural expectations that women major in other fields, or other reasons that aren't occurring to me. What seems unlikely as an explanation for lower enrollment is lesser potential talent. Instead, the thought was that many of the female statistical counterparts of talented males leave philosophy here.
Then, vastly fewer women apply to graduate programs. I assumed again that it's not only the most talented women who apply, just as it isn't only the most talented men who apply. Perhaps here again, talented women are removed from the pool at a greater rate than are talented men. Perhaps it's for the same reasons as the first cut, particularly harassment, if some narratives are true. Yet one's odds of being admitted as a woman are better.
As for the third, I was explaining why it seemed plausible to me that the gap might widen further here. I don't expect you to accept my testimony about this for purposes of your own beliefs. Regard it as meaningless noise, if you like. But since you know so little about me and my surroundings, I would think you should be similarly reluctant to charge me with confirmation bias with respect to this issue.
Finally, you may have just been writing quickly, but I do not accept your characterization of my view as being "not just that there is likely to be some disparity in talent between men and women, but a vast disparity." I hope you omitted a number of words qualifying the domain over which that judgment holds unintentionally, because as stated it is wildly unfair as a gloss on what I've said. But thanks for being otherwise charitable, if I've read you correctly.
With your first point, I don't see why you think that more talented women are more likely to drop out, and the women who are less talented are more likely to keep going (compared to the men).Why would this be true? You can propose scenarios all you like, but you've got to have some reason to think they're plausible.
And the problem with your anecdote is that it's not just meaningless noise: anecdotes like that often reinforce prejudices. So unless there is a reason for giving them (which there isn't, in a case like this) then it's not just a wash. And the point of confirmation bias is that we all have to be careful of it - I don't see why you seem to sake such offense at the suggestion of it.
And as for the vast disparity in talent, maybe it would help if you pay attention to the context: as I said later in the paragraph, what you're proposing is a huge disparity in talent between the women and the men who are interested and determined enough to pursue a PhD.
But why should we expect such a disparity in the behavior of men and women? Why, for example, would harassment mean that more talented women are more likely to leave than the less talented ones? Why would the less talented women be more likely to be inspired by the professor? Why would cultural expectations kick in at this level, rather than before?
I just think that if you're actually claiming, as you are, that the women who finish grad school are much less talented than the men who do, you need something more than a possible scenario according to which this is true. You need a plausible scenario. So I'm not quite clear about what you are trying to do here:
Are you actually claiming that it s true or likely that of the people who finish grad school, there is a very big difference in talent between the average man who finishes and the average woman who finishes?
Or are you just saying that this is a possibility, without making any claims about how likely it is?
10:43/11:42, I think you misread when you say: "But why should we expect such a disparity in the behavior of men and women? Why, for example, would harassment mean that more talented women are more likely to leave than the less talented ones? Why would the less talented women be more likely to be inspired by the professor?"
The comparative claim seems not to be between the behavior of more and less talented women, but more talented women and more talented men. I think the idea is that the more talented women drop out of the long track to the philosophy job market at a much greater rate than do the more talented men. That's all that needs to be true for this other explanation to be right. Seems plausible enough to me.
Maybe some numbers would help? Like, imagine (as the OP supposes) that talent is equally distributed. So we start with a pool of 10 men and 10 women, all equally matched 1-1 in terms of talent. Say 3 men drop out, and 7 women (to get roughly grad school numbers). In order for it to be true that the average man was smarter than the average woman, the scenario would have to be something like this: the top 7 men all stayed in, the 4th, 5th and 6th woman all stayed, and the rest dropped.
So I'm not disputing that you can make the numbers come out like this. But I don't see why we have any reason to think this is true. Why, for example, would it be the case that the less talented women stay when the more talented ones don't, in the scenario I described? I haven't tried all the scenarios, obviously, but I'm pretty sure that i order for the numbers to come out like the OP needs, it's not just got to be the case that more talented women drop out at a rate much greater than the more talented men, but that as a proportion of their respective populations, the less talented women are more likely to stay relative to more talented women compared with the men.
In any case, I really don't think it is enough for the OP to say something like "it's really true that the women who graduate and get jobs are on average less talented than the men" just on the basis that there are some possible combinations of drop out rates such that this wold be true. We actually have to have a reason for thinking it is true (imagine, for example, if I simply said "I think the men are on average stupider than the women, because I knew a few guys in grad school who were pretty dumb, and if we imagine a scenario where all the best women stay and all the smartest men go and do engineering, even though I don't have any evidence that this is the case, so the men deserve to get fewer jobs proportionally" I imagine you'd laugh in my face, and deservedly so.
2:26, The reason one would expect the more talented women to go elsewhere is that the more talented women will likely have more options in virtue of being more talented. So if you start off with some background forces that make women drop philosophy (e.g., maybe women favor careers in which they either make money or help people, or maybe women are more likely to think philosophy is self-important nonsense because the historically oriented way in which it is taught comes off as full of old white men pontificating, etc.) then the more talented women will tend to leave in greater numbers because they will have more appealing options. The case would be strengthened if talent in philosophy is correlated with technical talents that are useful elsewhere that are also short on women and that offer better opportunities, like computer science, engineering, physics, etc. So you could have a multi-stage selection going on. First, cultural pressures push most women initially away from even seriously considering a philosophy major. Then the women who remain who are both talented and interested in abstract philosophy-like issues are pulled away into other fields that provide better opportunities.
I wouldn't go so far as endorsing this explanation, but it does seem to me to be a plausible one that should be considered alongside others.
But again, there's no evidence for this, 10:58 (it's just all maybes). And it still doesn't explain why the less talented women stay. And I don't think there is any reason to think that more talented women will have more appealing career options. The fact that someone is not so talented at philosophy is more likely to make other career options more appealing, and it is not like such a person is likely to face a lack of appealing options, because being bad at undergraduate philosophy is no real indication at all that you will likely be faced with unappealing career opportunities accross the board.
11:08, I'm just trying to give you what you asked for: reasons why the numbers might come out that way. (Also, 10:58 is my first post on this thread so I can't speak for your previous interlocutor.) Of course it is all speculative without hard data. I'm personally ambivalent about whether the more talented women leave in greater numbers. I just don't know. Again, I was just trying to give you a possible explanation as to why it might happen. Nevertheless, given that we do know that there are some strong forces at work driving women to drop philosophy after their first course, you cannot just assume that these forces have no effect on the talent of those who stay (one way or another). Talent usually does play a role in people's decisions to pursue a field of study, so It really depends upon what kind of forces are at work. More research is needed in order to answer these questions.
Right, but I didn't just want possible reasons why the numbers might come out that way, or possible explanations :-). I agree that there are of course possible explanations. I think we need more than 'maybes' here - we need explanations that there is actually some evidence in support of. If you're defending a view (which I take it that my interlocutor was) you need more than the claim that 'here's a possible explanation for why this might be'. You need some reason to think that that explanation is true.
To all the judgmental shitheads who are calling the OP dour, unworthy of a reply, responsible for his own lack of a job, his own worst enemy, a complainer, clearly badly informed, probably boy a very good candidate anyway, not focused enough on success, too focused on success, etc. etc. , I have just one question: do you dispense this same advice and judgment to women when they complain that they have it tough? Or are you openly sexist pieces of shit who don't even bother trying to hide your sexism?
If you're for real, great. Prove it. Respond to Audrey Yap on Schleisser's blog. Tell get that her difficulties in the profession are all her fault and that she's got a dour attitude. Then tell all the women who don't even have jobs that they should keep their mouths shut and recognize that they don't even deserve to talk to you. Then go to Feminist Philosphers and WILTBAWIP and tell them to stop whining.
Go on, do it. Or are you ready to admit you only respond this way when the writer has a penis?
If you're talking to me (I'm 8:00), I openly admitted that I'm a male chauvinist. Of course I don't treat men and women the same. That would not be polite. I generally expect that men are more difficult to offend.
Here's the idea. A marriage would always be between two people. So in a four way polyamorous relationship among Pat, Chris, Sam and Leslie, there could be as few as three and as many as six marriages. I know of a poly family where, if things were formalized as marriages, the couples would be as follows: {P, C}, {P, S}, {C, L}. I know if another whether the couples are as follows: {P, C}, {P, S}, {C, L}, {S, L}. Those not married to each other are, of course, friendly, but don't have any romance with each other. In a more communal setting, you could imagine each adult family member married to each other. Whatever. I see no strong argument against it.
I don't see why we should assume that marriages need to have anything to do with sex. Because here is something that seems odd to me: say I decide to form a household with another woman who I don't have sex with, where we raise children from previous relationships together. It's now legal for us to form a legal partnership which recognises this, and confers benefits and responsibilities. But what if that woman was my sister? Now, even though we have chosen to function as household in exactly the same way, we can't get access to benefits like being on each other's health insurance, etc., because we can't get married. That doesn't seem fair.
I agree. I might add that it also seems unfair that two women can form a household together and raise their children together, but not three. Here's a proposal I might be able to get behind. First, get the state out of the marriage business. There would simply be no legally recognized status as "married". You might be married in the eyes of your religion or your community of friends, but it would have no legal significance. Second, allow any group of adults to declare themselves and their nonadult children as a legal family. Yes, we would have to figure out what the rights and responsibilities would be; what the exit clauses would be; etc. But that could be worked out, i think.
I'd be on board with that. It would be a good way of granting both legal and social recognition to the fact that for many people, their most important relationships are not necessarily romantic or sexual. (And they shouldn't have to pretend that they are).
Stop the pretence: it is metaphysically impossible for anyone but a man and a woman to marry. Of course, once you start changing the meaning of words, you can marry a sausage.
All of this disagreement about whether male and female candidates are treated differently--i.e., the merely descriptive issue, and not the normative one about whether this would be justified--seems to center around the fact that we are all epistemically deprived when it comes to decisions made by committees. All we generally see is who got hired and what their CVs look like. (And even this is becoming difficult to access since people are choosing not to post hires on PhilJobs.) So isn't this as strong a case as can be made that the powers that be (APA?) should be trying to determine whether gender is a criterion in committee decisions about hiring and interviewing? A few months ago Marcus Arvan collected data informally on his blog Philosophers' Cocoon, with the objective of "getting scientific on the academic job market." He asked for several pieces of information, but did not ask for gender, in spite of several people recommending that he do so. A few days later I mentioned this fact on one of the LR open threads, and Leiter responded by saying that Arvan probably wanted to avoid the controversy over collecting data about gender. Think about this for a minute--someone might be worried about even asking the question, "Does gender get factored into decisions about interviewing and hiring?" For those who firmly believe this kind of thing doesn't happen very often--you should not worry about asking the question. For those who firmly believe this kind of thing does happen very often--you should not worry about asking the question. The only ones who should worry are those who claim that it doesn't happen, but believe that it does. And if you're going to complain when the question is asked, you should own up to your intellectual dishonesty.
Well put. It is somewhat scandalous that CDJ and the APA chose not to disclose data on gender this year. Surely they looked at it. One wonders what was found.
There isn't really any disagreement about the descriptive issue of gender discrimination in philosophy job hiring. It's clear. Do you think NuCons disagree with this? NuCons know it contradicts their infantile victim narrative. The point is that NuCons agree with anti-male gender discrimination: for them, it is justified, while reasonable people disagree.
It is normal behavior for an institution to obscure the fact that it's doing massive amounts of affirmative action and switch to claiming it's justified when called on it. This happened in the early 90s with racial affirmative action in law school admissions.
I just read through all the recent comments about hiring policies and gender.
ReplyDeleteOver the last few years, I have been on three search committees. In those searches, we did our best to interview an equal number of men and women. Since more men applied, the interview bar for men was effectively higher than the interview bar for women. I endorse this policy. It is an important and concrete measure we cab take to improve conditions for women in philosophy and resolve the pipeline problem. Given what I know about searches at other institutions, it is also utterly common. There is no shame, I think, in admitting any of this. I wish I could say this with my real name, in fact. But I am writing anonymously to protect my recently hired junior colleagues from stereotype threat (no one wants to wonder whether they were an "affirmative action hire").
To the men on this blog complaining about these kinds of hiring policy, I have some unsolicited advice:
Complain all you want on the anonymous blogs. Let it all out. But also get to work. Revise your writing sample. Defend that dissertation. Get published. Network. It may feel unfair for women to get a leg up in the hiring process, but this does not mean that you will not or cannot get a job. You'll simply have to work harder. Some white men will waltz into jobs after spending many years in graduate school without much to show for it (no finished dissertation, no degree in hand, no publications, no record of successful teaching, etc.). But this will become increasingly uncommon, I think. Hiring policies favoring women and increased competition from other men on the job market will ensure as much. So strap on your "grim realist" helmet and prepare to work harder than you may have thought you'd have to work when you started this whole philosophy gig. There's probably not much more you can do. That sucks, but it's the truth, so far as I can tell.
Finally, be shrewd about how you complain on anonymous blogs. Venting here is sort of like primal scream therapy. That can be good for your well-being. But know that everything you say here will also be used to further justify hiring policies that favor women ("in a climate where men can say crap like this on the blogs, we need even more policies to ensure that women get an equal chance at being hired!"). And more hyperbolic complaints about unfairness will only prompt snark (think about those t-shirts and mugs about taking delight in "white male tears"). Don't give people an excuse to do this.
Sorry for the unsolicited (and paternalistic, and obvious, and annoying) advice. I suppose dishing this out is my own way of making peace with the policies I have supported.
While I don't agree that the interviewing practice described here is justified, this is a reasonable, honest, and welcome (at least by me) post. The advice sounds just right, too. Thanks, 10:08. I hope you contribute more.
DeleteSeconded. I would add one more piece of advice: acknowledge that you probably benefit from bias at points throughout your career, too. A lot of these discussions feel like people are pointing to affirmative action policies as evidence that those that benefit from such policies gain unfair benefits. But according to at least one kind of justification for these policies, the point of them is to try to correct for pre-existing unfairnesses.
DeleteSo if you're a white guy upset about women and minorities benefiting from hiring practices, it might be a good idea to think about the whole picture, rather than just the end game. There are probably ways in which you've had it easier along the way merely in virtue of being white and male. (Think about things like networking with prominent philosophers - most of whom are white and male. How many of them have asked you to go for a drink to discuss work? Or invited you round to their house? In my experience, these kinds of casual relationships, which often lead to opportunities, are far easier for young guys to come by than young women.
I'm not trying to start a discussions about who exactly has it better or worse (those discussions always seem pretty pointless and unresolvable) - I just wanted to put it out there that it is worth thinking about ways that you might have benefited, as well as ways in which you haven't.
10:53, you're probably right about networking advantages enjoyed by white male graduate students. But I'd guess that has quite a lot to do with the social and professional costs--living in a basement, exile to Mexico, etc-- that prominent white male philosophers would incur were they to invite a female grad student out for a drink or visit them at home.
Delete"I'm not trying to start a discussions about who exactly has it better or worse."
DeleteYour entire comment was about urging white male philosophy graduates to not be upset about what they perceive as unfair hiring practices, as they already have a leg up relative to everybody else.
1:01, notice that 10:53 does not say that men should not be upset by unfair hiring policies, but only that men should not forget that there also are some benefits they receive disproportionately because they are men. That's compatible with still thinking that affirmative action is an unjust practice. You're right that the end of the comment is a bit rhetorically weird and seems to pull the ladder up that it just climbed, but at least the comment was much more thoughtful than the "check your privilege, shitlord" stuff we often get from feminist-friendly posters here.
DeleteNo, it wasn't. The point was that hiring practices are the end of the story, not the beginning. Affirmative action policies are often designed to compensate for bias that happens earlier in the process. So it misses the point if you focus only on the affirmative action policies themselves, rather than acknowledge the possible bias that they are designed to compensate for.
DeleteIt is, of course, incredibly difficult to work out if we are over- or under-compensating, which is why I said I was not trying to start a discussion about who has it better or worse (that is, better or worse overall).
I read 10:53 more as giving psychological advice than as engaging in oppression olympics. Her goal is not to show that certain hiring policies are ultimately justified. Instead, it is to offer helpful mental techniques for dealing with those policies. Something like, "here, meditate on these facts, and you might feel better about your situation"
Delete"So it misses the point if you focus only on the affirmative action policies themselves, rather than acknowledge the possible bias that they are designed to compensate for."
DeleteThey focus on the hiring practices because most of the opposition to their claims (from what I have seen) comes from people who don't believe that women are given preferential treatment. You can only complain about the unjustness of of something if people accept it exists.
10:08 Thanks for this post. I was the OP on the last thread that brought up the issue of what I called "hypocritical hiring practices."
DeleteIt is posts like these that should dispel the illusion that these sorts of hiring practice are being used.
I think they are unjust, but that is another debate. I just want everyone in the profession to at least be honest enough with themselves to admit that this is what is going on.
In the last thread, look at all of the dismissive and sarcastic comments I received. People are in denial, and when you bring it to their attention they get very defensive.
I also agree with you "unsolicited advice." But I suppose my point is that this is precisely what's so frustrating about the hiring climate: one can do everything you say (have a PhD in hand, multiple good publications, and extensive teaching experience) and still get passed over for a woman who has a comparatively less accomplished record.
I do not think that is right. But thank you for admitting that this is not at all uncommon practice among selection committees.
Women are 57% of all college students, and at many types of institutions the number is between 60% and 70%. One advantage of hiring a woman philosophy professor is that, on average, they are better at recruiting women students to the major, something that allows us to teach more upper level classes (because we have more students) and that allows us to compete better with other departments for resources, including tenure track lines. This too is a consideration, but one we aren't allowed to discuss frankly.
DeleteGreat post, 10:08, and follow-up, 10:53.
DeleteLike 4:41, I am frustrated that people deny the existence of such policies. But I also think they are fair. In a department with 8 men and 0 women, surely hiring two women would benefit the department more, all other things being equal, than two more men. It might even benefit the department more if all other things _aren't_ equal! But we're supposed to pretend that departments don't think like that, and that every woman who's gotten a job recently has done it because she's just flat-out better at philosophy than every man she beat. That's not true. She's a better fit and benefits the program in a way that a man couldn't; that should be enough to justify hiring her!
10:23: This is 4:41 here. Though disagree with your view, I respect your honesty.
DeleteUntil more people are open about all this, there's no way that anything constructive can be done about how we should proceed and whether these sorts of practices should be allowed and encouraged.
The fact that the APA is trying to sweep the data under the rug is an example of the kind of lousy white-washing that needs to change.
I agree with 10:23, and think this is the discussion we need to be having. A couple of points:
Deletea) In this hiring climate, every position has a huge number of highly qualified applicants. If the department feels like they would benefit from a gender or racial balance, or by having someone from Prestigious U, or by having someone from a local or working-class background, or whatever, and they can get a highly qualified person who meets that need, is there a good reason for them to not do so?
b) Some schools that may be similar to what 10:23 describes, may feel that their current gender imbalance is due, in part, to biased practices in the past, and as a result, feel like it's OK to correct the imbalance with biased hiring practices now.
c) If the hiring climate was very different when the current faculty were hired, a number of them might have been hired with few, if any, publications, so they may not feel like giving low priority to that qualification will have negative results in the long run.
d) For good or ill, gender has been a hiring qualification in our society for a long time. It used to be the norm that want-ads had separate sections for jobs for men and women. More recently, I've been on committees at my children's school in which young men were hired over more objectivley qualified women specifically to get a more gender-balanced staff.
So, I think the question is: what factors are committees justified in taking into account, and is gender (race, prestige, class, political orientation, age,...) among them?
" One advantage of hiring a woman philosophy professor is that, on average, they are better at recruiting women students to the major" So you're saying that female students are sexist and we should pander to that sexism. This is indeed exactly one of the double standards that feminism has successfully imposed.
Delete" In a department with 8 men and 0 women, surely hiring two women would benefit the department more, all other things being equal, than two more men.". Obviously not. Sex is irrelevant.
DeleteWe're philosophers, not anthropologists.
DeleteI know a female philosopher who went on the job market every year for 7 years, failed to land a tenure-track job, and is now leaving philosophy. Does this anecdote reveal any new trend that we didn't see in the data? No. Does the OP's anecdote reveal any new trend that we didn't see in the data? No. Does the data show that there is slight bias towards hiring women? Yes. Is it fair? I'm not sure. Is this bias the reason that we are all so bitter, vicious, and resentful? No--that's just because the job market sucks. Should the job market be this bad? I don't think so. I think philosophy is valuable enough to society that there should be more jobs for philosophers, so it's a huge problem that the job market is this bad. While we can worry about gender bias if we want to, it would be a shame if we didn't at least talk about the much larger problem.
ReplyDeleteOne more semi-tragic thing is that many of the people that strike out on landing a job as a philosophy professor have a lot to offer society if given the right streamlined training. They are usually remarkably good writers and critical thinkers (not necessarily in the 'rational' sense, but in the 'analytical' sense).
Delete10:08, You'll simply have to work harder.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, women are held to lower academic standards in philosophy job hiring. As we know from the data for 2012 and 2013, " ... by and large, men publish more than women do: The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8. The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0. The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5. The median number of publications for a man hired was 1. .... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men".
Thanks for posting this.
DeleteThe data confirm a lot of people's anecdotal impressions.
Is this the new justice? I hope not.
It is disheartening and insulting to sit in a department placement scheme meeting, for instance, and listen to the placement director's stern advice that one will need this or that to be competitive on the market and know that the placement director should be qualifying every statement by saying "assuming you're a man."
There is a blatant double standard in hiring practices, and I don't know why so many 1) deny it exists or 2) downplay its significance if they do admit it.
For everyone who thinks this isn't happening or admits that it does but thinks it's okay, stop by the Royal Oak on Woodstock and talk to the guys in their late thirties with families who have to move somewhere new every year or two and barely scrape by on post docs because they can't land a permanent assistant professorship.
Tell them that they deserve to be passed over for a woman with virtually no publication record, no post doc, and sometimes still ABD simply because the female candidate supposedly had a "glowing letter" or showed "real promise."
I can guarantee if you did, you wouldn't be able to finish because you'd feel ashamed of yourself. These policies have real consequences: there are real people who bear the brunt of what you think are harmless (even good) hiring practices like these, and to so cavalierly deny the real harm they inflict is unconscionable.
For all the rhetoric about justice and fairness we hear when it comes to other issues, you can be pretty cruel when it comes to this one.
They are not real people, they are just male postdocs in their late thirties.
DeleteI posted this on the other thread ,but I'll append it here too, because I don't want it to get lost in the fray, and I'd love to get the pooper posse's take on it.
DeleteThe first thing to note is that it is totally irrelevant whether I think highly or not about my own promise (or indeed even whether that self-appraisal is accurate). Instead, what matters is what my objective record indicates about that promise and also what my letter writers say about it.
The issue of letters leads us back to the key question that I keep raising which everyone seems to prefer to ignore: why should we believe all this talk that female candidates are winning interviews and hires on the basis of their having letters that claim they're "this generation's Kripke" (this turn of phrase isn't the way I point the point, but rather the way in which someone objecting to me chose to put it)? I see absolutely no reason to believe this is really the case, and if it is the case, there are plenty of reasons for thinking it is a nefarious practice anyway!
There are at least two related reasons that explain why.
To begin with, as you yourself say, not everyone is sure to be the next Kripke, so why do DOZENS OF WOMEN GET HIRED EVERY SINGLE YEAR on the supposed basis that they are the next best thing despite their having otherwise inferior files when compared to a slew of male candidates? Surely selection committees should know that these letters can't all be true, and that they deserve to be taken with a heavy grain of salt.
Everyone knows that letters these days are notoriously overinflated in their praise, so why should a letter of recommendation somehow trump the fact that the candidate has essentially nothing objective to prove that they even deserve the high praise? Presumably search committees request that one send in a CV and a publications list because one's ACTUAL accomplishments--rather than speculation about the candidate's "potential"--should carry comparatively heavier weight.
So, even if we grant that these sorts of letters are not pure fiction but actually exist, and even if we grant that they in turn explain why otherwise seemingly unqualified female candidates land the jobs that they do, one has every right to still ask: IS THAT JUSTIFIED?
There is a real danger in hiring practices like these. They are essentially no different than the sort of "insider dealing" that went on for decades at prestigious places. I know a bit about that first-hand because I currently study at one of the places that is nearly synonymous with the images that talk of the "old boys" club conjures.
If we justifiably decry those days, and I presume that you do, why should we be okay with effectively the same practices simply because it is now women, rather than men, who benefit?
4:53 and others keep talking like having a lot of publications is in and of itself evidence that a person should do better in the job hunt. But no, a lot of stuff that gets published as philosophy is not good philosophy.
DeleteGiven men are likely to be more aggressive than women in sending things out, I don't think that the stats people are showing that say male hirees have more pubs than female hirees shows anything. If they are publishing a bunch of useless crap, who cares? One might say: well the publications show that more people (namely, the referees at the journals) besides their graduate department and letter writers think that the writer is a good philosopher. But no, that's not how it works apparently. A lot is getting through that is not really quality philosophy due to the way that the refereeing process is working.
Okay, got it.
DeletePublications now suddenly don't matter anymore because we would have to acknowledge that many female candidates are unqualified for the posts they receive, if publications do.
So, away with publications and back to secret letters of recommendation!
It's the new nepotism, but that's okay, because, hey, now it's women who profit and not men!
Nice!
Publications matter, but a lot of what is published is crap. And graduate programs at whatever rank in Leiter are doing a poor job if they are tellling their students to publish too early. The main problem though, or so I hear, is that referees of journals are not paid for what they are doing, and the range of referees is narrowing. They are doing a poorer job. Also, of course there are many journals where someone can publish and call what they're doing philosophy, when it is not. Publications are one measure of success and promise, but better to publish a lot later rather than earlier, unless the published piece is in Analysis or something where the point can be made in a few pages.
Delete10:31 I never denied that much of what is published is crap. But surely not ALL of it is. The point is that there ARE men who have written many fine publications, and that they are nevertheless being passed over for despite their achievement and productivity for women who have NOT published.
DeleteWhy?
And why are there so many in the philosophy world who deny this is taking place?
It is anyone with a dash of common sense that it occurs, so it is insulting to be told that it doesn't.
10:31, "Publications matter, but a lot of what is published is crap. "
DeleteOne can control for this by looking at publications in the highest quality journals. Amongst such journals, men hired publish around three times as much as women hired do. From the data for 2012 and 2013 job hiring analysed at genderandprestige, "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications".
Well, that evidence is in favor of the view I put forward, since elsewhere you report when ALL journals are considered, the spread between the men and the women is greater. The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals, shows that part of what is happening in the case of all journals is that men are simply sending out work more often and more aggressively, even if it is not the best philosophy.
Deleteaddendum to 12:57
DeleteAnd, opinions may differ as to whether this is desirable or not in a colleague, viz that he/she be aggressive in sending material to journals or whether he/she develop ideas more thoroughly first. I lean towards the latter, because I see a lot of crap philosophy and I see people who have produced it getting promoted, to my great surprise.
You seem to be missing the force of this data 12:59. Publication record is a metric used by committees to judge applicants when evaluating academic philosophers. No one thinks its exclusive or overriding, but it is used. What data we have shows that women junior hires in 2012-3, across Leiter-rankings and prestigious journals, published at significantly lower rates than men. It's not that women are getting more jobs than men at comparable publication levels -- women are getting a BOOST with less qualification for the one metric we can measure. This needs an explanation, and what-ifs about quality don't cut it because high-quality journals are agreed by all to be a reliable proxy for quality of publication. Of course that proxy is not perfect, and crap gets published everywhere. But you have given us no reason to think that women are getting preferential treatment because the men who are out-publishing them are publishing crap. And anyone who has been on a junior committee over the last few years knows that's nonsense. Instead, it's looking like more people are owning up to the preferential treatment women are getting. It's certainly been my experience that this is an open secret.
DeleteOP you really need to stop saying things like this:
Delete"To begin with, as you yourself say, not everyone is sure to be the next Kripke, so why do DOZENS OF WOMEN GET HIRED EVERY SINGLE YEAR on the supposed basis that they are the next best thing despite their having otherwise inferior files when compared to a slew of male candidates? "
Because guess what - given, the actual raw numbers, MORE MEN THAN WOMEN get hired EVERY YEAR on the basis of things like letters and writing samples despite them having worse CVs than men who DON'T get hired.
"Everyone knows that letters these days are notoriously overinflated in their praise, so why should a letter of recommendation somehow trump the fact that the candidate has essentially nothing objective to prove that they even deserve the high praise?"
Because they didn't bother to submit a writing sample with their application, like everybody else did?
Maybe you only think people are downplaying the significance of the data we have because you're really hyperbolic about it. Talking about 'unqualified' female candidates doesn't help. In this market, there are probably at least a dozen qualified candidates for every post.No one is suggesting that anyone hire an unqualified candidate.
They are, at least de facto. I know of many people who say this.
DeleteMy department hired an full time lecturer two years ago that we hoped would convert to tenure tract in a year. We desperately wanted to hire a female philosopher. Of the 100 plus applications we got (late in the hiring cycle), we had SIX women turn us down for interviews because they got jobs between the deadline date and our selections for interviews (a couple of weeks). We then interviewed as many as we could, but they just weren't right for us, and two dropped out (they already had jobs). So we didn't get to hire a woman and we really, really wanted to hire a female philosopher. The job didn't turn tenure track, and if we had hired a female philosophers, I believe it would have. I really wish we could advertise for a job and have it say "only non-white dudes need apply." A symbol on job ads would be great. That would save the white dudes from unnecessarily applying and it would save a lot of work by the hiring committees.
ReplyDeleteAnd fuck me the applications were so good. You could have easily replaced our entire department with accomplished people from that pool of applicants and not missed a beat. It made me really sad for the discipline that so many good, accomplished people can't get jobs while some worthless pieces of shit have jobs. We have a dude like that in my department. It fucking pisses me off, but I digress.
"A symbol on job ads would be great".
DeleteI would like that. I applied for a job last year that was one of only three in my AOS. I didn't get an interview. They interviewed 8 women and 2 men, and flew out 3 women. The woman who got the job was ABD (and still hasn't defended) with no publications and hadn't ever taught her own class.
They clearly had no intention of hiring a man. And you know what? That's fine with me. I think women bring something to the table that men just can't, simply because they are women.
I just don't want to waste my time applying for a job that I have no chance of getting.
'White dude', and even 'dude', definitely qualify as slurs by now.
Delete"I think women bring something to the table that men just can't, simply because they are women." If that something isn't philosophical or teaching ability then it's irrelevant. And if it *is* philosophical or teaching ability, then we don't need positive discrimination, do we?
"If that something isn't philosophical or teaching ability then it's irrelevant."
DeleteI disagree. Here are two: they can better attract undergraduate women to the philosophy major, and they can better mentor undergraduate women who are philosophy majors.
"they can better attract undergraduate women to the philosophy major, and they can better mentor undergraduate women who are philosophy majors." Just because young women are sexist is not a reason to pander to their sexism.
Delete7:58, for the win!
DeleteWho would have thought it: the ultimate explanation for sexist hiring practices turns out to depend upon equally sexist rationalizations?
If it's true that more men stay and your basis were *genuinely* doing whatever increases numbers then you would be arguing for discriminating in favor of *increasing* male numbers. Indeed, you would do very well increasing numbers of men by advertising that you're not going to subject them to all the feminist bullshit. The fact you are not making this kind of argument shows this is all just a blind for anti-male sexist discrimination.
DeleteIf anyone out there has been on a hiring committee that favored women in some way (as 10:08 PM and 10:21 AM have), please tell us about it here. These stories are very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI am a very reliable source. We've given female candidates preferential treatment on every hiring committee I've ever served on. Sometimes we'll offer jobs to women from cognate fields just so that we can hire a woman. Once we offered a tenure track position to a woman that had been dead for four years. (She even got tenure! She only published, like, two articles, but she did come from a Leiterriffic department.) My friends tell me that my experience is common.
Delete12:17, I am a very reliable source.
DeleteNah, are you Poopy Girl having another tantrum?
From the objective data for job hiring in 2012 and 2013,
1. "The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8. The median number of publications for a woman hired was 0. The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5. The median number of publications for a man hired was 1".
2. "... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men."
3. "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications."
4. "The statistical findings, at least as far as philosophy job hiring in 2012 and 2013 were concerned, indicate the existence of both prestige and gender bias in philosophy job hiring: Against lower prestige male applicants. For high prestige female applicants. As noted above, the correlation amongst those hired between being unpublished and gender is statistically significant."
As I said in another comment, that stat is uninteresting until we know the quality of the publications. And I don't think we should assume they are good quality.
Delete12:53, "... that stat is uninteresting until we know the quality of the publications."
DeleteDismissing objective evidence is not a good strategy. It makes those doing it look scientifically ignorant. As you know, on average, an article published in Nous or Phil Review is, other things being equal, of higher quality than one published in some obscure place. The statistics concerning high quality publications show that men hired into these jobs have published at around three times the rate of women hired into these jobs. Similarly, through the whole cohort of those hired into TT/post-doc from no prior in 2012 and 2013, lower prestige males have around 1.7 publications, while high prestige females have around 0.6 publications. For women, the majority (54%) had 0 publications.
These are statistically significant and measurable levels of gender discrimination, based on data collected by CDJ.
I don't think you understood my reasoning. I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats. You are the one dismissing what the stats are saying by oversimplifying in your analysis.
DeleteAnd btw, "lower prestige males" ? Holy fuck. What kind of aliens am I dealing with here? Who talks that way about human beings?
Let me repost from another thread just above what I alluded to at 12:53 just above:
DeleteWell, that evidence is in favor of the view I put forward, since elsewhere you report when ALL journals are considered, the spread between the men and the women is greater. The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals, shows that part of what is happening in the case of all journals is that men are simply sending out work more often and more aggressively, even if it is not the best philosophy.
You seem to be missing the force of this data 1:23/12:59. Publication record is a metric used by committees to judge applicants when evaluating academic philosophers. No one thinks its exclusive or overriding, but it is used. What data we have shows that women junior hires in 2012-3, across Leiter-rankings and prestigious journals, published at significantly lower rates than men. It's not that women are getting more jobs than men at comparable publication levels -- women are getting a BOOST with less qualification for the one metric we can measure. This needs an explanation, and what-ifs about quality don't cut it because high-quality journals are agreed by all to be a reliable proxy for quality of publication. Of course that proxy is not perfect, and crap gets published everywhere. But you have given us no reason to think that women are getting preferential treatment because the men who are out-publishing them are publishing crap. And anyone who has been on a junior committee over the last few years knows that's nonsense. Instead, it's looking like more people are owning up to the preferential treatment women are getting. It's certainly been my experience that this is an open secret.
Delete1:17 I agree with you that this kind of language is gross. But it is just shorthand lingo to describe the terms in which hiring decisions are made today.
DeleteSo if you think it is bad that people have been reducing to thinking and talking in those terms (and I agree with you that it is), then I think you should consider the climate and causes that make those sorts of de-humanizing turns of phrase sadly handy.
In other words, as much as you might understandably think that the way 1:13 speaks is problematic, this just goes to show that you are dealing with people who are products of a culture that has decided it makes perfect sense, and it not at all problematic, to hire someone with a vagina simply because they have a vagina.
I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats.
DeleteThe data for job hiring in 2012 and 2013 shows statistically significant measurable gender bias, relating to high quality publications in high quality journals. For high quality journals, men hired publish at roughly three times the rate that women hired do. Your counter-assertion is,
(*) High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles.
Could you prove this peculiar assertion, rather than merely assert it without evidence?
And btw, "lower prestige males" ? Holy fuck.
Departmental prestige is defined in terms of Leiter rankings: "These were coded as "Leiter prestige bands" A to F follows: A: 4.5-5.0 ...".
"The fact that the spread is different for high quality journals vs all journals, and that in particular the spread is lessened in the case of high quality journals,"
DeleteNo, the exact opposite. The spread is higher, not lower.
To repeat, on average men publish around double the rate to women. However, for higher quality journals, it is around three times the rate.
Here's something my department did: commit itself back in late 1990s to a policy of hiring at least one female TT member for every two new hires. There was at the time only one female TT member of the department. Most of the other department members were unhappy with this state of affairs. So it was decided: in every second hire from that point on, the person hired would *definitely* be a woman, and in every other hire, the hire *could* be a woman if we objectively thought she was the best candidate (though in practice, one of the 'other' hires turned out to be a woman anyway because she was neck-and-neck with a male candidate and we had to decide between them, so the search committee decided that her being a woman would be a deciding factor: it would get us closer to male-female equality more quickly, etc.)
DeleteIn other words: women make up 1/5 to 1/4 of the applicants to our positions, but they have a >50% chance in one out of two competitions in our department, and a 100% chance in the other competitions. Someone better than I am at probability can work out the exact advantage my department gives to female candidates, but it's fucking enormous.
I also know of several other departments and search committees that do things rather like what our department is doing.
So, we know that there's a huge advantage to female candidates from the overt practices and preferences of SCs and departments and from 'market boost' programs. And we also know that the results turn out this way by looking at the Dicey-Jennings data, as others here have shown ad nauseam.
We can have a sensible discussion about how fair this is. But on the 'Do women have an advantage' question? It's not even a question. Women do have an absolutely huge advantage. Let's face it. Who exactly is denying it at this point? Why make believe this isn't happening?
Well I do appreciate that you acknowledged something close to my actual position.
DeleteI think two claims are getting mushed together in all this.
(1) Women get preferential treatment in hiring
(2) Different rates of journal publication while ABD shows that women get preferential treatment where preferential hiring means less qualified philosophers are getting hired.
I was not denying (1). As another commentator pointed out, maybe on another subthread: affirmative action is no secret. I was denying (2) was established merely by pointing out that there are different rates of publication for ABDs.
You have to take into account that the spread (though it still exists) is much smaller when you only look at high quality journals as opposed to all journals. And you have to take into account that men are probably more aggressive in sending out material to get published anywhere it will get published. Finally, you have to take into account that working on material meant to be published while ABD is not necessarily the best means to producing high quality philosophy in the long run, and in fact may be antithetical to it.
Yes, journal publication is an "objective" manner of measurement, and that is why we use it in tenure cases and cases of promotion. But it does not follow that it should have the same importance in hiring in junior positions. There is art and experience that is involved crucially in these judgments. If we followed your suggestion that we should rely heavily on these "objective" measurements for hiring decisions we might as well leave philosophers out of the hiring decisions and just let accountants or business adminstrators do it.
My 1:43 is a response to 1:28.
DeleteBoy comments are coming pretty fast on this topic.
"I agree with you that this kind of language is gross."
DeleteReferring to higher prestige versus lower prestige departments is not "gross". It is a measure of a certain kind of prestige status, just as a sociologists and economists measure socio-economic class, as A, B, C and so on. Are sociologists and economics who study class "gross"?
It is lower prestige status males who are suffering gender discrimination, while higher prestige females are benefitting.
1:33,
DeleteThe person who said this:
"I was dismissing no stats, but telling you one of the meanings of the stats."
did not say this:
"High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles."
And by the way what the fuck is a "counter-assertion"?
(You say:
Your counter-assertion is,
(*) High quality journals do not publish higher quality articles.)
This language of "rebuttal" "counter-assertion" and especially "counter-argument" I do not get and do not like. It makes it seem that the positions with all their attendant claims are already carved out and claimed by political parties, with no room for refinement of views and give and take. In short, it is political, in the worse sense of political.
1:55, you assumed something without evidence, and called your assumption a "meaning". It is not a "meaning". It is an assumption: namely that higher quality journals do not, on average, publish higher quality articles. So perhaps you might provide some evidence for your assumption?
DeleteMeanwhile the evidence that, for higher quality publications, hired men publish around three times the rate that hired women do, remains the same: "For the Top 15 journals, 27% of men hired had at least one such publication, while only 11% of women hired had at least one. For these journals, the average publication rate for men hired was 0.42 publications, while for women hired it was only 0.14 publications."
Thanks 1;47/1:43, that's helpful. It's exchanges like this that make me think the metablogs are good for the profession, even if we have to wade through some femscat to get to it sometimes.
DeleteWe're on the same page concerning your (1), I think, and I agree that (2) is the issue. But as you can see from 1:55 below, you're wrong about what the data shows. The difference is more, not less, pronounced when we get to the high-quality journals. There women receive an even greater boost relative to their proportion in the population. This is what needs an explanation. On your view, women junior hires receive a boost relative to their representation in these venues because men send more stuff out, and because so many *more* men are publishing philosophy in top journals that is so bad it harms their standing relative to women. But vetted publication in prestigious journals is a proxy for academic merit, and though no proxy is perfect, you have given us no reason to think that the philosophical potential of male candidates is so undervalued because their material, published in high-quality journals, somehow casts a pall over their future prospects. Your proposal beggars belief as an explanation of the phenomenon. It just doesn't work. The stories people are telling here are a far better explanation for what we're seeing, don't you think?
Let me just note, in the interest of better communicating, that I deny something implied by your last paragraph. I don't take myself to be giving any prescriptions about what dimensions to use in assessing candidates, and I certainly don't think we should 'rely heavily' on publication record, as you say I suggest. My points are far more prosaic. I'm pointing out that, of the data we have (some of 2012-3), one metric of assessment (publication record) shows that women are receiving some kind of systematic overcompensation. I'm not saying that publication record is (or should be) the *only* thing that matters in hiring. And who knows, maybe other things explain the bias we see, and maybe the bias washes out if we look at more of the candidate pool. But given what we do know, it is no explanation to suppose that men are publishing so much crap in top journals that unpublished women look that much better by comparison.
Finally, I just want to say that I'm sympathetic to some of the things people have said by way of justifying these hiring practices, and I'd like to hear more about what people think on that score.
2:17. I did not assume such a thing. I don't know where you are getting it.
DeleteDo you feel like responding to the evidence 5:41? You seem to be misunderstanding it.
DeleteNo, it's you who misunderstood my posts, but never mind. I'm not going to go through the whole thing with you.
DeleteGod, the hubris.
All you have to do is respond to the evidence. You are trying to make this way more 'political' than it is.
DeleteYou might be confusing me with someone else then.
Delete1:43, "You have to take into account that the spread (though it still exists) is much smaller when you only look at high quality journals as opposed to all journals."
ReplyDeleteThe spread is much higher for these journals, not lower. Men hired published at around three times the rate women did, for these high quality journals (0.42 to 0.14). While, on average amongst those hired in 2012 and 2013, men published around double the rate (1.5 to 0.8).
So, the spread is higher for the higher quality journals.
I love Frege.
DeleteBut the first report on this blog about the spread in the case of the top journals was that it was LESS of a spread than in the case of all journals. Then some of you people appeared to switch it on me, now claiming that the spread is greater in the case of the top journals. I think some of you are playing fast and lose about what stat exactly you are reporting so I am going to have to really study things before I say anything more. But by way of conclusion I'll just say this: Frege was mostly right, but he got some things wrong. What he was mostly right about most people ignore and they make a big deal out of the things he got wrong.
Care to say more? Frege's views on meaning? on foundations of math? or...
DeleteSome of what his interpreters and elaborators, anyway, believe about meanings is probably inconsistent with his concept/object stuff and the latter is probably a better guide for understanding the structure of (all possible) thought.
DeleteProminent feminists in philosophy have been claiming that women face discrimination in philosophy and in job hiring. Is there any objective evidence of this? A few years back, Carolyn Dicey Jennings collected "placement data" for nearly all hires in 2012 and 2013. As she herself noticed, it appeared to contradict the feminist assumptions, revealing anti-male gender discrimination. The data was then analysed in detail, at genderandprestige, which included analysis for bias around prestige status too, based on Leiter rankings. It yields statistically significant evidence of anti-male gender discrimination in philosophy job hiring.
ReplyDeleteExecutive summary: the social science of philosophy job hiring contradicts the feminist narrative.
Right, but everyone above seems to be arguing that this is itself a result of affirmative action. People actually engaging in affirmative action is not evidence that there was no bias in the first place. (That's like waiting til the air conditioning cools the room down, and then using that to claim that the cool air in the room contradicts the claim that it was ever hot in the first place).
Deletebut what if running the air conditioning leads to bouts of diarrhea.
Deletecheck mate, feminists.
It seems to me there are three possible justifications for this kind of affirmative action:
ReplyDelete1. Correcting for historical bias (ie, that which affected earlier generations of women)
2. Correcting for past bias (i.e., bias which affected this generation of women prior to them being on the market)
3. The fact that, for whatever reason, being a woman is in fact likely to make the department better in some way (for example, mean that the candidate is likely to help attract more female students, or whatever)
I can't really see any justification for (1). But (2) seems at least plausible. And I don't see why anyone could have any objection to (3). It is already the case that considerations that have nothing to do with raw philosophical ability or raw teaching ability play a role. Like, does this person have family in the area and so is likely to stay long-term? etc.
Affirmative action is illegal. Now perhaps there are some wildly different cultural assumptions about this (e.g., on the US "left"). But the US is an extreme outlier in such matters. For all reasonable people, affirmative action is both immoral and illegal.
DeleteWell, (3) above wouldn't, strictly speaking, be affirmative action. If 3 were true, then being a woman would better qualify you for the job. This is clearly fine in circumstances like this. It's not illegal,presumably, to hire a woman to play Juliet.
DeleteAnd it would be good to not be parochial about it. There are many countries that are not the US in which affirmative action is legal in some circumstances. So I don't think you can just declare to the rest of us, on the basis of what happens in the US, that " For all reasonable people, affirmative action is both immoral and illegal."
"There are many countries that are not the US in which affirmative action is legal in some circumstances."
DeleteEmployment legislation in North America, Europe and Australasia allows special caveats based on protected characteristics, agreed: e.g., hiring certain groups of social workers. However, other things being equal, the law says that you cannot harm/damage the employment rights of an individual based on a protected characteristic to which they belong.
Scenario (3) is affirmative action - but why should a department wish to attract more female students? Why not attract more male students? Should psychology departments hire more men to attract more male students, given the preponderance of female academics in the area? Or many other areas, including the biological sciences, social sciences and humanities. No. That would be illegal.
Commenters above keep assuming that feminism - an ideology - is true. But feminism is not true. It is false. In the educational system, the conditions are extremely favourable towards girls and women. It is not 1950 and not 1980. It is 2015. It is girls, and women, who receive preferential treatment and huge advantages.
That comment doesn't make a lot of sense, 3:59. I also doubt you have extensive knowledge of employment legislation of all the countries in NA, Europe and Australasia. In any case, that is beside the point: what we're discussing is this: on the assumption that the practices described (wanting to hire a woman, etc) happen in philosophy, is there something wrong with these practices?
DeleteIf you want to call it affirmative action if you take into account some characteristic that better qualifies you for a job, then fine, call it that - but it doesn't settle the question of whether it is immoral. It seems like you are not aware of this, but departments often do take into account these kinds of characteristics - like whether someone has ties to the area, and is so likely to stay long term. Also, as for why a department would wish to attract more women - well, again, perhaps you're not aware of this, but philosophy departments don't have much trouble attracting and retaining male students. They do have trouble retaining female students. Student numbers are very important for a department.
Also, I don't see that anyone is assuming anything about feminism.
4:28, you said before, "The fact that, for whatever reason, being a woman is in fact likely to make the department better in some way (for example, mean that the candidate is likely to help attract more female students, or whatever)"
DeleteCan you justify this? You assume there is a justification for "helping attracting more female students".
Why should "more" be attracted rather than, e.g., "fewer"? What is the "right" number? How is that "right number" justified? What justifies any form of intervention?
I said that that was a possible justification. So on the assumption that it was true, it might justify the kind of policies we're discussing.
DeleteBut it's not nuts to think that departments are justified in caring about student numbers, and that given that the evidence shows that philosophy departments don't have much trouble retaining male students but do have some trouble retaining female students that steps they take to retain more female students would boost student numbers overall.
The "right" number is, roughly, as many as possible. The more philosophy students we get, the more upper division courses (more fun, interesting) we can teach, the more tenure track lines we gain (or at least avoid losing), the better our general standing in the university, and so on. Women undergrads are the biggest market at our school, and yet we have trouble getting them. The idea is that if our faculty makeup were 6/3 men to women, we would have better odds than if it were 9/0 or 8/1 men to women.
DeleteWhy is this "trouble"? It seems to me to be a choice based on aptitudes and inclinations. One concludes that it is "trouble" only if one thinks it isn't a free choice, but rather one somehow based on, e.g., structural oppression, etc, etc., etc. I see no objective evidence for this. In fact, in 2015, all the evidence points the other way.
DeleteThere's no reason for socially engineering other people's decisions, merely to make feminists happy. If female undergrads prefer psychology to supervenience, then: so what? Let them choose as they please.
Surely you don't mean exactly what you say in that first part, 5:06. Suppose that the difference between always hiring the most qualified candidate and always hiring only women is 1 additional student in the latter case. There's a tradeoff here between considerations of fairness in hiring and enrollment outcomes (at least, if the claim about male faculty not drawing as much female enrollment is true). We shouldn't look at just the one side and mindlessly aim to maximize it. Of course, this also works in the other direction. If departments hire without paying any mind to enrollment, things will also get ugly.
Delete5:13, 'don't have much trouble doing something' is a colloquialism that just means that the dept. doesn't have much difficulty doing something. I think you're reading far too much into one word. The point is simply that philosophy depts seem to attract fairly equal numbers of men and women, but that after first year classes, a lot more women drop philosophy than men do. So, one thing philosophy departments could do to try and keep student numbers up is to take steps to try to keep women dropping the major. If you want another explanation that doesn't use the word 'trouble' read 5:06.
DeleteI don't know why you keep dragging in stuff about feminists and feminism. No-one's trying to engineer people's choices to make feminists happy. People are trying to engineer choices in order to increase the number of students overall who take philosophy courses, for the reasons that 5:06 identifies.
I haven't been in this particular thread, but I did post at 11:48 above in a similar thread.
DeleteI think it's interesting to consider where fairness and morality comes into these hiring decisions. Given that there is a glut of candidates for every job, and that hiring committees have an abundance of qualified candidates, when are they justified in using factors other than objective merit in research and teaching? In business in general, there's no expectation that the most objectively qualified will always be hired - there's even such a thing as being "over qualified" hurting you.
So, to go back to the question I raised at 11:48, "what factors are committees justified in taking into account, and is gender (race, prestige, class, temperament, political orientation, age, personal hygiene...) among them? If not, why not? If so, in what circumstances?
5:24, " So, one thing philosophy departments could do to try and keep student numbers up...."
DeleteThis is the crucial point - why? Why not just let them go? They tried it and didn't like truth tables, supervenience, etc. Fair enough. So why not try to attract students on the basis of the discipline itself, and not on the basis of their gender?
The reason for aiming marketing at female students is to maximize the probability of getting smart students. This assumes that intelligence is evenly distributed over the two sexes. Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal. If the general population of university age in your community is mostly men or mostly women, then this wouldn't hold. For example, if you were in Alaska or the Yukon or a place where a lot of military people were pursuing an undergraduate education, I wouldn't recommend trying to get 50/50 majors.
DeleteJust so I'm clear on this argument for preferring women candidates:
DeleteYou're saying that, if it turns out that female profs attract more students, and in particular more female students, then that justifies deciding in advance to hire a female philosopher.
So, if we do the research and it turns out that we'd be likely to get more female students, and more students in total, with a male professor, then we can justifiably decide in advance to hire a male candidate.
And even if we found that in general we'd get more students by hiring a woman, but that we have a make applicant P who would get even more students, then we need to hire P and we'd be wrong to not consider P on the grounds of his sex.
Right? Or are you just making up bullshit rationalizations you don't believe in to justify a morally bankrupt conclusion you selected out of blind, stupid and unapologetic sexism?
6:13, you need to do a better job of allowing your interlocutors to have subtle differences in the positions they hold. If the position you find yourself debating is made up of claims x,y,z, u,v, w, and then someone comes along and explains or argues for claim y, you don't need to get all worked up about it as if she were also thereby defending x, z, u, v, and w as well. Your last paragraph there indicates that you think you're giving a knock down argument but it's against a conclusion that was not stated in 6:02. 6:02 made an argument indicating why we should try to get more female students. That's all. The argument could be recruited to support the position of those who think that that's a reason to give preferential treatment of female candidates for jobs, but 6:02 did not make that argument. It could be that even someone who thought that we should give preferential treatment to women candidates AND who agreed with 6:02's argument would also agree with you that preferential treatment should be given to really good male teachers, or ones who were good mentors for women. Again, try to separate out different theses before you get all worked up.
DeleteI don't think anyone's saying that we need to do anything like you are proposing merely on the basis of student numbers. Just that it is a consideration that it's reasonable for a department to take into account.
Delete@6:01 "Why?" Self-interest. If the number of majors is low enough, administrators can decide we don't need as many tenure lines as we have, or even a department at all (maybe we get absorbed within religion). Put another way, if the commentator from above is right that women don't have the aptitude or inclination from philosophy, that would look like a pretty good reason to administrators to cut some philosophy jobs for fields that are more in demand for students (who are a majority women).
Delete@6:13: my own view is that the case for preferring women candidates (other things being equal) is overdetermined. I suspect in advance you'll reject several of the arguments I find compelling, given your apparent views. But an additional argument is student recruitment.
Delete6:02, "The reason for aiming marketing at female students is to maximize the probability of getting smart students. This assumes that intelligence is evenly distributed over the two sexes. Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal."
DeleteMaybe you can explain this probabilistic argument in more detail. If "smartness" in a population is probabilistically independent of a separate variable (e.g., gender), the distribution of that variable in a sample makes no difference to the expected value of "smartness" for that sample. The sample could be, say, MMMM or FFFF and the expected "smartness" is the same each way. So, no particular distribution maximizes smartness. Have I missed something?
So you think that in a university of 30,000 each of the following is equally likely?
Delete(a) all the students with an IQ above the median are boys
(b) roughly half the students with an IQ above the median are boys and roughly half the students with an IQ above the median are girls.
1:46, please learn something about probability before making a comment like that. You embarrass philosophers everywhere with your innumeracy.
DeleteNot sure why it's supposed to be embarrassing. The implicature of the question in 1:46 is (correct me if I'm wrong please) that (b) is more likely. That is correct.
DeleteIs the problem supposed to be that this probability is not the relevant one? I could not understand exactly what was supposed to be at issue, which is why I didn't not chime in. (Well, that and laziness.)
Yes, relevancy is the issue. In particular, nothing in the preceding comment implied that the commenter would think (a) is as likely as (b), and in fact one would have to believe the opposite of what 7:30 explicitly stated in order to believe that. I.e., if we have probabilistic independence, (b) is strictly more likely. (This is all ignoring the fact that (a) will be literally impossible at most universities, which have fewer than fifty percent men.) It is true that if intelligence and gender are independent, *the best possible smartness sample* is much more likely to be close to half-and-half than it is to be close to all-or-nothing. *But so is the worst possible smartness sample.* So gender distribution can't say *all* that much about intelligence.
DeleteOkay, I think I agree. The commenter may have been confusing the chance of getting the best smartness sample given equal distribution with the chance of equal distribution given best smartness sample. But, I don't think I understand the original argument, so I'm not confident.
DeleteThe original argument, from 6:02PM, concluded, "Assuming it is, the best way to maximize the probability of getting smart and talented students is to try to get 50/50, all other things being equal."
DeleteBut this conclusion is incorrect. It does not provide a basis for aiming to target either females or males. The other arguments mentioned appear to be equally groundless. As we know, female and male undergraduates try out truth tables, supervenience, split brains, Gettier, utilitarianism and whatnot. But females tend to dislike this stuff more than their male peers do. So, they go off and study psychology, biological sciences, social sciences/humanities instead.
Why not just let them go? Let them do as they please, instead of trying to socially engineer a social system already close to statistical equilibrium with respect to the uncoerced choices, interests and aptitudes of undergraduate students.
Would a female student be more likely to stay in philosophy after a course with a decent female teacher picked to fill a quota, or a great male teacher who would have got the job in a fair contest? Why assume it's the former? Without this assumption, this argument for anti-male sex discrimination fails.
DeleteIf it's true that more men stay and your basis were *genuinely* doing whatever increases numbers then you would be arguing for discriminating in favor of *increasing* male numbers. Indeed, you would do very well increasing numbers of men by advertising that you're not going to subject them to all the feminist bullshit. The fact you are not making this kind of argument shows this is all just a blind for anti-male sexist discrimination.
DeleteSo, people are discussing the issues above, which is great, but tangentially - is the OP still pretending he's a grad student on the market at 'arguably' the top school in the world? Because there's just no way someone who writes that is a final year student at NYU. Guy writes either like he is 50 or 17 and trying to sound 50.
ReplyDeleteUnless you're interested in getting to the bottom of his particular case, does it matter? Most of the discussion that's still going on is, as you say, about the broader issues, none of which depend on anything suggested by his particular story. We have data. There's no need to focus on a narrative that might be made up. I think people are currently doing a nice job of ignoring a lot of irrelevant noise that's being posted here.
DeleteOP here.
DeleteI am not 50. I'm not even 30!
But I am at the program I claim to be.
I am glad that I've been able to start the conversation I have. This is an important topic, and it is one that people in private mention quite a bit, but it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
I seem to notice an incipient pattern of bias in favor of young female authors at peer-reviewed journals (e.g., at Ethics).
ReplyDeleteThe NC might be doing this in response to the revelation that the bias in hiring is actually not in favor of men, but in favor of women. The NC solution? Give publications to women so the anti-male bias can no longer be proven.
We can't be certain yet that this is going on, but I think we should pay a lot of attention to what makes into the journals this year and next.
So, according to you, a group of people noticed CDJ's data, thought well, we better fix that, and then pressured ethics into selecting more papers by women to fix it?
DeleteAnd your evidence for this is just that you 'seem to notice' a pattern? So what, you read a few issues and there were a couple of articles by women you thought were not very good? And on this basis, you're spreading conspiracy theories which smear the reputations of those who edit a particular journal, and cooking up conspiracy theories? And in the process, insinuating - on the basis of no evidence whatsoever other than your own 'noticings' (not on the basis of anything to do with the actual work whatsoever) that young women in general who have published in Ethics recently do not deserve their publications? Not cool, 3:59.
3:59s statement of the concern seems like overreaching, perhaps irresponsibly so. But remember that Jessica Wilson and Meena Krishnamurthy have both publicly supported gender quotas at journals. The latter even wrote a paper about it. So as crazy as it sounds (to me), apparently this is something being considered in at least some circles.
DeleteSure, and if you (or 3:59) wants to have a discussion about those papers, have at it. But it's not cool to go round insinuating stuff about specific journals (and authors) like 3:59 did
DeleteOP: what is your evidence? Are you claiming that junior women are disproportionately over-represented in Ethics? Could you provide data on this? Ethics only publishes 4 or 5 articles per issue, and 4 issues per year. It should be pretty quick for you to look at the last few issues and show us the demographic percentages for authors. This is just descriptive data - it doesn't even requiring commenting on the quality of what has been published.
Delete3.59 is exactly on point and the idiotic and pompous tone policing of 4.15 and 4.32 is timewasting nonsense. Tone police this, 'not cool' arsehole: Go screw yourself.
DeleteNow for something on point: The journals have been under relentless feminist pressure. 3.59 has put his finger on a very interesting additional motive for that pressure.
Can you explain what you mean by 'tone policing', 4:26? I can't seem to make sense of it from your usage. You seem to be saying that if A makes anonymous comments which smear someone's reputation, or if A calls B an arsehole and tells B to go screw himself, and B asks A not to do those things, then B is the one who deserves criticism?
DeleteSeems like a pretty odd view to me.
http://theadvocate.com/news/12669113-123/lsu-professor-fired-for-using
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether the NC will be for or against this firing. On the one hand, we should always believe people who tell us they've been sexually harassed. On the other hand, this is a woman.
Who cares what the NC would say. I wonder if her politics are progressive and thus attracted the ire of someone in the high school system who then decided to ruin her, aided in the fact that there were a couple disgruntled students who were having to work harder than they wanted to. Louisiana, poor Louisiana.
DeleteImpossible, Justice Whineburg assured me that all the talk of chilling academic freedom was baseless speculation. For all the feminist support for these policies, the two of the most recent and prominent professors to suffer them were both women (Kipnis and the above LSU professor). Puritanism has always struck the defiant woman the hardest.
DeletePuritanism has always struck the defiant women the hardest.
DeleteI think there's a lot in that. The amount of ire and vitriol against Kipnis from the NC was extraordinary. The claims about retaliation were pretty obviously nonsense even before it became clear that the dating claim was true (at least, if by 'dating' we mean dating). So there was a bit of an explanatory vacuum, and I think a lot of NC people were just incensed that a woman, who must look progressive at least to a lot of 'non-enlightened' types, was openly mocking their most precious and beloved ideas. There was a lot more bile about Kipnis on FB than there was when Tooley broke ranks, and that's saying something. It reminded me a bit of some of the reaction to Paglia back in the day.
No, there's nothing in it. It's just pandering.
DeleteIt is, of course, a disgrace she's been fired. Can't work out what "a slang term for vagina that implies cowardice" is. And "the committee found that her adult language and humor violated university policies that protect students and employees from sexual harassment, " is why sexual harassment is bollocks. Sexual harassment is what anyone wants it to be. Once you let the totalitarian leftists in (and that is what letting the feminists in is doing), this is what you get.
DeleteThe CDJ data set doesn't prove that men are discriminated against in hiring.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it's still *possible* that men are discriminated against in hiring (and if so, the data set makes sense).
Possibly women are discriminated against in getting papers accepted in journals.
Possibly both of these are true.
Possibly the average quality of the papers of men and women is different, which might explain the disparity. Possibly men aggressively send out papers, but possibly they don't. Possibly the average quality of the papers is the same across sexes, either way. We don't know!
Possibly some men are discriminated against and other men are favored. Possibly some women are discriminated against and other women are favored. Possibly both!
It's a shame that evidence underdetermines theory. It's also a shame how quickly everyone forgets this. It's a shame that underdetermination is out-of-control-extreme whenever statistics are used in political discussions. It's even more of a shame that few seem to consider this.
I, for one, ignore all studies that say children do better with gay parents than straight parents. I also ignore all studies that say straight parents are better for children than gay parents. Lies, damn lies, and statistics, right? Maybe I'm just an anti-science ignoramus.
I suspect women have a pretty big edge on the market, but this is mainly my impression from the culture in my department and online. I don't know, but I suspect. But ultimately, I don't care. I'm not a justice-zealot. I recognize that life is unfair, and I'm okay with that. If I turn out to be a new Kripke (I won't, just saying) then I'll get a job. If not and I don't, my life will probably be okay, because I'm relatively intelligent, and I can figure out something.
I dislike feminism, but as an old-fashioned male chauvinist, the complaining here seems unmanly. It's unfortunate to miss out on a job, and perhaps even more so if someone not as qualified gets the job you want. But to all the non-feminists here, do we want to match the new infants sniffle for sniffle, sob for sob? With all due kindness and courtesy to my masculine counterparts, be men about it.
For the information we have for 2012-3, women received preferential treatment in hiring. That information is limited to publications and prestige of PhD, both of which are admittedly poor measures of overall merit. But it's not nothing, and for the dataset we have the bias in favor of hiring women is robust. These are all facts that no 'manly man' need deny. As for your counsel, it is better sent to the scolds and dissemblers who can't be bothered to let their narrative become beholden to the facts.
DeleteKind sir, all you have is a gap in publication rates, a gap between men and women. Your explanation might be true. Alternatively, it might be the case that the men and women hired are of equal quality (however that might be measured). On this alternative scenario, it might be that the publication rate of men is inflated by prejudice against women by academic journals.
DeleteThe disparity in publication rate can be explained in these two opposing ways, and we have no data that shows one explanation to be more plausible than the other.
Now, maybe it's implausible that the journals would be prejudiced against women and not the hiring committees, and perhaps we should lean toward your explanation. But that's just speculation.
Maybe instead women are generally shy wall-flowers who have great material that they are too timid to share with the world, and so they don't get published as much as men. And maybe hiring committees see these women's writing samples and are convinced by the excellence of their work.
And these are just two crude possibilities. There are thousands of factors at work that we can't isolate. Maybe men from the top 10 are relatively disadvantaged, and those from 11-29 advantaged, and from 30 on down disadvantaged. Maybe research schools favor women and others don't. Maybe SLACs and community colleges strongly favor women. Maybe all of these things are true, but are masked in the limited data we have because in the social sciences evidence radically underdetermines theory.
I am sympathetic. I really am. But this complaining won't help.
Sniffle for sniffle 8:00? It is not zealotry to draw attention to the fact that a political movement that regularly pleads the victimhood of its constituency is composed of people who are, by and large, pretty privileged.
DeleteThere's nothing odd or contradictory or hypocritical about saying that a person is a victim in one respect even if they are privileged in others. Privileged is a relative term, victimhood is not. For example, a wealthy black man living in the US is privileged in many respects compared to a poor white man living in the former Eastern Bloc. But this doesn't mean that it is somehow a mistake to point out that black men in the US, even sometimes very wealthy ones, are often victims of racism.
DeleteBy all means, draw attention to it. But there's no need to make a habit of complaining about it. A little more light-hearted humor would help too.
DeleteThink about it for a minute---they'll never take pity on you. Attempting to tug on their heartstrings won't work.
Instead, maybe try waiting for opportune moments when something obvious and absurd crops up, think of a funny way of describing this absurdity, and don't overdo it. I don't know if they can feel shame, but at least we'll get a laugh.
--8:00
Maybe's don't help 9:19. The data shows something. You can ignore that, as you seem to be inclined, but you cannot throw a bunch of 'maybes's into play and ignore the plausibility of the one explanation that already made sense and which the stories here give testament to (and which,, ironically, you attest you suspect is true). Namely, that women have a pretty big advantage on the market. If you want to ignore all this, that's your decision. But take the 'manly' stuff and put it where the sun don't shine
DeleteI agree, 9:28. Men in philosophy, while privileged in some respects, are victimized by the preferential treatment that women enjoy in hiring. 9:19, do you consider the testimony of those who serve on hiring committees that they treat women differently evidence? Sure, manliness and all that, but the degree of skepticism you'd need to genuinely think there's nothing going on here is pretty silly.
DeleteApparently the sun never shines on your face. What will your dour, bitter attitude get you?
DeleteAnd anyway, repeating the claim won't work. Everyone who cares has seen it. --8:00
Thanks, 9:31, I appreciate that. I agree that a wry sense of humor is a productive way forward. Still, let's be honest about what is happening.
DeleteIt may be hard for you to tell 9:38, what with your head so far up your ass, but I'm about the last person one would call 'dour.' Thanks for confirming that you're just here to cheerlead, though.
DeleteCool jacket bro.
9:54, I don't really understand your response (what jacket?), but I suppose I was wrong to call you dour. You now don't seem mature enough for so serious a feeling. --8:00
DeleteCute 10:03. But still empty of conrent.
Delete*content
DeleteThe voices seem very shrill here, even though the ones typing most of the comments are probably men. They are screeches in the night.
Deletehttp://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/738/025/db0.jpg
DeleteHi 8:00,
DeleteI agreement with the general thrust of your post. The amount of butthurt on here lately can't be justified by the CDJ data, which admits of multiple minimally plausible explanations and is limited in ways the seem to prevent us from easily identifying any particular explanation as the best one. More to the point, even if we could identify the "women are knowingly and regularly given an unmeritocratic advantage on the market" hypothesis as the best one, the apposite response would not involve crying about it on the internet.
Suppose, however, that the CDJ data could be supplemented with other data (say, testimony from people on search committees) which would make the "women are advantaged" hypothesis look more plausible than its closest competitors. If we had good reason to believe that women enjoyed significant advantages in the hiring process, that would tell against the new consensus narrative. If you hold the view, as I do, that new consensus ideas/practices are invidious and damaging to the profession, you might think there's a good reason to care about hashing this stuff out (even if the butthurt here is unwarranted and unbecoming of grown men).
I have no personal stake in the question of whether women enjoy market advantages. Indeed, I have a tenure track job I'm rather happy with. But I'd prefer that my discipline not be taken over by political zealots, incompetents, and people who bemoan philosophy's "culture of justification." And I don't want to have to feign agreement with such people to avoid being personally attacked on internet fora. Thus, I think it's certainly worth thinking through the CDJ data, even with it's acknowledged limits, insofar as may help us to make a cumulative case against a central new consensus view; namely, that women in philosophy are tremendously disadvantaged.
Amazing that I lost out in interviews to someone who uses the word "butthurt". That makes me more "butthurt" than any amount of anti-male sexism in hiring practices.
DeleteLysias,
DeleteOk, that's fair. But I think we need to keep modest goals in mind. A large fraction of tenured faculty (the new infants) won't care no matter how good a case we make. Let's write them off now (politely).
If we take our time making a calm case, while showing a sense of humor, then maybe we can win the silent plurality out there that just wants to do philosophy and get along. And I agree completely that our thesis needs to be that it's false that women are significantly disadvantaged. Let's avoid arguing that it's unfair for all the men out there -- even if the latter happens to be true (and I don't know that it is), our goal should just be that hiring committees pick the best candidate, not the correct set of genitals. But if that's going to happen, we can't go off half-cocked with CDJ's dataset. That's not a smoking gun.
But we'd need to keep in mind that it's also a political campaign, and if the silent plurality sees weeping PC infants on one side and embittered, complaining men on the other, they'll likely side with the babies. So we'd need to see a bit more maturity from this crowd to make our plan work. Which should be doable because we're supposed to be the adults in this dispute.
-8:00
Thanks for the tone of moderation. We could all use more of it.
DeleteAnd am I right to think the big question is whether men and women are getting TT jobs and postdocs etc. at a rate proportional to their overall numbers? That seems like an easy bit of info to collect. It would be good to put this to bed.
What exactly would seeing that one number put to bed? Women are given preferential treatment at stages before and during the hiring process. You're not entitled to the presumption that proportional representation in placement must mean that our professional practices are fair.
DeleteHere's why, 7:55: you're conflating the kinds of affirmative action policies people are talking about with all-things-considered preferential treatment. Affirmative action policies, of the kinds described - like explicit decisions by hiring committees to interview women, etc. - are (usually) designed to cancel out biases, or cancel out disadvantages that happen earlier in the process.
DeleteSo, unless you think that the average male student who begins grad school is more philosophically talented than the average female student who begins grad school - and there is no reason to believe this - we should expect that hiring rates would be proportional.
If they are in fact proportional, then we have reason to believe that particular policies which give preference to women are not unjust, because they are part of a set of overall policies/practises (conscious or unconcsious) which lead the the result one would expect if the overall set of policies/practises were fair.
I'm familiar with the usual rationale for affirmative action. Perhaps you've heard that the practice is hardly morally uncontroversial, and also that many don't think it actually has the effect of leveling the playing field that you claim. You're right that it's worth figuring out if the result of hiring is proportional representation. I was only taking issue with your suggestion that seeing a number settles the matter.
DeleteSorry, I should have made it clear: that wasn't my original suggestion. Perhaps 6:36 had a different explanation in mind. But I take it that the explanation I gave is the usual reason why people think proportionality matters.
DeleteAnd sure, I know it is controversial. All I was doing was explaining why evidence of proportionality gives us reason to believe certain practises are justified, and also pointing out that calling any of these policies 'preferential' looks like it begs the question, if the rationale for such policies is to ensure that no particular group does in fact get preferential treatment all-things-considered.
The reason I think proportionality settles the matter (or at least that it's reasonable to believe that it does) is that if the hiring numbers were NOT proportional, then it seems like there are two competing explanations: either the average woman doing philosophy is less talented than the average man (and we've got no reason to believe this) or there is either conscious or unconscious bias affecting the way that women's talents are evaluated (or vice versa).
The second explanation is something that is unfair, and should be corrected for (so, to be clear: if it turned out that women were being hired wildly out of proportion to their numbers, I think we should correct for that to - because I don't buy the possible justifications for affirmative action that would permit this).
Maybe you have another explanation, but it seems to me that if you think finding out whether the numbers are proportional wouldn't settle the question, then you have to think that the gendered differences in talent scenario is plausible, and there's just no reason to think it is. So that's why the numbers settle the matter.
Thanks for clarifying, 8:55. That's all reasonable enough.
DeletePreferential actually doesn't seem like a biased term to me, since if you're right, preferential treatment within one stage may be morally required. But perhaps it's better termed something else, like corrective preferential treatment. Both sides could agree that that's what's going on, it's just that they disagree about whether it's justified.
I don't have another explanation because I don't know the social science on this, or even if there is any. But surely no issue this complicated is settled with the armchair plus one number. I'd more readily grant that you'd have a justified mild presumption in favor of your conclusion. To me, 'settled' sounds too close to saying no reasonable person would continue to look at evidence except as an academic exercise.
Yeah, what I meant by 'settled' was closer to this: not that no reasonable person would continue to look at evidence, but that given that the only explanation that would mean the numbers don't settle the question is one we have no good evidence for, we should take it as settled unless this kind of evidence is forthcoming. But to be honest, it also seems pretty unlikely that we would get evidence for the claim that there is such a disparity in talent that in a pool (of those already interested enough and talented enough to go to grad school) with more than twice as many men as women, the average man is still likely to be more talented than the average woman. Even those who argue for claims like the claim that women are on average less interested and less good at, say, mathematical or spatial reasoning would have a hard time coming up with a scenario which would support this hypothesis.
DeleteSo this is obviously pretty rough (because quanitative GRE scores are probably not a very good predictor of philosophical talent) but from what I remember, something like 30% of women and 70% of men score over 700 on the quant section. This is pretty similar to the numbers in philosophy. So even if you are pretty generous about whether this kind of evidence is relevant, we should expect that of the pool of men and women in grad school, the average talent according to this measure is about the same.
So not only do we not have evidence that given the 30/70 split in philosophy, the average man is likely to be more talented than the average woman, we have at least some evidence that this is not likely to be the case.
Right 9:31, and if your GRE score explanation is correct then we should be more cautious about imputing bias and discrimination against women, qua women, in the profession. Remember slatestarcodex's takedown of Leslie et al's claim to have found substantial evidence for a gender gap due to perceptions of 'genius' in different careers in January:
Deletehttp://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap/
Turns out if you look at average quantitative GRE scores relative to majors you get pretty much what we see.
I should be clearer about this: I really don't buy the view that men are inherently better than women in terms of philosophical talent. I gave that example for this reason: even *on the assumption* that there is this kind of difference (along with the kinds of assumptions I've seen before, that for example women are just less interested in philosophy) none of the evidence people point to to support that assumption supports the view that given the gender breakdown we have, a lack of proportionality in hiring could be explained by something like discrepancies in talent.
DeleteSo it's an 'even if accept the kind of evidence people point to, it still doesn't support a particular claim about what fairness in hiring would look like' argument.
I don't think the GRE explanation is correct, nor is it robust enough to support any skepticism about bias, or whatever - that's a whole separate issue. I was just using it as an example of the kinds of evidence people who do support the differences-in-intrinsic talent view point to, and pointing to the fact that even this isn't enough to get the claims that would need to be supported when we talk about proportionality in hiring off the ground.
I think we are on the same page 10:17. If the breakdown of gender in PhDs is the same when looking at who gets hired, then that's evidence that the job market is not favoring women overall. And if that proportion is correlated with quantitative GRE scores then that is evidence that whatever the quantitative GRE score is tracking is valued by professional philosophers. In neither case would the evidence be dispositive, but it would be important to consider that evidence if we had it. All the more reason to be looking closely at the facts, it seems to me.
DeleteYeah, and I think that's the sticking point for people who believe that the hiring data shows that women get all-things-considered preferential treatment. Because the only way to make the difference in publication rates go away would be if women were hired in a lower proportion to their proportion in grad school. And then it seems like that would be prima facie evidence of unfairness elsewhere in the process.
DeleteYes, OP, you're a ridiculous time wasting ignoramus.
DeleteThe only thing that matters is improving the lot of women. This has always been the case, as it always will be.
DeleteAll glory to the Mother-Goddess-Crone! She who gives us life! She who gives us love!
There is something that I think we're missing in just focussing on hiring, though. As far as I recall, women and men are still getting jobs in numbers roughly proportional to their numbers in the discipline. So unless you think not just that women in general are naturally worse at philosophy than men, but that *amongst those who decide to pursue til PhD graduation and go on the job market*, women are on average less talented at philosophy than men, then it doesn't seem like women are getting preferential treatment overall.
ReplyDeleteOne explanation that you don't consider here is that less talented women are more likely to be admitted to graduate programs than are less talented men. (Indeed, I know of one top 20 school that proudly admits to having gender quotas for admission.) So if the quality of the initial pool of grad students is skewed in this way, a proportionate outcome on the job market still suggests preferential treatment.
DeleteI didn't explicitly consider it because it doesn't seem very plausible. Because it would have to be not just that less talented women are admitted, but that less talented women graduate. And do you really think it is likely, say, that for any group of 200 people interested enough to pursue philosophy, evenly split along gender lines, the 70-80th men are likely to be more talented at philosophy than the 20th-30th women? Because something like that would need to be true for your hypothesis to be plausible.
DeleteIt does seem plausible to me, and I don't think you have to hold sexist views about the distribution of intelligence in the general population to think that. Here are a few reasons why.
DeleteFirst, as we're often told, women disproportionately stop taking philosophy classes after the introductory level. It is possible that what's being selected for in further enrollment is intelligence, but I doubt that, and many of the dominant narratives around that issue seem to reject the thought.
Second, the numbers I've seen show that women are disproportionately likely to be admitted to graduate programs (i.e. based on ratio of women:men in the applicant pool). It could be that what I've seen reported isn't representative, but that's what I've see.
Third, what happens once people enter programs is going to be very difficult to collect any good data about. So dismiss this if you like, but in my program there are no shortage of examples of women being treated differently with respect to program requirements--e.g. passing comprehensive exams while admitting to have never read X, and having never heard of X's most-discussed idea, where discussion of X has dominated the subfield for 50 years and is featured heavily on the comprehensive exam reading list. I'm afraid this last claim will really tick you off, and perhaps rightly so, but that's just what I've seen, and why the explanation does seem plausible to me.
It's not that it 'ticks me off' it's that I don't see the point of relating anecdotes like that. First, from my perspective it is both anonymous and an anecdote, so I have reasons to take it with a grain of salt. Secondly, you seem to already have the view not just that there is likely to be some disparity in talent between men and women, but a vast disparity. So there are worries about confirmation bias.
DeleteIn any case, I don't see how you have said anything to support the claim that it is plausible to expect that there is such a vast disparity in talent between men and women. You still need to show why you think it is that of those determined, interested and talented enough to pursue something to PhD, you think it's likely that the 8th most talented man in any group is likely to be more talented than the 3rd most talented woman. This is not just a disparity, its a huge disparity amongst those who have already shown both interest and determination. Can you explain why you think your first and second speak to this issue? Because I don't see why they are relevant.
10:43: as I understood it, you asked me to explain why, starting from a roughly equal distribution of potential talent, there is such an unequal distribution of talent at the end of a PhD program. So the point of the 3 reasons was to explain the widening gap at various stages. All of this, again, is meant only to suggest the plausibility of an explanation.
DeleteAt the stage of post-intro enrollment, the thought was that perhaps vastly more gifted women than men find something else to study. That could be because of harassment, not connecting with or being inspired by the professor, cultural expectations that women major in other fields, or other reasons that aren't occurring to me. What seems unlikely as an explanation for lower enrollment is lesser potential talent. Instead, the thought was that many of the female statistical counterparts of talented males leave philosophy here.
Then, vastly fewer women apply to graduate programs. I assumed again that it's not only the most talented women who apply, just as it isn't only the most talented men who apply. Perhaps here again, talented women are removed from the pool at a greater rate than are talented men. Perhaps it's for the same reasons as the first cut, particularly harassment, if some narratives are true. Yet one's odds of being admitted as a woman are better.
As for the third, I was explaining why it seemed plausible to me that the gap might widen further here. I don't expect you to accept my testimony about this for purposes of your own beliefs. Regard it as meaningless noise, if you like. But since you know so little about me and my surroundings, I would think you should be similarly reluctant to charge me with confirmation bias with respect to this issue.
Finally, you may have just been writing quickly, but I do not accept your characterization of my view as being "not just that there is likely to be some disparity in talent between men and women, but a vast disparity." I hope you omitted a number of words qualifying the domain over which that judgment holds unintentionally, because as stated it is wildly unfair as a gloss on what I've said. But thanks for being otherwise charitable, if I've read you correctly.
With your first point, I don't see why you think that more talented women are more likely to drop out, and the women who are less talented are more likely to keep going (compared to the men).Why would this be true? You can propose scenarios all you like, but you've got to have some reason to think they're plausible.
DeleteAnd the problem with your anecdote is that it's not just meaningless noise: anecdotes like that often reinforce prejudices. So unless there is a reason for giving them (which there isn't, in a case like this) then it's not just a wash. And the point of confirmation bias is that we all have to be careful of it - I don't see why you seem to sake such offense at the suggestion of it.
And as for the vast disparity in talent, maybe it would help if you pay attention to the context: as I said later in the paragraph, what you're proposing is a huge disparity in talent between the women and the men who are interested and determined enough to pursue a PhD.
But why should we expect such a disparity in the behavior of men and women? Why, for example, would harassment mean that more talented women are more likely to leave than the less talented ones? Why would the less talented women be more likely to be inspired by the professor? Why would cultural expectations kick in at this level, rather than before?
I just think that if you're actually claiming, as you are, that the women who finish grad school are much less talented than the men who do, you need something more than a possible scenario according to which this is true. You need a plausible scenario. So I'm not quite clear about what you are trying to do here:
Are you actually claiming that it s true or likely that of the people who finish grad school, there is a very big difference in talent between the average man who finishes and the average woman who finishes?
Or are you just saying that this is a possibility, without making any claims about how likely it is?
10:43/11:42, I think you misread when you say: "But why should we expect such a disparity in the behavior of men and women? Why, for example, would harassment mean that more talented women are more likely to leave than the less talented ones? Why would the less talented women be more likely to be inspired by the professor?"
DeleteThe comparative claim seems not to be between the behavior of more and less talented women, but more talented women and more talented men. I think the idea is that the more talented women drop out of the long track to the philosophy job market at a much greater rate than do the more talented men. That's all that needs to be true for this other explanation to be right. Seems plausible enough to me.
Maybe some numbers would help? Like, imagine (as the OP supposes) that talent is equally distributed. So we start with a pool of 10 men and 10 women, all equally matched 1-1 in terms of talent. Say 3 men drop out, and 7 women (to get roughly grad school numbers). In order for it to be true that the average man was smarter than the average woman, the scenario would have to be something like this: the top 7 men all stayed in, the 4th, 5th and 6th woman all stayed, and the rest dropped.
DeleteSo I'm not disputing that you can make the numbers come out like this. But I don't see why we have any reason to think this is true. Why, for example, would it be the case that the less talented women stay when the more talented ones don't, in the scenario I described? I haven't tried all the scenarios, obviously, but I'm pretty sure that i order for the numbers to come out like the OP needs, it's not just got to be the case that more talented women drop out at a rate much greater than the more talented men, but that as a proportion of their respective populations, the less talented women are more likely to stay relative to more talented women compared with the men.
In any case, I really don't think it is enough for the OP to say something like "it's really true that the women who graduate and get jobs are on average less talented than the men" just on the basis that there are some possible combinations of drop out rates such that this wold be true. We actually have to have a reason for thinking it is true (imagine, for example, if I simply said "I think the men are on average stupider than the women, because I knew a few guys in grad school who were pretty dumb, and if we imagine a scenario where all the best women stay and all the smartest men go and do engineering, even though I don't have any evidence that this is the case, so the men deserve to get fewer jobs proportionally" I imagine you'd laugh in my face, and deservedly so.
2:26, The reason one would expect the more talented women to go elsewhere is that the more talented women will likely have more options in virtue of being more talented. So if you start off with some background forces that make women drop philosophy (e.g., maybe women favor careers in which they either make money or help people, or maybe women are more likely to think philosophy is self-important nonsense because the historically oriented way in which it is taught comes off as full of old white men pontificating, etc.) then the more talented women will tend to leave in greater numbers because they will have more appealing options. The case would be strengthened if talent in philosophy is correlated with technical talents that are useful elsewhere that are also short on women and that offer better opportunities, like computer science, engineering, physics, etc. So you could have a multi-stage selection going on. First, cultural pressures push most women initially away from even seriously considering a philosophy major. Then the women who remain who are both talented and interested in abstract philosophy-like issues are pulled away into other fields that provide better opportunities.
DeleteI wouldn't go so far as endorsing this explanation, but it does seem to me to be a plausible one that should be considered alongside others.
But again, there's no evidence for this, 10:58 (it's just all maybes). And it still doesn't explain why the less talented women stay. And I don't think there is any reason to think that more talented women will have more appealing career options. The fact that someone is not so talented at philosophy is more likely to make other career options more appealing, and it is not like such a person is likely to face a lack of appealing options, because being bad at undergraduate philosophy is no real indication at all that you will likely be faced with unappealing career opportunities accross the board.
Delete11:08, I'm just trying to give you what you asked for: reasons why the numbers might come out that way. (Also, 10:58 is my first post on this thread so I can't speak for your previous interlocutor.) Of course it is all speculative without hard data. I'm personally ambivalent about whether the more talented women leave in greater numbers. I just don't know. Again, I was just trying to give you a possible explanation as to why it might happen. Nevertheless, given that we do know that there are some strong forces at work driving women to drop philosophy after their first course, you cannot just assume that these forces have no effect on the talent of those who stay (one way or another). Talent usually does play a role in people's decisions to pursue a field of study, so It really depends upon what kind of forces are at work. More research is needed in order to answer these questions.
DeleteRight, but I didn't just want possible reasons why the numbers might come out that way, or possible explanations :-). I agree that there are of course possible explanations. I think we need more than 'maybes' here - we need explanations that there is actually some evidence in support of. If you're defending a view (which I take it that my interlocutor was) you need more than the claim that 'here's a possible explanation for why this might be'. You need some reason to think that that explanation is true.
DeleteTo all the judgmental shitheads who are calling the OP dour, unworthy of a reply, responsible for his own lack of a job, his own worst enemy, a complainer, clearly badly informed, probably boy a very good candidate anyway, not focused enough on success, too focused on success, etc. etc. , I have just one question: do you dispense this same advice and judgment to women when they complain that they have it tough? Or are you openly sexist pieces of shit who don't even bother trying to hide your sexism?
ReplyDeleteIf you're for real, great. Prove it. Respond to Audrey Yap on Schleisser's blog. Tell get that her difficulties in the profession are all her fault and that she's got a dour attitude. Then tell all the women who don't even have jobs that they should keep their mouths shut and recognize that they don't even deserve to talk to you. Then go to Feminist Philosphers and WILTBAWIP and tell them to stop whining.
Go on, do it. Or are you ready to admit you only respond this way when the writer has a penis?
If you're talking to me (I'm 8:00), I openly admitted that I'm a male chauvinist. Of course I don't treat men and women the same. That would not be polite. I generally expect that men are more difficult to offend.
DeleteI'm talking to the female chauvinists.
DeleteExactly. The double standards are laughably obvious.
DeleteJesus dude, you read like you are caught up in an apoplectic fit.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't anyone want to talk about Frege and Russell instead?
ReplyDeletewho?
DeleteSo ... legal polyamorous marriages? I say, why not?
ReplyDeleteI agree, if only for the trolling opportunities. I'd love to see what the numerically largest marriage turns out to be. An entire town? A state?
DeleteThe really bleeding-edge question - can subsets of a marriage have their own separate marriage? Or would that be bigamy? #lovewins
Scatofem nails it again.
DeleteScatofem's objection fails. Gays spend lots of time sharing bathrooms, and they're allowed to marry.
DeleteHere's the idea. A marriage would always be between two people. So in a four way polyamorous relationship among Pat, Chris, Sam and Leslie, there could be as few as three and as many as six marriages. I know of a poly family where, if things were formalized as marriages, the couples would be as follows: {P, C}, {P, S}, {C, L}. I know if another whether the couples are as follows: {P, C}, {P, S}, {C, L}, {S, L}. Those not married to each other are, of course, friendly, but don't have any romance with each other. In a more communal setting, you could imagine each adult family member married to each other. Whatever. I see no strong argument against it.
DeleteI don't see why we should assume that marriages need to have anything to do with sex. Because here is something that seems odd to me: say I decide to form a household with another woman who I don't have sex with, where we raise children from previous relationships together. It's now legal for us to form a legal partnership which recognises this, and confers benefits and responsibilities. But what if that woman was my sister? Now, even though we have chosen to function as household in exactly the same way, we can't get access to benefits like being on each other's health insurance, etc., because we can't get married. That doesn't seem fair.
DeleteI agree. I might add that it also seems unfair that two women can form a household together and raise their children together, but not three. Here's a proposal I might be able to get behind. First, get the state out of the marriage business. There would simply be no legally recognized status as "married". You might be married in the eyes of your religion or your community of friends, but it would have no legal significance. Second, allow any group of adults to declare themselves and their nonadult children as a legal family. Yes, we would have to figure out what the rights and responsibilities would be; what the exit clauses would be; etc. But that could be worked out, i think.
DeleteI'd be on board with that. It would be a good way of granting both legal and social recognition to the fact that for many people, their most important relationships are not necessarily romantic or sexual. (And they shouldn't have to pretend that they are).
DeleteStop the pretence: it is metaphysically impossible for anyone but a man and a woman to marry. Of course, once you start changing the meaning of words, you can marry a sausage.
DeleteAll of this disagreement about whether male and female candidates are treated differently--i.e., the merely descriptive issue, and not the normative one about whether this would be justified--seems to center around the fact that we are all epistemically deprived when it comes to decisions made by committees. All we generally see is who got hired and what their CVs look like. (And even this is becoming difficult to access since people are choosing not to post hires on PhilJobs.) So isn't this as strong a case as can be made that the powers that be (APA?) should be trying to determine whether gender is a criterion in committee decisions about hiring and interviewing? A few months ago Marcus Arvan collected data informally on his blog Philosophers' Cocoon, with the objective of "getting scientific on the academic job market." He asked for several pieces of information, but did not ask for gender, in spite of several people recommending that he do so. A few days later I mentioned this fact on one of the LR open threads, and Leiter responded by saying that Arvan probably wanted to avoid the controversy over collecting data about gender. Think about this for a minute--someone might be worried about even asking the question, "Does gender get factored into decisions about interviewing and hiring?" For those who firmly believe this kind of thing doesn't happen very often--you should not worry about asking the question. For those who firmly believe this kind of thing does happen very often--you should not worry about asking the question. The only ones who should worry are those who claim that it doesn't happen, but believe that it does. And if you're going to complain when the question is asked, you should own up to your intellectual dishonesty.
ReplyDeleteWell put. It is somewhat scandalous that CDJ and the APA chose not to disclose data on gender this year. Surely they looked at it. One wonders what was found.
DeleteThere isn't really any disagreement about the descriptive issue of gender discrimination in philosophy job hiring. It's clear. Do you think NuCons disagree with this? NuCons know it contradicts their infantile victim narrative. The point is that NuCons agree with anti-male gender discrimination: for them, it is justified, while reasonable people disagree.
DeleteIt is normal behavior for an institution to obscure the fact that it's doing massive amounts of affirmative action and switch to claiming it's justified when called on it. This happened in the early 90s with racial affirmative action in law school admissions.
Delete