I don't know about his actions toward women. I do know that Schliesser has an overtly contemptful attitude toward people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He despises autists, and he also uses the word 'autist' as a slur against neurotypical people with poor social skills.
When the 'anti-ableist' New Consensus is led by an overt ableist, this tells you most of what you need to know.
Joshua Cohen just wrote a little post on bullshit v. execrable bullshit. When you compare the libertarians publishing again and again the very lines that (should, given a wider audience) embarrass them, when you compare even the handful of tweets that make RM a recurring source of discussion- to just "float" the idea that there is something wrong with Schliesser is certainly execrable.
Why was my comment about Schliesser's overt spite toward people with Autism Spectrum Disorder removed? I wasn't 'floating' anything, that is exactly what he does.
Did Eric Schliesser not publicly call for his colleagues to be purged and thrown out of their jobs? His conduct is unethical. He abuses his status and power to behave like a judge and a police officer, purging and inflicting suffering on others. And consider the deep irony, by comparing what was done to Baruch Spinoza by the judgmental bullies of his day.
Status and power? OK... but even that you feel this way about him is no evidence that he is secretly some kind of "creep" (whatever that means) to women. That part is just wishful. Very unlike reacting to people's own published/ tweeted words.
2:28, I am not the person calling him a "creep"; someone else is. I am the person referring to Schliesser's abuse of his power and status in publicly calling for purges and bullying of his colleagues.
People use "autistic" as pejorative to call some self-absorbed, or disconnected from the outside world. Tbh, I have no idea if Schliesser uses the term. I should have said that. I just meant that it's a really mean thing to do.
I've heard Schliesser say things like "I don't know if he's a f*ckin' autist or what."
I'm pretty sure there are more people here who heard him because he does it in public and he's not shy about it.
It's interesting how the New Consensus crusade for 'social skills' is implicitly an ableist campaign against people with Asperger and other socially impairing conditions.
The data on page 12 will be of special interest to some readers here. If I read correctly, this isn't confirmed placement data by gender, but it is something quite close (guessing someone's gender by their first name):
"62% of female candidates and 53% of male candidates eventually find permanent positions, with 49% of female candidates getting placed in those positions in their first year on the market, compared to 39% for male candidates."
And then they say young males shouldn't be annoyed? If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more.
I guess, if academia is a market of sorts, there could be more demand for a woman philosopher for the reasons of a. appealing to students b. making the field look less obviously sexist to please administration, parents, etc. I am surprised this ratio isn't greater, actually. But graduate schools probably do not have any reason to admit students on the basis of a. and b. And they are still placing mostly men, so...
Here's the most striking gender result, to my mind, quoting from the report (it isn't made clear what exactly is being reported to be "statistically significant"):
The intercept tells us that the odds for male participants to have a reported permanent academic placement within the first two years after graduation are statistically significant at .37, p < 0.001 when year of graduation is held constant. The odds for female participants to have a reported permanent academic placement are 1.85, p < 0.001 when graduation year is held constant
"If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more."
Ain't that the truth. There are some dummies taking up space that need to go emeritus, like yesterday. My tone might sound a bit satirical. Let me assure you, I am not joking.
"If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more."
I would love to see the mental gymnastics that would unfold if the New Sexists were actually forced to try to evade this nice little reductio with evidence and reason (rather than the standard mix of insults, threats, and nonsensical bluster).
I don't see in what sense 7:12's comment was a reductio. Is your point that taking away the jobs of older males is absurd? (Is that your absurdum?) I mean, it is, but not in the relevant way.
Yeah, I've just confused myself. Anyway, what did you mean?
An academic male in their mid 40s will have experienced only anti-male sexism, for two decades. Why should someone who has experienced two decades of discrimination have their job taken away?
10:50 the reasons that women might be more marketable than male philosophers are because there are so few of them. Why are there so few of them? What could it be? What could it be...
This is a conspiracy theory: a myth invented by political activists. Around 30% of women choose at age 18/19 to study philosophy. This is a reflection of their interests and aptitudes. This remains roughly stable as one progresses. The factual evidence shows that all discrimination in academic philosophy is anti-male, and this has been true for decades.
People seem to have strange ideas as to how long Affirmative Action has been operative in philosophy.
Certainly for the last 35 years it has played a major role in hiring. Almost certainly it started even before that -- back in the 70s, at least.
Activists always seem to want to pretend that just a few years back, things were horribly sexist or racist all around. Yet the fact is that these issues have been in the forefront of academic hiring for so long that virtually no one active today in the academy has been in their field in a time before such concerns weren't being seriously addressed.
It is rather telling that in some fields rather little progress has been made. 35 years or more of Affirmative Action hasn't turned the trick. Why anyone would expect that another umpteen years might is beyond baffling.
"things were horribly sexist or racist all around"
Quite. It is a conspiracy theory, promoted by political activists. No evidence has ever been given, and anyone who has worked in philosophy for a couple of decades knows this, having seen case after case after case of men being discriminated against. All the objective evidence points the opposite way: all discrimination in academic philosophy, at each level, is anti-male.
Well, hang on, I've been in the biz some 20 years, and frankly the amount of lobbying pro women has never been remotely as strong as in the last five-seven years or so.
Anti-male discrimination - special treatment, lower workload, special deals and favors, preferential hiring and promotion - has been the norm in all cases I have seen over the last two decades. True, in the last five to seven years, the activists have become pathological in their hysteria, conspiracy theories and witch hunts, which we've seen over and over again.
But even so, anti-male discrimination has been a constant factor of life in academic philosophy for as long as I can remember, particularly in hiring and workload matters. Women generally receive lower workloads, complain if asked to do what men do without question, are given more leave, and are routinely hired over better qualified men.
The thought was that the justifications typically offered for hiring female candidates over equally or better qualified male candidates would seem to justify - indeed, would seem to even more strongly justify - forcing older male professors into early retirement. Which is absurd. Therefore, etc.
Perhaps you think that there's a normatively relevant difference between the two policies that makes the second ultima facie unjust but not the first. If so, then let's hear it.
11:05 up at Daily Nous the two studies we have that might be related to why women don't study philosophy in greater numbers are linked. How in the world would you know better? What is wrong with the studies that you can see. Will you tell us? Otherwise, I think you are just making an explanation up, my friend.
I, anonymous feminist, don't think that older men should have their jobs taken away either. I've been using a lot of hyperbole for the last 3-4 hours. Carry on.
A more plausible explanation than Patriarchic Radiation is that applicants look at faculty profiles on department web pages before they apply to departments. It may then be the case either that female students are more likely to apply where they see faculty who have some identity-element in common with them, or that they see the kinds of things studied by female faculty and those correspond well with what female applicants are more likely to be interested in.
Two utterly bizarre hypotheses, of course, but while we're throwing around outlandish thought experiments....
Yeah, because women don't rape and assault people? Feminist philosopher Anna Stubblefield is accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a disabled man who is unable to give consent.
So explain why female rapists get the "it's complicated" excuses. Whereas a Nobel Prize winning scientist makes a joke and is witch hunted and life ruined?
It's been awhile, but when I was an undergrad applicant (both freshman and transfer) the number of women in a department never occurred to me (as a female). I was no more interested in a class because a woman was teaching it, and I never worried about being harassed by a male professor. From conversations I can recall about professors and class selection, these didn't seem to be major concerns for others I knew, either. We mostly worried about topic, scheduling, and whether or not someone was known to be fair/clear or unfair/confusing.
By the end I had noticed that I preferred male professors because they tended to be more laidback, but that is another matter. (I never knew if my female professors were less laidback from the start or if they were made that way by academia.)
Anyway, as an applicant, I cared about location, size/type of school, and rankings. Gender didn't come into play until I got there and encountered modern feminism with its herstory months and weird spellings intended to stick it to the patriarchy. ("We put the y in womyn because fuck men, right? No, not literally! Haha.")
So I subconsciously gravitated towards departments with certain gender ratios, despite never looking up how many men or women were teaching in a specific department? You seem to be forgetting that many undergrad applicants do not know what their majors will be. I certainly didn't.
(In the US, that is. I know other countries ask that their new university students bring a little more direction with them.)
7.46: Looks like you missed the memo; this mantra doesn't work any more. Read. Try reading very recent research on social psychology in general and stereotype threat in particular.
"ARG comments, on the swarm. CDJ data is a major trigger for the ARG"
Why do you think that only men deserve to be attacked by bees, 10:43? Is it because you love Stubblefield so much? Learn science at kindergarten, which you need to go back to. Idiot.
Presumably, the null hypothesis here (for being female) is that the odds ratio for being female is 1.0. Since the p is reported as being <0.000, and, more precisely, the z value is 3.64, the likelihood that the null hypothesis is true is basically infinitesimal. Put another way, it's essentially impossible that females don't have a higher probability of having been hired for a permanent position.
Oh, I forgot I was 8:17. Right, but what is the idea of the significance claims and numbers for men and women separately? What does this mean:
"the odds for male participants to have a reported permanent academic placement within the first two years after graduation are statistically significant at .37, p < 0.001"
genderandprestige blogger analysed the previous CDJ data six months ago, and got the right answers - pro-female bias in philosophy job hiring. Naturally, the response to the evidence, from the Daily Whine and the tin foil feminists, was silence.
There is so much information missing though, about those female candidates. That recent study on women in STEM showed only at the highest level of performance were women favored. The majority of competition is from other men, too. No sour grapes toward them? How do you know why they were favored for the job?
Indeed, while feminist commenter "babygirl" makes the claim "I see no reason to have this expectation, unless we think that the number of publications is the measure of a quality of a candidate."
Now the 2012 and 2013 hiring data itself showed, - "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much." - "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." - "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."
When prestige was included, the gender bias was even more pronounced. Classifying the applicants as "alpha" and "beta" according to Leiter prestige, the publication rates amongst those hired in 2012 and 2013 were
So, the most privileged females published at only one third of the rate as the least privileged males.
But "babygirl" is right. Current political ideology being as it is, the publication record of an academic is not a "measure of a candidate". The evidence shows that the correct measure is "being a privileged women". If the candidate satisfies that crucial "measure of quality", the candidate is hired, even if the less privileged male competitor has twice or three times as many publications.
I find it hilarious that for years idiots have been insisting that, absent so-called 'objective' evidence, one was unjustified in stating what anyone with a room-temperature IQ could already see what was plainly there to be seen: comparatively unqualified women are routinely hired over men.
What happens now that the evidence is in?
These same idiots now shift the goal posts, either by simply ignoring the evidence that is finally in, or else by denying that things like publications should matter in hiring decisions.
You have to love this!
As Kierkegaard said, 'There's nothing the world loves more than a subtle hypocrisy.'
Speaking of critical thinking, I don't think anyone was suggesting that women don't have a bump up in virtue of being women. Someone merely suggested that "number of publications" as a kind of "control variable" is idiotic, since the quality and desirability of publications varies considerably, and so a crude measure like number of pubs shows absolutely nothing, "controls" for absolutely nothing. It's about as relevant to the hiring data as height (which might also correlate in certain ways with gender, and have some significant correlations with other factors, none of them independently interesting)
that "mere suggestion" is actually what's idiotic. "it varies a bit so let's not measure it, it must be as unrelated as [something really unrelated" - no, actually, as EVERYBODY knows, it's actually taken into account in hiring decisions, so it's per se useful information, and the gender disparity is per se interesting. your point about variability just shows that it's not a knock-down case (i.e. if you demonstrate that the articles by the women hired are ACTUALLY in more prestigious journals, not just point out that they MIGHT be, you will have offered an alternate explanation of the data)
people here seem completely unwilling to understand the difference between abductive and deductive reasoning. next time you think you have a point to make, i hope you instead realize that you're not pointing out any sort of subtlety others have missed, you're just kind of slow intellectually. thanks.
The actual gender disparity in publication rates amongst those hired for higher quality journals is explicitly stated above. Amongst those hired, men publish at roughly three times the rate women do in higher quality journals:
"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."
How is publication taken into account? In my own department I can think of several times where a (male) candidate was ranked more highly despite having zero publications (the appeal was always personality and being trained by someone important at a top school). This is in a market where many applicants have 6-8 major publications.
2:34, don't question the reigning orthodoxy here! Subtleties like the ones you are pointing to have no place in this discussion, which centers around how things are maximally bad for all males because of the females.
You are presented with objective data covering job hiring in 2012 and 2013, listed by 1:03. How is this an "orthodoxy"? The response at the ideologically driven blogs is silence.
The point of the anecdote is that you have no possible way of knowing the role publications play in hiring. Given how much you are just making up, I could take the same data and push the line that a percentage of men in philosophy have personality defects that make them difficult to hire. It's just as easy as what you are doing. Stick to the data and you won't be able to assume "the role publications play in hiring."
The point of the data that you wish to ignore is to present you with objective evidence concerning the gender disparity in publication counts amongst those hired. You may ignore this data if you wish, but it won't go away.
You're quite right about the low IQ of those who argue that average publication rate means nothing as to the average quality of the candidate. Always the argument is some stupid counterexample that misunderstands the point of statistical inference at all.
It has always struck me as a basic defect in the training of philosophers that they always learn some deductive logic, but almost never any statistics. Yet just about everything interesting that we learn about the real world must be learned via statistical inference, not deductive inference. If you're going to understand and talk about knowledge, I don't know how you can do it without some sense of statistical inference.
One spends over half one's time on boards like this explaining to ignoramuses how statistical inferences work, and what statistically couched statements mean.
In recent years I've thought more and more that the low regard for the study of math in general, and statistics in particular, is more detrimental to our (the population's) overall well-being than people realize. The aversion to numbers is so extreme that I could sit in a cafe doing basic arithmetic, and someone would see it and exclaim, "Math is so hard! You must be really smart. I couldn't do that."
The "I couldn't do that" is absolute nonsense. I would say it's an excuse, but I think they believe it. And that's sad. 100% of people I've surveyed think it's sad.
2:50 --- we're discussing what this data means. Women get a bump up. Some are making the *additional* suggestion that female candidates are, on average, of lower quality than male candidates (this is the upshot of Lemoine's suggestion on DN) as evidenced by the fact that they publish less before getting hired. I, and others, like babygirl on DN) are taking issue with this suggestion. They might publish less, on average, because they are on the market for less time. They might publish less because they tend to be in subfields where publishing early is not expected or encouraged. They might publish less for a number of reasons. Saying this is not taking issue with the data or denying that women get a leg up. It's not some fallacy in statistical reasoning. It's simply pointing out that the data doesn't justify the inference that Lemoine is making, that if women publish less, this is reason to assume that they have an *additional* bump, beyond the one indicated in the data (which is significant!).
Oh sorry, what is the relationship between publication rate and the quality of the candidate? And where is the data that shows schools agree with you on this?
Look, 3:27, if you are going to argue that one can find hypotheses whereby it turns out that the women who are hired might not actually be of lower quality than the men, then, of course, one can do so. But, again, and again, these are hypotheses introduced not because they have any independent plausibility or evidence, but because they save one's thesis.
And it's not even clear what kind of sense they might make. Take the idea that women publish less because they are hired earlier. To begin with, of course, there is no independent evidence that that is so. But consider the idea on its own terms. Are we supposed to believe that, on the one hand, philosophy departments prefer women so strongly that they are willing to hire them earlier, but that they nonetheless are every bit as stringent regarding their quality as philosophers as they are with men? Why would this preference not be explained most naturally by relaxation of standards more generally? Why isn't the most reasonable interpretation of the data that philosophy departments of course, as they do in tenure considerations, consider publications (other things being equal!) as a factor in determining the desirability of a candidate, and as sign that the candidate will generate more publications and add to the prestige of the department? Again, this a statistical claim as to whether candidates are more desirable and of higher quality if they have more publications. If women are hired despite their relative lack of publications at an earlier stage than men, then that, on any natural interpretation of the data, is a sign that departments are willing to overlook the lack of a publication record and plunk down for a woman. You need to come up with more than some quick rejoinder as to why women are hired with fewer publications--you need to have an overall account that makes some socio-cultural sense.
And what is the evidence that it's harder for women to publish in the subfields to which they mostly gravitate? Obviously, more women are to be found in moral philosophy and history of philosophy than in other subfields. Is there any plausibility to the idea that it's harder to get a publication in those subfields -- especially when often it feminist oriented material that they publish?
Early on, it was suggested that women may not publish as much as men generally, but they might do so in prestige publications. That, of course, was shot down by the evidence, when it was finally introduced and considered.
No doubt these other hypotheses would likewise fall once further data is introduced, for the simple reason that they make no independent sense.
You have no overall account of why women might be obviously preferred for hire yet be every bit as desirable a candidate as men. You are simply making up ad hoc hypotheses that save the only thesis you seem to able to entertain.
I am really just trying to point out what we can't know yet. I am guessing that the data you need would actually show that Departments are regularly willing to plunk down for candidates they like, be they male or female. You are just assuming a better published person is more desirable candidate (all things equal- and I can easily imagine the count done carefully so that someone with 60 articles in business ethics is out). I know there is this interest in seeing the academic market as a meritocracy, but there all sorts of roles professors play. This is where "all things equal" needs content. If you cannot imagine that a Department might, in the face of the the number and quality of candidates in a standard search, spend their time debating whether candidates would be a good fit for the Dept. and school, then I just don't think you are imagining what goes on in a search (the make or break it point is in the interview/s). If number of top publications were all that made male candidates desirable, you realize how easy the work of hiring would be? If you find that Departments simply hire the best published male candidates, that would be helpful.
You're coming up with still another statistically clueless account. Do you even grasp the concept of "other things being equal" here? Sure, departments consider many factors -- but, other things being equal, will, generally prefer candidates with more publications, and more publications in prestige journals. This is by far the most natural read of the statistics.
Again, you need an overarching account that puts together all the data we see, and comports with obvious motivations departments and human beings have.
The account I offer is simplicity itself, and comports exactly with obvious motivations: departments, and individuals within them, very much want to hire women. To do so, they will go to considerable distance to relax standards.
That hypothetical motivation explains everything we see to a T.
You can come up with no overarching picture that makes any coherent sense.
3:27 here, in response to 5:19 --- I'm not advancing any particular hypothesis, so I don't have the burden to make it plausible. I'm saying WE DON'T KNOW why the average pub rate of hired women is lower than that of men. I proposed a number of hypotheses, saying that any one of them is just as plausible as the hypothesis that they are weaker candidates. Again, I'm *not* saying that they don't have a bump up. I think they clearly do, I think the data shows that, and apart from some implausible claim like "women are just better at philosophy than men" the only plausible explanation seems to be bias in their favor. BUT I AM taking issue with Lemoine's claim that when we take into account number of publications, women have a greater bump up, since it rests on the assumption that number of publications is a good predictor of a candidate's quality (and thus that lower pubs = lower quality, so women are, on average, less qualified applicants), and that this is the best explanation of what's going on. The point is just that we don't know what's going on.
By subfields, I simply meant that one should expect someone in metaphysics or epistemology to have a few publications in hand leaving graduate school, or at least a few in the works. Not so for historical disciplines, for a variety of reasons. Shit, I could publish something in metaphysics if you gave me 3 months. I could not publish anything in ancient philosophy, because I don't know Greek and I haven't read the massive body of secondary material, let alone mastered it, which is required for pubs in ancient. So if there is a higher percentage of women in ancient phil as compared to metaphysics, this might skew the publication data. And, from my own experience of the gender breakdown of various subfields, it seems plausible to me that this is the case. Of course, I haven't done a study, so I don't know that this is the case.
Similarly with time on the market -- one would expect a person who has been on the market for longer to have more publications, right? Am I losing my mind here? I've already said many times that there is a bias in favor of women which leads to them getting hired earlier and more often. I think saying it's MORE than the 85% bump pointed to in the data is absurd. THIS IS WHAT LEMOINE IS SAYING, that the average female candidate is less qualified than the average male candidate, and so it's MORE than 85%, which would be the bump if we just assume that the spread of quality among genders is even. I think you might be taking me to say that I don't think there is a bias. I never said that. I don't believe that. Of course, I haven't done a study here either, but it would be interesting to see if number of pubs as a factor disappears if one controls for years on the market. It seems plausible that it might, yeah? Again, just a hypothesis, but I think a more plausible one than "men are just better than women, and publish more before they get jobs BECAUSE they are better."
It seems to me that the big problem is this: it's really not clear whether, and to what extent, publications do (or should) boost one's chances on the job market. Because here's what we don't know: the publication rates of those who *don't* get jobs.
Compare to placement data, where we do know that information: you can go onto departmental websites and work out, for example, that 9/10 people who graduate from Fancy Private U get jobs, but only 2/10 people from State School get jobs.
And if we knew, for example, that 9/10 people with 2 publications got jobs and 2/10 people with 0 pubs got jobs, then we would know that having more pubs increases your chances of getting a job, But if it were the case that 5/10 people with 2 pubs got jobs and 5/10 people with 0 pubs got jobs, then we would know that there wasn't any correlation between no. of pubs and chances of getting a job. And if there isn't any such correlation, then it's not clear why the differences publication rates of male and female graduates shows anything important at all.
Contrary to what babygirl is saying, it would be quite useful to see a regression with number of publications, gender, and status of PhD institution as parameters. Then we would know the answers to at least some of the questions being raised. I don't know why babygirl is against this. The reasons given don't make any sense to me.
Now that the pro-female bias has become hard to deny, some people have started to pretend that it's important for philosophers to have a 'good personality' (implying that women have better personalities than men). But it's hard to think of any great philosophers who would have won a high school popularity contest.
If we want philosophers to have 'great personalities' then we want to replace philosophy with something else. Philosophy is done by nerds.
Anne Jacobson is in fine form again on FP with a post asking whether we should be watching a panda give birth, and then two updates, the first of which observes that one of the newborns has died, while the second seems to suggest that a mouse may have had something to do with the death:
i feel so bad for her every time she posts anything. is this a "grandma on the internet" sort of thing and we should just be happy it isn't in all caps? berkeley and oxford are good schools; did something happen to her?
Wallace: "...a lot of these “not-statistically-significant” M/F gaps tend to point in the same direction, which can be significant in of itself." The wall of hypocrisy is starting to show some cracks.
Bias in academic philosophy is anti-male. Preferential treatment in academic philosophy is pro-female. All discrimination in academic philosophy is aimed against men. All false accusations are aimed at men. The witch hunts and smear campaigns are directed against men - the sole exception being Laura Kipnis, a feminist cultural critic, who merely wrote an essay disagreeing with feminist hysteria and who was then subjected to feminist hysteria and frivolous attempts to prosecute her under Title IX.
The actions of recent feminists - their conspiracy theories, witch hunts, purges, bullying and smear campaigns - will be judged harshly by future historians.
The various smear campaigns and witch hunts have been run by feminists. Do you dispute this? Who ran the smear campaign against Tim Hunt? A secret cabal of MRA's? Who ran the campaign against Laura Kipnis? A secret cabal of MRAs?
Nobody is slaughtering anyone, and this site is sadly plagued by a bunch of quasi-MRA loons, but still, it's abundantly clear that there is a feminist lobby group that is taking advantage of Title IX paranoia and other such factors to gain all sorts of advantages.
"this site is sadly plagued by a bunch of quasi-MRA loons"
Ah - the conspiracy theory yet again. How does objecting to smear campaigns and witch hunts make someone a "quasi-MRA loon"? Explain. How was the witch hunt against Tim Hunt connected to "Title IX"? Explain.
Remember: the senior women lobbying for more posts to go to junior women are building their own support base, and creating a climate were their own careers will benefit enormously in terms of conference/publication invites, citations, promotion, and so on.
4:24 thinks a UK scientist, Tim Hunt, was witch hunted by a UCL feminist, because of Title IX. Disagree with this geographically incoherent nonsense and the response is a conspiracy theory about "quasi-MRA loons".
4:53, if you don't think that the US climate contributes to the overall anti-men current in global English-speaking academia then I don't know what to tell you.
The problem with wanting fewer women in philosophy is that the public is no longer interested in male-domination of any field. Tim Hunt made the public (that's men and women alike) aghast when they had no idea what work he did. Like it or not, people believe sexism against women is pervasive and wrong. All types of people. The public. So an all-male philosophy department is not going to be liked by the most conservative dads you can imagine, etc.
4:56, if somewhere in your mind you believe that, for example, Louise Mensch, multiple Nobel Prize winners, the female Master of Churchill College and many others are all "quasi-MRA loons", then you are suffering from conspiracist paranoia and need to see a doctor.
Nobody wants fewer women in philosophy. People just don't want to be unemployed because someone thought they'd better hire a woman because of made up discrimination claims.
"Like it or not, people believe sexism against women is pervasive and wrong."
Eh? Do you think your lies are acceptable? Tim Hunt did nothing wrong and was subjected to a smear campaign of lies, fabricated by a couple of feminists, and which were then contradicted by multiple witnesses.
5: 13 You are missing the point, the smear campaign worked because of what I explained in 4: 57. It would not work if the public were not going to react as they did.
Eh, 5:19? You seem delusional. You imagine someone agrees with sexism? Is that actually your point? Who, exactly? No one agrees with that. It's just a conspiracy theory.
If you read in any detail of what took place in the smear campaign against Tim Hunt, what's most disgusting is the absolute contempt in which its perpetrators hold the truth, even though they are journalists (and one particularly absurd figure who was a major player in something called "Retraction Watch", devoted to uncovering the fraud of others).
They simply lied again and again, and when called on the lies, made up more lies to cover them.
These are the sort of moral standards to which the SJW crowd hold themselves.
"Wallace: "...a lot of these “not-statistically-significant” M/F gaps tend to point in the same direction, which can be significant in of itself." The wall of hypocrisy is starting to show some cracks."
I have no idea what this is intended to mean. But the statistical point I was making was just this: if I have N comparisons between X and Y (or, in this case, M and F), and the null hypothesis is that X and Y don't differ except through random noise, then the probability that X is greater than Y in all N comparisons is 2^-N. So if N is reasonably large and all the indicators point in the same direction, you can reject the null hypothesis at quite a high statistical-significance level even if the individual differences aren't significant on a case-by-case basis.
I think the point was just that women can perform less well in seminars (and any other quality indicators) and still get hired over men, as the data indicates.
In some cases, yes it is. I'm sorry that people are trying to correct for sexism and you're not getting your dream jobs.
Except I'm not that sorry, because I'm a white person, and I don't get all bent out of shape when attempts to correct racism work against me. I acknowledge that it's in everyone's interest in the long run (including mine), and that in the short term, it's actually kinda fair.
Here's a data point for you, 5:37: "the proportion of women in the placement data (28% in this subset) is smaller than I would have expected, given other data on women graduates (31% in 2011 according to one source)"
The fact that the proportion of women hired matches the proportion of women graduating suggests that if there are explicit biases in favor of women in the hiring process, these are correcting for (rather than over-correcting for) sexism.
That is exactly the kind of data point you were after, 5:50. Because given the fact that hiring rates match graduation rates, there are two hypotheses: either women who are interested and dedicated enough to finish graduate school are inherently less talented than men who do likewise, and the parity in placement and graduation is evidence that women are being hired disproportionately to their talent, or women who finish are just as talented as the men, and the data on hiring, combined with evidence that universities have policies to explicitly favor women in hiring, is evidence that these explicit biases in favor are correcting for (rather than over-correcting for) biases against.
There is some evidence, both in terms of data and anecdotally, of explicit biases in favor of female candidates at the hiring stage in philosophy, yes?
However, the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women (28% vs 31%, but as pointed out on DN, given small total numbers this is probably within margin of error)
So either the explicit biases in favor of women are in fact correcting, and correcting pretty accurately, for biases (whether explicit or implicit) against women.
Or, the women who graduate are on average inherently less talented than the men who graduate. What the parity in hiring numbers shows, then, is that despite being inherently less talented women are being hired at the same rate as men.
"However, the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women"
So? The evidence shows that, amongst those hired, men perform on average twice as well as females hired on publications (and three times as well wrt to high quality journals).
The two further statements you make do not make any sense.
Hm, I think your numbers might be off. We know that the odds of a woman being hired within two years of graduating is much greater than the odds of a man being hired. About 85% higher. How is that consistent with biases in favor of and against women somehow balancing out? If they balanced out, wouldn't the odds be the same for men and for women?
I understand that there are various possible explanations for the difference in odds. It's just that the data do not seem to show two trends that cancel each other out.
Hi 5:50, as Wallace points out at DN, the numbers you point to are not statistically significant. But the increased odds for women getting jobs is 85%, which is very significant. The odds of women who are on the market for the first time getting a job is even higher.
What I don't understand is how that can be consistent with the proportion of women hired being the same as the proportion graduating.
"The evidence shows that, amongst those hired, men perform on average twice as well as females hired on publications (and three times as well wrt to high quality journals)."
Right, and this fact, combined with the fact that the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women, is evidence that there is explicit bias in favor of women.
The question is whether this explicit bias in favor of women is correcting for bias against women, or not.
The fact that with explicit bias we see parity in hiring and graduating numbers is evidence in favor of the claim that the explicit bias we see in favor of women is correcting for bias against women. And so is evidence for the existence of bias against women, which is exactly what you wanted.
Think about it this way: imagine that there were none of the explicit biases in favor of women that we hear about. The numbers of women being hired would likely drop, right? So women would be being hired in a rate lower than their proportion in the group of graduates. And it seems like this would be evidence of unfairness, unless we have reason to think that women who graduate in philosophy are on average less talented than men who graduate in philosophy. But we have no reason to think this.
"The question is whether this explicit bias in favor of women is correcting for bias against women, or not."
Eh? What "bias against women" do you mean? There is no evidence for that. It's like feminism is a fixed immutable ideology inside your mind, and cannot be removed by critical thinking. So, it's "true" - even if all the evidence shows it is false.
The evidence shows that the academic performance of females drops off, to around 50% of that of men. Therefore, in a meritocracy, we would expect fewer females to be hired amongst the corpus. However, they are hired, being held to lower expectations. This implies prejudice against men.
The rest of your comment doesn't make sense. You appear to believe that the existence of prejudice against men implies the existence of prejudice against women? And you believe this despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever.
7:41, I've explained this to you multiple times now. You've both failed to understand and been really rude about your failure to understand. I am 'writing in English', your claims about what my 'fixed immutable ideology' and my lack of critical thinking skills are baseless, and I have clearly explained multiple times that I do not think merely that the 'existence of prejudice against men implies the existence of prejudice against women'. The question is whether evidence of explicit bias in favor of women in one particular respect, combined with other facts, gives us reason to think there are also other biases - possibly implicit - against women. Futher the evidence does *not* show that the 'academic performance' of women drops off. The evidence is limited to publishing, which is hardly evidence of a person's academic performance as a whole, which is what you would need to support your claim.
It's really quite simple: unless we have reason to believe that the women who graduate in philosophy are inherently less talented than the men who graduate, we should expect women to be hired in proportion to their numbers. Women are being hired in proportion to their numbers. But we also have evidence of explicit bias in favor of women. These two facts combined are evidence of bias against women.
Maybe an analogy will help: if you have to put a brick on one end of the scale in order to keep it level, that's evidence that there is something heavy on the other end, even if you don't know exactly what.
7:54, "unless we have reason to believe that the women who graduate in philosophy are inherently less talented than the men who graduate ..."
The objective data shows that men outperform women. You pretend the data doesn't exist. It does and is listed above. The evidence shows, amongst the whole corpus of those hired from no prior position in 2012 and 2013:
1. "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much." 2. "The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8." 3. "The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5." 4. ".... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men." 5. "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."
No, 8:20: what we have is (weak) reason to believe that women are, on paper, less *qualified* than men who graduate. This is not the same as less talented. And the point of affirmative actions is often to try and select for talent rather than qualifications, on the basis that merely selecting for qualifications simply reproduces the problems of the past.
Think about it this way: if you thought that qualifications were a reliable, unbiased indication of merit,desert and talent, then you would not advocate for any form of affirmative action. So merely pointing out that affirmative action in favor of women has the result that women who are on paper less qualified have an easier time getting hired than men does not show that there is bias against men - to assume this begs the question against the affirmative action advocate.
So what we do have is a reason to believe that women who graduate are on average less qualified on paper than men who graduate. But we do not have evidence that women who graduate are less talented. The absence of this evidence, combined with the fact that hiring rates are proportional, is reason to believe that the explicit biases are in fact balancing things out (and so are not evidence of all-things considered bias against men).
8:18, if you can't understand something, it doesn't help to just repeat lies and data. I am not 'pretending the data doesn't exist', in fact almost every single comment I have made mentions the evidence of explicit bias. The comment *directly* above yours mentions the evidence about publishing in particular.
We have independent reason to believe it. I did not mean that the reasons were here in this data set. Studies on testosterone, the historical record, etc. provide some prima facie evidence. (I like how you say "on paper". Where else would the qualifications be?)
You are making affirmative action advocacy out to be more extreme than it has to be. In fact, there are several good reasons to favor affirmative action even if one does not share your very radical view about talent that can never be represented by qualifications because of "the problems of the past" or whatever. (Whether they're good enough is a question I don't want to get into. But they're there.)
Here is a question for you. We have metrics - what you call "qualifications" - for determining what you call an individual's "talent". You suggest that all of these systematically underrate women. Why all of them? Will metrics like, say, publishing really good papers after tenure, making a contribution to the field, etc. evade this systematic underrating, or will it never end? When will this hidden "talent" start to show?
Affirmative action is illegal. It is also considered immoral by everyone I have ever spoken to. Do you have someone in mind who agrees with this illegal and immoral practice?
"if one does not share your very radical view about talent that can never be represented by qualifications because of "the problems of the past" or whatever"
I did not claim any such thing.
"You suggest that all of these systematically underrate women. Why all of them?"
9:27, there might be evidence which would lead us to believe that on average, men might be more talented than women. But the evidence you point to (testosterone or whatever) would have to be very strong such that we should expect that when people already self-select into a group, and that group is 30% women and 70% men, (as opposed to, for example, 50/50) it is till true that *of that group* the average man is more talented than the average woman.
I'm convinced by 5:50's admirably clear (and surprisingly patient, given the obnoxiousness of some replies) explanation.
But for those who aren't: even if 5:50's wrong, why assume the explanation is that women in the field are less *talented*? Believing as you do (I do not) that there is a very strong bias in favor of women, wouldn't another plausible explanation be that if departments have such a bias, they are likely anxious to hire and retain women. So they're less demanding of them overall, and there's less pressure for women to publish? If that were the reason, it would tell us absolutely nothing about talent.
Of course, I think this is still not the correct explanation, but I think it's telling that so many on this board are immediately and tenaciously drawn to the most obnoxious one, when there are somewhat more innocuous ones available.
Instead of your obnoxious arrogance, 5:35, perhaps you can explain why observable male outperformance of women, along with observable anti-male bias, is evidence of unobservable anti-female bias?
Who *assumed* that was the explanation? Again, the difference between deductive and abductive reasoning is apparently just too much for some of you. Note also that abductive reasoning is not inference to the least "obnoxious" or most "innocuous" explanation. It is simply inference to the best explanation. Concerns like the ones I put in scare quotes, which I have to think of as political concerns, have no real place there.
There is a lot of very sloppy thinking going on in this thread. For example, we hear that affirmative action is "an attempt at a correction". No doubt. But the fact that affirmative action is intended that way does not necessarily mean everyone was right that there was much to be corrected for in the first place, and if there wasn't, affirmative action itself will lead to a pool where women are, on average, less talented. This has almost unquestionably happened with affirmative action in other areas, and yet the same arguments pop back up again and again, as though the conversation has never taken place before. This is, of course, not a decisive argument against affirmative action, because there are several independent rationales for the policy. For example, black law students, who do far worse on the LSAT, end up doing far worse grade-wise in law school, too, but this is not a crushing blow against affirmative action in law school admissions. Note too that black law students already received affirmative action in college admissions and will receive it again in the job market (and yet again when promotion and partnership decisions are made). The "corrections" affirmative action makes seem never quite to take hold. I'd be interested in hearing the views of some of the commentators here on that fact. If affirmative action is an efficacious corrective policy, why must it be reapplied at every level of a profession?
Someone earlier in this thread distinguished talent and qualifications. Surely if they are able to make that distinction they will be able to suggest alternative qualifications which would better capture talent, or at least note where in his or her career a philosopher will start to do things uncorrelated with the qualifications in question.
"There is a lot of very sloppy thinking going on in this thread."
Indeed. In the face of objective evidence that men hired have outperformed women hired, the social justice warriors above repeat their mantra - despite the complete absence of evidence. And the evidence we have of observable anti-male bias is not, somehow, evidence of unobservable anti-female bias.
Above there is a repeated evidence-free assertion of anti-male bias being a "correction". This simply begs the question and assumes, without evidence, that there is something to be "corrected". This needs to be shown with evidence, and not merely asserted on the basis of ideology. There is not something to be "corrected" -- even if people have been successfully indoctrinated to believe this falsehood. It is ideology.
6:13, if someone merely deviates one tiny bit from the feminist ideology, using objective evidence, you respond with childish insults. This is black-and-white thinking. Do you think that a female scientist, like Dame Athene Donald, Master of Churchill College Cambridge, is a "loon"?
Look, doods. The SJWs see sexism against women under every rock. You guys see sexism against men under every rock. You both accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being on the opposite team.
But most of us don't agree with either of you, and think both the bros and the SJWs are paranoid loons. So no, 6:32, I don't think Athene Donald's a loon, I think people on this board who require you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons. Just like the loons on the other boards who require you sign every item on their SJW manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons. (For example, I'm already on their naughty list my "disablist" or "anti-birdist" pejorative use of "loon.")
Now, even if you are right, you and the SJWs the ones seeing people out to get them everywhere, not the rest of us. So how "tinfoil hat" and "paranoid" can be your favorite go-to insults is really pretty bewildering.
But then it's not so bewildering, is it? Since it's the likely response you'll raise, you deflect it by using it first.
"So no, 6:32, I don't think Athene Donald's a loon, I think people on this board who require you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons."
Can you give a citation, 7:12, for your loony paranoid claim that someone "requires you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto"? And why is Athene Donald the "unabomber", you weirdo?
Eh? 7:01 made the paranoid and bonkers claim that someone "requires you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto". This is tinfoil hat paranoia. The Athene Donald remark was a joke, intended to rile up 7:01. It had its desired effect - as it is easy to stir the emotions of SJWs, who cannot bear to be challenged.
In point of fact, Prof Athene Donald, a female physicist, spoke out against the SJW witch hunt of Prof Tim Hunt. Repeated paranoid tantrums, comparing a prominent female scientist to the "unabomber", do not help the SJW cause a tiny bit. It makes them look like childish, paranoid loons.
Athene Donald: good. Butt Hurt Bros in this thread: bad.
"deviating one tiny bit from the feminist ideology" (6:32): good. endorsing the opposite ideology of the Butt Hurt Bros: bad.
Man, I wish I'd gotten to be the female philosophy professor who gave these guys a B+ one time when they were undergrads, launching their lifelong crusades. Would have been fun.
We also need a handy term like "Social Justice Warrior" to identify these guys, to distinguish reasonable skeptics of extreme feminism from extremists, just as SJW distinguishes a narrow, particularly rabid form of neo-leftism.
No one here, 7:01, advocates the "opposite ideology", you paranoid loon. If you imagine someone is "requiring you to sign a unabomber manifesto", this makes you sound paranoid and bonkers. This is why you were ridiculed. The butt hurt is all yours.
It's fairly amazing to see the contortions feminists will go through to defend their turf here.
I don't see how one can argue that women aren't on average distinctly less qualified than men when hired for their positions -- the publication record demonstrates this. But then they retreat to the position that, nonetheless, women are every bit the equal in terms of "talent" as men, and that they are selected for "talent" rather than "qualifications". But what does this even mean, and why might we have reason to believe such a thing in any case?
It is hardly as if there exists some well known set of criteria for "talent" independent of "qualifications". "Talent" can't be treated as some kind of ineffable trait to which hirers have access, which is not reflected in qualifications. When departments or people make decisions about degrees of talent, "qualifications" would naturally play a major role in such determinations. Qualifications are the best objective index of talent, especially given that letters of reference, a quick subjective impression based on an interview, etc., are notoriously unreliable.
Moreover, suppose someone is seeking a woman to fill a position and is willing to relax the need for "qualifications". What reason is there to believe that, nonetheless, he or she is not willing to relax the need for "talent"? In fact, of course, any purported independent notion of "talent" turns out to be almost purely subjective and not subject to falsification--and is thus the easiest thing to fudge if one is seeking to achieve the desired end of hiring a woman.
Indeed, if one were to declare that it is "talent" that departments seek in the case of women over men, one might look for some kind of objective marker of "talent", and then predict that women, at least on that marker, would do as well as men. One such might be the publication of articles in prestige journals. But it turns out that on that score, men are if anything only more dominant, not less -- suggesting that they are only more talented than one might otherwise conclude.
One further point is that if departments seek "talent" instead of qualifications for women, and, supposedly, apply some set of criteria to do so, why couldn't the same new criteria be applied to men, resulting in an even more "talented" group of men for hire? How does this purported shift to a new set of criteria change anything fundamental as to the level of talent present in the overall group of women vs. the group of men?
The real fundamental issue here is: why are women, in fact, so much less qualified as a group than men? They come to the job market in numbers proportional to their numbers in grad school, but they are well less qualified than the men when they do. Nonetheless, they fare at least as well as men in being hired. But the question remains: why are they relatively so unqualified? Why isn't the natural explanation that they are less talented or less hard working?
There's finally just the point that publication is more than an indication of talent; it is a good index of the perseverance to get things published. Obviously, departments care about this as well. Why believe they are willing to relax standards for signs of perseverance, but not for "talent"?
8:31, I think you're reading too much into that. I meant only: the SJWs think there's pervasive bias against women in the profession, and the BHBs think the opposite: there's pervasive bias against men in the profession.
If you object to the term "ideology", fine, but keep in mind that an ideology can still be true. In the loose pejorative sense, it's a belief, true or not, held dogmatically with an oversensitivity to disagreement or criticism. In the narrower pejorative sense, it's a motivated belief, such as a belief convenient for reasons of class and economic position.
I think both apply, but I'll give you an example of oversensitivity to disagreement.
At 5:35, I gave an alternative explanation of the publication difference that was *consistent* with the BHB's view that there's anti-male bias. It was a view *on their side,* but more moderate than the claim that talent is the explanation.
In response to suggesting a moderate version of their own view, the BHBs overreactd. 5:42 demanded proof of anti-female bias, even though I'd offered a view that assumed anti-male bias. 5:56 whined about the use of the casual use of the word "assumed", then ignored the alternate explanation rather than arguing against it.
These were reactions to someone offering a view that *agreed* with their basic view.
And that's exactly what happens when you ever so slightly disagree with the SJWs, too. They get way too agitated, they ignore the criticisms, and they repeat the same evidence and arguments without responding to the way the critic's have directly address the evidence and arguments they keep repeating.
Ideology.
The unabomber comparison was a silly joke, silly. Ideologues hate jokes.
[P.S. Dammit, I knew they'd pull this shit eventually! Prove you're not a robot wants me to identify sandwiches. A croissantwich is arguably a sandwich. But a bagel with meat is not a sandwich. No, just no.]
Of course it's amazing, 9:17. The ideological level of resistance to evidence is a shock. The reason one can't even say the obvious explanation - here, of the measured outperformance of women by men - is that it's verboten, illegal. Does not compute. Doesn't fit the narrative.
State the evidence and then, as we see above, the paranoia nuts appear, like 7:01, who yabbers on with conspiracy theories about imaginary "butt hurt", and an imaginary "unabomber manifesto", and an imaginary "undergrad" who got an imaginary "B+" from an imaginary "female philosopher professor". It's paranoid lunacy.
I'd like to see the new and improved philosophymetablog do a parody of a Metametablog thread composed entirely of images of tin foil and lions, with all-caps brightly colored text "PARANOID!" "ROAR!," and so on.
Kudos to Jennings: initially she tried to deny that her results showed a pro female bias, now that there's more evidence in the same direction she has stopped denying it. That's intellectual honesty.
1:03 above listed the data from CDJ's previous hiring spreadsheet for 2012 and 2013. For example, "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much" and ".... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men" and "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."
Did Jennings comment on why the statistics show that men outperform women? Also, if the numbers hired are proportionate to those who graduate, this is even further evidence that the outperformance of women by men is balanced by strong pro-female bias.
Seriously, again. Hiring of men would be very different if all someone cared for in a colleague was how many publications he had in top journals. It's not an attempt to derail your "strong pro-female bias" (this is subconscious? This is something most philosophers deny they have, but they are wrong?) thesis. Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee? There are so many publications in top journals that this becomes the "noise." You cannot just say "performance" in philosophy is number of publications, because people do not simply get hired on that basis. You are missing the data that shows the men with the most/ best publications get the job over other men.
I literally have to remind myself that I just assume men are "smarter" on about a weekly basis. It has been helpful to find that young men now writing in the same kind loopy handwriting style I used to associate with just women. It is really hard for me to believe other people have some general pro-woman bias when it comes to talent in philosophy. I can readily understand wanting a woman in a Department (lots of reasons for that), so I can understand a pro-woman bias there- but people speak about this interest. People openly say they want a woman for a position (for reasons). This seems like important evidence that the hiring bias is an attempt at a correction. (I know what comes next, women are the rapists, etc. etc. The rest of the world just has not caught on, etc. etc.)
5:15, "Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee?"
Of course. Many times. The pro-female bias is a constant feature of hiring committees and is well-known.
5:27, "This seems like important evidence that the hiring bias is an attempt at a correction."
A "correction" against what? Something that exists only inside your imagination?
5:27, "women are the rapists"
Women routinely rape and sexually assault men, according to major crime surveys in the US and UK. You can lie about this if you like. The evidence contradicts you.
"You are missing the data that shows the men with the most/ best publications get the job over other men."
Hiring would be very different if all someone cared for in a colleague was how many publications he had in top journals. Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee? There are so many publications in top journals that this becomes the "noise." "Performance" in philosophy isn't just number of publications, because people do not simply get hired on that basis.
No one has claimed any such thing, 5:49. Publications are a major measure of academic performance. On this measure, men hired outperform women amongst those hired, as the data listed above shows.
I don't mean to push too hard here, but am genuinely curious. Publications are a major measure of academic performance, but is it fair to say at a certain level of such performance, surely other factors come into play? Let's say one level is: yes, this person is doing enough top-level work, will get tenure. After reaching that level, even if we look to the very top philosophers, do they actually have more publications than other people in their department, etc.? (I truly don't know so I apologize if someone has done this counting up.)
Other factors include - teaching evaluations, - unpublished work, - letters of recommendation, - conference presentations, - research statement - interview performance.
Feminist activists are trying to downplay the publication measure, because it transpired that men are outperforming women amongst the cohort hired. Had the data been the other way round, feminists would be broadcasting it from the rooftops.
Academic success correlates moderately well with h-index. There are a few significant outliers - Gettier and Wittgenstein, for example. In philosophy, an assistant prof might have h-index of 2-3; an associate professor around 5-9; a full professor usually >10.
8:55, yes, and particularly quality of the published work. One of my senior colleagues got tenure (fairly recently) with seven published papers. Another former colleague failed to get tenure despite have fifteen published papers. I wasn't party to the meetings (I'm more junior) but I hear the tenure letters were weak -- the fifteen papers were competent but not original or trend-setting. Yeah, I'm a little worried. Better start setting trends soon...
It's helpful to remember that, often when these discussions happen, posters admit that SC members regularly consider factors that fall completely outside the list of other merit-tracking factors--e.g., the fact that the department is too male, that female profs would attract more female majors, that the discipline itself is too male. Of course, it's possible that these anonymous posters are just lying, but we can't just assume this is the case. So, yes. pubs are only one merit-tracking factor, but merely pointing out that some female candidates may have other strong merit-tracking features does nothing to address the seemingly common practice of weighting non-merit-tracking factors.
See the information at https://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html --despite the URL, the information is updated to 2015. At places with less than 20% female faculty, of which there are many, and at non-PhD granting programs like that too, I bet there is often a lot of pressure to hire female faculty. (Both internally, from faculty who think this would be good for various reasons, and externally from Dean-y types.)
It is a further question whether it is justifiable to give some preference to female applicants when your department has 7% or 15% female faculty.
I was looking for the perfect video of a roar so that I could post it here, and I was reminded of two things: (1) that Warner Brother's had some really racist and sexist cartoons, (2) that lions are really cool animals.
In fact, I think that post is symptomatic of the current political climate. Cartoon representations of femininity that once most would agree are insulting to women not only in their exagerrated form but in their essentialist implications, are now rebranded as progressive, because they fit the current ideological obsession with trans-identity.
In other words, the theoretical underpinnings of trans-discourse contradict those of feminism.
I'm not saying that this can't be resolved, but it's a problem that the left is ignoring it.
I also think it's good to let people be who they are. Who suggested otherwise?
As it happens, I don't think any one "really is" a man or a woman in any essentialist way. So, sure, trans people believing they're essentially a given gender is no worse than non-trans people believing the same.
But I do think the more progressive position is to say all sex, sexuality, andgender categories are bullshit, not to constantly invent new varieties of bullshit.
Especially when the new varieties are counterproductive, reinforcing stereotypes about true womanhood and diverting progressive attention away from the real economic inequalities that are the primary source of the suffering and powerlessness of minorities of all kinds.
I am still waiting for someone to put forward a decent argument (moral or prudential) for the claim that the gender imbalance in philosophy is something we ought to try to correct. Absent such an argument, all the hand-wringing about the CDJ data and its implications strikes me as largely pointless.
The argument was supposed to be that the imbalance is due to implicit bias and all sorts of discrimination. And it probably is, given that most people working now were hired decades ago. What his has to do with giving an unfair advantage to current female advantages, as borne out by the CDJ data, beats me.
In the previous thread, someone said this about Schliesser:
ReplyDelete"i can attest to callous and destructive actions toward low status women in the profession."
Care to tell us more?
I don't know about his actions toward women. I do know that Schliesser has an overtly contemptful attitude toward people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He despises autists, and he also uses the word 'autist' as a slur against neurotypical people with poor social skills.
DeleteWhen the 'anti-ableist' New Consensus is led by an overt ableist, this tells you most of what you need to know.
Joshua Cohen just wrote a little post on bullshit v. execrable bullshit. When you compare the libertarians publishing again and again the very lines that (should, given a wider audience) embarrass them, when you compare even the handful of tweets that make RM a recurring source of discussion- to just "float" the idea that there is something wrong with Schliesser is certainly execrable.
DeleteOr someone has a story about ES but can't tell it for fear of being identified.
DeleteWhy was my comment about Schliesser's overt spite toward people with Autism Spectrum Disorder removed? I wasn't 'floating' anything, that is exactly what he does.
DeleteAw yeah, that anti-autism thing is pretty mean.
DeleteDid Eric Schliesser not publicly call for his colleagues to be purged and thrown out of their jobs? His conduct is unethical. He abuses his status and power to behave like a judge and a police officer, purging and inflicting suffering on others. And consider the deep irony, by comparing what was done to Baruch Spinoza by the judgmental bullies of his day.
DeleteStatus and power? OK... but even that you feel this way about him is no evidence that he is secretly some kind of "creep" (whatever that means) to women. That part is just wishful. Very unlike reacting to people's own published/ tweeted words.
Delete2:28, I am not the person calling him a "creep"; someone else is. I am the person referring to Schliesser's abuse of his power and status in publicly calling for purges and bullying of his colleagues.
DeleteWhat's the autism thing? Link?
DeletePeople use "autistic" as pejorative to call some self-absorbed, or disconnected from the outside world. Tbh, I have no idea if Schliesser uses the term. I should have said that. I just meant that it's a really mean thing to do.
DeleteI've heard Schliesser say things like "I don't know if he's a f*ckin' autist or what."
DeleteI'm pretty sure there are more people here who heard him because he does it in public and he's not shy about it.
It's interesting how the New Consensus crusade for 'social skills' is implicitly an ableist campaign against people with Asperger and other socially impairing conditions.
"They're scaring the womyn!"
ive heard him also make vigorous cases to take away funding low-status junior women so they cant attend conferences
DeleteI heard it said anonymously on PMMB, so it must be true!
Delete12:28 says "ive heard him also make vigorous cases to take away funding low-status junior women so they cant attend conferences"
DeleteWas he saying that about low-status philosophers in general, or was he targeting a specific low-status woman?
Thoughts on the CDJ placement data?
ReplyDeleteIs there any new data?
DeleteThe data on page 12 will be of special interest to some readers here. If I read correctly, this isn't confirmed placement data by gender, but it is something quite close (guessing someone's gender by their first name):
ReplyDeleteObtained academic placement within 2 years
Male Female
No 412 119
Yes 269 138
"62% of female candidates and 53% of male candidates eventually find permanent positions, with 49% of female candidates getting placed in those positions in their first year on the market, compared to 39% for male candidates."
DeleteAnd then they say young males shouldn't be annoyed? If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more.
I guess, if academia is a market of sorts, there could be more demand for a woman philosopher for the reasons of a. appealing to students b. making the field look less obviously sexist to please administration, parents, etc. I am surprised this ratio isn't greater, actually. But graduate schools probably do not have any reason to admit students on the basis of a. and b. And they are still placing mostly men, so...
DeleteHere's the most striking gender result, to my mind, quoting from the report (it isn't made clear what exactly is being reported to be "statistically significant"):
DeleteThe intercept tells us that the odds for male participants to have a reported permanent academic placement within the first two years after graduation are statistically significant at .37, p < 0.001 when year of graduation is held constant. The odds for female participants to have a reported permanent academic placement are 1.85, p < 0.001 when graduation year is held constant
"If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more."
DeleteAin't that the truth. There are some dummies taking up space that need to go emeritus, like yesterday. My tone might sound a bit satirical. Let me assure you, I am not joking.
"If the profession is so keen on rebalancing the gender ratios they should take away the jobs of the older males who surely benefitted from sexism a lot more."
DeleteI would love to see the mental gymnastics that would unfold if the New Sexists were actually forced to try to evade this nice little reductio with evidence and reason (rather than the standard mix of insults, threats, and nonsensical bluster).
Feminist here. 7:12's claim wasn't anti-feminist, it was anti-establishment.
DeleteI don't see in what sense 7:12's comment was a reductio. Is your point that taking away the jobs of older males is absurd? (Is that your absurdum?)
DeleteI mean, it is, but not in the relevant way.
Yeah, I've just confused myself. Anyway, what did you mean?
An academic male in their mid 40s will have experienced only anti-male sexism, for two decades. Why should someone who has experienced two decades of discrimination have their job taken away?
Delete10:50 the reasons that women might be more marketable than male philosophers are because there are so few of them. Why are there so few of them? What could it be? What could it be...
Delete"there are so few of them""
DeleteThis is a conspiracy theory: a myth invented by political activists. Around 30% of women choose at age 18/19 to study philosophy. This is a reflection of their interests and aptitudes. This remains roughly stable as one progresses. The factual evidence shows that all discrimination in academic philosophy is anti-male, and this has been true for decades.
People seem to have strange ideas as to how long Affirmative Action has been operative in philosophy.
DeleteCertainly for the last 35 years it has played a major role in hiring. Almost certainly it started even before that -- back in the 70s, at least.
Activists always seem to want to pretend that just a few years back, things were horribly sexist or racist all around. Yet the fact is that these issues have been in the forefront of academic hiring for so long that virtually no one active today in the academy has been in their field in a time before such concerns weren't being seriously addressed.
It is rather telling that in some fields rather little progress has been made. 35 years or more of Affirmative Action hasn't turned the trick. Why anyone would expect that another umpteen years might is beyond baffling.
"things were horribly sexist or racist all around"
DeleteQuite. It is a conspiracy theory, promoted by political activists. No evidence has ever been given, and anyone who has worked in philosophy for a couple of decades knows this, having seen case after case after case of men being discriminated against. All the objective evidence points the opposite way: all discrimination in academic philosophy, at each level, is anti-male.
Well, hang on, I've been in the biz some 20 years, and frankly the amount of lobbying pro women has never been remotely as strong as in the last five-seven years or so.
DeleteAnti-male discrimination - special treatment, lower workload, special deals and favors, preferential hiring and promotion - has been the norm in all cases I have seen over the last two decades. True, in the last five to seven years, the activists have become pathological in their hysteria, conspiracy theories and witch hunts, which we've seen over and over again.
DeleteBut even so, anti-male discrimination has been a constant factor of life in academic philosophy for as long as I can remember, particularly in hiring and workload matters. Women generally receive lower workloads, complain if asked to do what men do without question, are given more leave, and are routinely hired over better qualified men.
10:44 AM,
DeleteThe thought was that the justifications typically offered for hiring female candidates over equally or better qualified male candidates would seem to justify - indeed, would seem to even more strongly justify - forcing older male professors into early retirement. Which is absurd. Therefore, etc.
Perhaps you think that there's a normatively relevant difference between the two policies that makes the second ultima facie unjust but not the first. If so, then let's hear it.
11:05 up at Daily Nous the two studies we have that might be related to why women don't study philosophy in greater numbers are linked. How in the world would you know better? What is wrong with the studies that you can see. Will you tell us? Otherwise, I think you are just making an explanation up, my friend.
DeleteWomen enter the study of philosophy, as undergraduates, at a rate of about 30%.
DeleteI, anonymous feminist, don't think that older men should have their jobs taken away either. I've been using a lot of hyperbole for the last 3-4 hours. Carry on.
DeleteActually, Paxton's work puts it at over 40%, and almost 35% majors...
DeleteI happen to know the current first year undergraduate enrolment at a major UK university. It is 31%.
DeletePaxton looked at loads of universities and it tracked faculty ratio. Maybe your uni is light on women faculty?
DeleteHow could the proportion of female faculty play any causal role in the percentage of applicants? By by some kind of Patriarchic Radiation?
DeleteA more plausible explanation than Patriarchic Radiation is that applicants look at faculty profiles on department web pages before they apply to departments. It may then be the case either that female students are more likely to apply where they see faculty who have some identity-element in common with them, or that they see the kinds of things studied by female faculty and those correspond well with what female applicants are more likely to be interested in.
DeleteTwo utterly bizarre hypotheses, of course, but while we're throwing around outlandish thought experiments....
maybe the undergrads are worried about harassment. sexual harassment goes up when sex ratios are off, for both men and women.
DeleteGrow up. Undergrads have never heard of "harassment" until they meet the local conspiracy theorists.
Deleteyeh, fems invented rape, too. give me a break.
DeleteYeah, because women don't rape and assault people? Feminist philosopher Anna Stubblefield is accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a disabled man who is unable to give consent.
Delete"for both men and women"
DeleteSo explain why female rapists get the "it's complicated" excuses. Whereas a Nobel Prize winning scientist makes a joke and is witch hunted and life ruined?
Deletebias
DeleteIt's been awhile, but when I was an undergrad applicant (both freshman and transfer) the number of women in a department never occurred to me (as a female). I was no more interested in a class because a woman was teaching it, and I never worried about being harassed by a male professor. From conversations I can recall about professors and class selection, these didn't seem to be major concerns for others I knew, either. We mostly worried about topic, scheduling, and whether or not someone was known to be fair/clear or unfair/confusing.
DeleteBy the end I had noticed that I preferred male professors because they tended to be more laidback, but that is another matter. (I never knew if my female professors were less laidback from the start or if they were made that way by academia.)
Anyway, as an applicant, I cared about location, size/type of school, and rankings. Gender didn't come into play until I got there and encountered modern feminism with its herstory months and weird spellings intended to stick it to the patriarchy. ("We put the y in womyn because fuck men, right? No, not literally! Haha.")
4:00 if you'd read the research, the effects are subconscious.
Delete"if you'd read the research, the effects are subconscious."
DeleteYes, the "research" shows that unobservable Patriarchic Radiation affects the subconscious.
So I subconsciously gravitated towards departments with certain gender ratios, despite never looking up how many men or women were teaching in a specific department? You seem to be forgetting that many undergrad applicants do not know what their majors will be. I certainly didn't.
Delete(In the US, that is. I know other countries ask that their new university students bring a little more direction with them.)
No, jesus there is an literature on this. Start with stereotype threat. Read. Try reading research on this topic.
Delete7.46: Looks like you missed the memo; this mantra doesn't work any more. Read. Try reading very recent research on social psychology in general and stereotype threat in particular.
DeleteARG comments, on the swarm. CDJ data is a major trigger for the ARG.
Delete"ARG comments, on the swarm. CDJ data is a major trigger for the ARG"
DeleteWhy do you think that only men deserve to be attacked by bees, 10:43? Is it because you love Stubblefield so much? Learn science at kindergarten, which you need to go back to. Idiot.
Looks like Ms Tinfoil is back.
Delete*explosion*
DeleteI prefer this picture of both of us, 10:50.
DeleteWait: that pic was of me with my BFF 10:58 = ARG. But 10:50, you did make me lol.
DeletePg 11: In terms of differencethe odds of having a reported permanent academic placement are 85% greater for females as compared to males.
ReplyDelete8:17,
ReplyDeletePresumably, the null hypothesis here (for being female) is that the odds ratio for being female is 1.0. Since the p is reported as being <0.000, and, more precisely, the z value is 3.64, the likelihood that the null hypothesis is true is basically infinitesimal. Put another way, it's essentially impossible that females don't have a higher probability of having been hired for a permanent position.
Oh, I forgot I was 8:17. Right, but what is the idea of the significance claims and numbers for men and women separately? What does this mean:
Delete"the odds for male participants to have a reported permanent academic placement within the first two years after graduation are statistically significant at .37, p < 0.001"
Aaand... Leiter comes out in favor of the metabros!
ReplyDeleteit's interesting material, and will be of particular interest, I imagine, to those concerned with the role of gender in hiring.
genderandprestige blogger analysed the previous CDJ data six months ago, and got the right answers - pro-female bias in philosophy job hiring. Naturally, the response to the evidence, from the Daily Whine and the tin foil feminists, was silence.
DeleteThere is so much information missing though, about those female candidates. That recent study on women in STEM showed only at the highest level of performance were women favored. The majority of competition is from other men, too. No sour grapes toward them? How do you know why they were favored for the job?
Deletelemoine doing good work as always on DN
ReplyDeleteIndeed, while feminist commenter "babygirl" makes the claim "I see no reason to have this expectation, unless we think that the number of publications is the measure of a quality of a candidate."
DeleteNow the 2012 and 2013 hiring data itself showed,
- "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much."
- "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."
- "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."
When prestige was included, the gender bias was even more pronounced. Classifying the applicants as "alpha" and "beta" according to Leiter prestige, the publication rates amongst those hired in 2012 and 2013 were
- Beta-males: 1.7
- Alpha-males: 1.3
- Beta-females: 1.1
- Alpha-females: 0.6
So, the most privileged females published at only one third of the rate as the least privileged males.
But "babygirl" is right. Current political ideology being as it is, the publication record of an academic is not a "measure of a candidate". The evidence shows that the correct measure is "being a privileged women". If the candidate satisfies that crucial "measure of quality", the candidate is hired, even if the less privileged male competitor has twice or three times as many publications.
I find it hilarious that for years idiots have been insisting that, absent so-called 'objective' evidence, one was unjustified in stating what anyone with a room-temperature IQ could already see what was plainly there to be seen: comparatively unqualified women are routinely hired over men.
DeleteWhat happens now that the evidence is in?
These same idiots now shift the goal posts, either by simply ignoring the evidence that is finally in, or else by denying that things like publications should matter in hiring decisions.
You have to love this!
As Kierkegaard said, 'There's nothing the world loves more than a subtle hypocrisy.'
True indeed.
Only the hypocrisy here isn't even subtle.
I don't know.... most research level philosophy papers aren't that useful to anyone. Critical thinking, however, now that benefits everyone.
DeleteWhatever. Gotta go write a philosophy paper now. :/
Speaking of critical thinking, I don't think anyone was suggesting that women don't have a bump up in virtue of being women. Someone merely suggested that "number of publications" as a kind of "control variable" is idiotic, since the quality and desirability of publications varies considerably, and so a crude measure like number of pubs shows absolutely nothing, "controls" for absolutely nothing. It's about as relevant to the hiring data as height (which might also correlate in certain ways with gender, and have some significant correlations with other factors, none of them independently interesting)
Deletethat "mere suggestion" is actually what's idiotic. "it varies a bit so let's not measure it, it must be as unrelated as [something really unrelated" - no, actually, as EVERYBODY knows, it's actually taken into account in hiring decisions, so it's per se useful information, and the gender disparity is per se interesting. your point about variability just shows that it's not a knock-down case (i.e. if you demonstrate that the articles by the women hired are ACTUALLY in more prestigious journals, not just point out that they MIGHT be, you will have offered an alternate explanation of the data)
Deletepeople here seem completely unwilling to understand the difference between abductive and deductive reasoning. next time you think you have a point to make, i hope you instead realize that you're not pointing out any sort of subtlety others have missed, you're just kind of slow intellectually. thanks.
The actual gender disparity in publication rates amongst those hired for higher quality journals is explicitly stated above. Amongst those hired, men publish at roughly three times the rate women do in higher quality journals:
Delete"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."
How is publication taken into account? In my own department I can think of several times where a (male) candidate was ranked more highly despite having zero publications (the appeal was always personality and being trained by someone important at a top school). This is in a market where many applicants have 6-8 major publications.
DeleteAnecdotes do not prove anything about statistical trends.
Delete2:34, don't question the reigning orthodoxy here! Subtleties like the ones you are pointing to have no place in this discussion, which centers around how things are maximally bad for all males because of the females.
DeleteYou are presented with objective data covering job hiring in 2012 and 2013, listed by 1:03. How is this an "orthodoxy"? The response at the ideologically driven blogs is silence.
DeleteThe point of the anecdote is that you have no possible way of knowing the role publications play in hiring. Given how much you are just making up, I could take the same data and push the line that a percentage of men in philosophy have personality defects that make them difficult to hire. It's just as easy as what you are doing. Stick to the data and you won't be able to assume "the role publications play in hiring."
DeleteThe point of the data that you wish to ignore is to present you with objective evidence concerning the gender disparity in publication counts amongst those hired. You may ignore this data if you wish, but it won't go away.
Delete2:21,
DeleteYou're quite right about the low IQ of those who argue that average publication rate means nothing as to the average quality of the candidate. Always the argument is some stupid counterexample that misunderstands the point of statistical inference at all.
It has always struck me as a basic defect in the training of philosophers that they always learn some deductive logic, but almost never any statistics. Yet just about everything interesting that we learn about the real world must be learned via statistical inference, not deductive inference. If you're going to understand and talk about knowledge, I don't know how you can do it without some sense of statistical inference.
One spends over half one's time on boards like this explaining to ignoramuses how statistical inferences work, and what statistically couched statements mean.
3:13pm,
DeleteI totally agree re: stats and philosophers. I think it should be a requirement for grad programs.
In recent years I've thought more and more that the low regard for the study of math in general, and statistics in particular, is more detrimental to our (the population's) overall well-being than people realize. The aversion to numbers is so extreme that I could sit in a cafe doing basic arithmetic, and someone would see it and exclaim, "Math is so hard! You must be really smart. I couldn't do that."
DeleteThe "I couldn't do that" is absolute nonsense. I would say it's an excuse, but I think they believe it. And that's sad. 100% of people I've surveyed think it's sad.
2:50 --- we're discussing what this data means. Women get a bump up. Some are making the *additional* suggestion that female candidates are, on average, of lower quality than male candidates (this is the upshot of Lemoine's suggestion on DN) as evidenced by the fact that they publish less before getting hired. I, and others, like babygirl on DN) are taking issue with this suggestion. They might publish less, on average, because they are on the market for less time. They might publish less because they tend to be in subfields where publishing early is not expected or encouraged. They might publish less for a number of reasons. Saying this is not taking issue with the data or denying that women get a leg up. It's not some fallacy in statistical reasoning. It's simply pointing out that the data doesn't justify the inference that Lemoine is making, that if women publish less, this is reason to assume that they have an *additional* bump, beyond the one indicated in the data (which is significant!).
DeleteOh sorry, what is the relationship between publication rate and the quality of the candidate?
DeleteAnd where is the data that shows schools agree with you on this?
"You're quite right about the low IQ of those who argue that average publication rate means nothing as to the average quality of the candidate."
DeleteLulz. Do you know how IQ is tested 3:13?
Roar-a-roar-roar.
Doesn't Princeton tend to discourage it's grads from publishing and give them no independent teaching experience? How do they do on the market?
DeleteWhat is that relationship between publication rate and the quality of a candidate again? Just so that all of the hiring departments are clear?
Look, 3:27, if you are going to argue that one can find hypotheses whereby it turns out that the women who are hired might not actually be of lower quality than the men, then, of course, one can do so. But, again, and again, these are hypotheses introduced not because they have any independent plausibility or evidence, but because they save one's thesis.
DeleteAnd it's not even clear what kind of sense they might make. Take the idea that women publish less because they are hired earlier. To begin with, of course, there is no independent evidence that that is so. But consider the idea on its own terms. Are we supposed to believe that, on the one hand, philosophy departments prefer women so strongly that they are willing to hire them earlier, but that they nonetheless are every bit as stringent regarding their quality as philosophers as they are with men? Why would this preference not be explained most naturally by relaxation of standards more generally? Why isn't the most reasonable interpretation of the data that philosophy departments of course, as they do in tenure considerations, consider publications (other things being equal!) as a factor in determining the desirability of a candidate, and as sign that the candidate will generate more publications and add to the prestige of the department? Again, this a statistical claim as to whether candidates are more desirable and of higher quality if they have more publications. If women are hired despite their relative lack of publications at an earlier stage than men, then that, on any natural interpretation of the data, is a sign that departments are willing to overlook the lack of a publication record and plunk down for a woman. You need to come up with more than some quick rejoinder as to why women are hired with fewer publications--you need to have an overall account that makes some socio-cultural sense.
And what is the evidence that it's harder for women to publish in the subfields to which they mostly gravitate? Obviously, more women are to be found in moral philosophy and history of philosophy than in other subfields. Is there any plausibility to the idea that it's harder to get a publication in those subfields -- especially when often it feminist oriented material that they publish?
Early on, it was suggested that women may not publish as much as men generally, but they might do so in prestige publications. That, of course, was shot down by the evidence, when it was finally introduced and considered.
No doubt these other hypotheses would likewise fall once further data is introduced, for the simple reason that they make no independent sense.
You have no overall account of why women might be obviously preferred for hire yet be every bit as desirable a candidate as men. You are simply making up ad hoc hypotheses that save the only thesis you seem to able to entertain.
4:41,
DeleteBecause, as every one with a sense of statistics knows, the practices of one department are perfectly predictive of the practices of all departments.
This is the low IQ of which I complain.
I am really just trying to point out what we can't know yet. I am guessing that the data you need would actually show that Departments are regularly willing to plunk down for candidates they like, be they male or female. You are just assuming a better published person is more desirable candidate (all things equal- and I can easily imagine the count done carefully so that someone with 60 articles in business ethics is out). I know there is this interest in seeing the academic market as a meritocracy, but there all sorts of roles professors play. This is where "all things equal" needs content. If you cannot imagine that a Department might, in the face of the the number and quality of candidates in a standard search, spend their time debating whether candidates would be a good fit for the Dept. and school, then I just don't think you are imagining what goes on in a search (the make or break it point is in the interview/s). If number of top publications were all that made male candidates desirable, you realize how easy the work of hiring would be? If you find that Departments simply hire the best published male candidates, that would be helpful.
Delete4:45,
DeleteYou're coming up with still another statistically clueless account. Do you even grasp the concept of "other things being equal" here? Sure, departments consider many factors -- but, other things being equal, will, generally prefer candidates with more publications, and more publications in prestige journals. This is by far the most natural read of the statistics.
Again, you need an overarching account that puts together all the data we see, and comports with obvious motivations departments and human beings have.
The account I offer is simplicity itself, and comports exactly with obvious motivations: departments, and individuals within them, very much want to hire women. To do so, they will go to considerable distance to relax standards.
That hypothetical motivation explains everything we see to a T.
You can come up with no overarching picture that makes any coherent sense.
3:27 here, in response to 5:19 --- I'm not advancing any particular hypothesis, so I don't have the burden to make it plausible. I'm saying WE DON'T KNOW why the average pub rate of hired women is lower than that of men. I proposed a number of hypotheses, saying that any one of them is just as plausible as the hypothesis that they are weaker candidates. Again, I'm *not* saying that they don't have a bump up. I think they clearly do, I think the data shows that, and apart from some implausible claim like "women are just better at philosophy than men" the only plausible explanation seems to be bias in their favor. BUT I AM taking issue with Lemoine's claim that when we take into account number of publications, women have a greater bump up, since it rests on the assumption that number of publications is a good predictor of a candidate's quality (and thus that lower pubs = lower quality, so women are, on average, less qualified applicants), and that this is the best explanation of what's going on. The point is just that we don't know what's going on.
DeleteBy subfields, I simply meant that one should expect someone in metaphysics or epistemology to have a few publications in hand leaving graduate school, or at least a few in the works. Not so for historical disciplines, for a variety of reasons. Shit, I could publish something in metaphysics if you gave me 3 months. I could not publish anything in ancient philosophy, because I don't know Greek and I haven't read the massive body of secondary material, let alone mastered it, which is required for pubs in ancient. So if there is a higher percentage of women in ancient phil as compared to metaphysics, this might skew the publication data. And, from my own experience of the gender breakdown of various subfields, it seems plausible to me that this is the case. Of course, I haven't done a study, so I don't know that this is the case.
Similarly with time on the market -- one would expect a person who has been on the market for longer to have more publications, right? Am I losing my mind here? I've already said many times that there is a bias in favor of women which leads to them getting hired earlier and more often. I think saying it's MORE than the 85% bump pointed to in the data is absurd. THIS IS WHAT LEMOINE IS SAYING, that the average female candidate is less qualified than the average male candidate, and so it's MORE than 85%, which would be the bump if we just assume that the spread of quality among genders is even. I think you might be taking me to say that I don't think there is a bias. I never said that. I don't believe that. Of course, I haven't done a study here either, but it would be interesting to see if number of pubs as a factor disappears if one controls for years on the market. It seems plausible that it might, yeah? Again, just a hypothesis, but I think a more plausible one than "men are just better than women, and publish more before they get jobs BECAUSE they are better."
It seems to me that the big problem is this: it's really not clear whether, and to what extent, publications do (or should) boost one's chances on the job market. Because here's what we don't know: the publication rates of those who *don't* get jobs.
DeleteCompare to placement data, where we do know that information: you can go onto departmental websites and work out, for example, that 9/10 people who graduate from Fancy Private U get jobs, but only 2/10 people from State School get jobs.
And if we knew, for example, that 9/10 people with 2 publications got jobs and 2/10 people with 0 pubs got jobs, then we would know that having more pubs increases your chances of getting a job, But if it were the case that 5/10 people with 2 pubs got jobs and 5/10 people with 0 pubs got jobs, then we would know that there wasn't any correlation between no. of pubs and chances of getting a job. And if there isn't any such correlation, then it's not clear why the differences publication rates of male and female graduates shows anything important at all.
thanks 6:09.
DeleteContrary to what babygirl is saying, it would be quite useful to see a regression with number of publications, gender, and status of PhD institution as parameters. Then we would know the answers to at least some of the questions being raised. I don't know why babygirl is against this. The reasons given don't make any sense to me.
DeleteNow that the pro-female bias has become hard to deny, some people have started to pretend that it's important for philosophers to have a 'good personality' (implying that women have better personalities than men). But it's hard to think of any great philosophers who would have won a high school popularity contest.
DeleteIf we want philosophers to have 'great personalities' then we want to replace philosophy with something else. Philosophy is done by nerds.
Anne Jacobson is in fine form again on FP with a post asking whether we should be watching a panda give birth, and then two updates, the first of which observes that one of the newborns has died, while the second seems to suggest that a mouse may have had something to do with the death:
ReplyDeletehttps://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/should-we-watch-this/#comments
i feel so bad for her every time she posts anything. is this a "grandma on the internet" sort of thing and we should just be happy it isn't in all caps? berkeley and oxford are good schools; did something happen to her?
DeleteSometimes it is all in caps.
DeleteWallace: "...a lot of these “not-statistically-significant” M/F gaps tend to point in the same direction, which can be significant in of itself." The wall of hypocrisy is starting to show some cracks.
ReplyDeletefit ya square peg, fit!
DeleteBias in academic philosophy is anti-male. Preferential treatment in academic philosophy is pro-female. All discrimination in academic philosophy is aimed against men. All false accusations are aimed at men. The witch hunts and smear campaigns are directed against men - the sole exception being Laura Kipnis, a feminist cultural critic, who merely wrote an essay disagreeing with feminist hysteria and who was then subjected to feminist hysteria and frivolous attempts to prosecute her under Title IX.
DeleteThe actions of recent feminists - their conspiracy theories, witch hunts, purges, bullying and smear campaigns - will be judged harshly by future historians.
yes, the feminist wolves are slaughtering the innocent lamb-like men of philosophy. but the lambies will have their vengeance! lambies forever!
DeleteThe various smear campaigns and witch hunts have been run by feminists. Do you dispute this? Who ran the smear campaign against Tim Hunt? A secret cabal of MRA's? Who ran the campaign against Laura Kipnis? A secret cabal of MRAs?
DeleteNobody is slaughtering anyone, and this site is sadly plagued by a bunch of quasi-MRA loons, but still, it's abundantly clear that there is a feminist lobby group that is taking advantage of Title IX paranoia and other such factors to gain all sorts of advantages.
Delete"this site is sadly plagued by a bunch of quasi-MRA loons"
DeleteAh - the conspiracy theory yet again. How does objecting to smear campaigns and witch hunts make someone a "quasi-MRA loon"? Explain. How was the witch hunt against Tim Hunt connected to "Title IX"? Explain.
Remember: the senior women lobbying for more posts to go to junior women are building their own support base, and creating a climate were their own careers will benefit enormously in terms of conference/publication invites, citations, promotion, and so on.
DeleteAnd some senior men who go out of their way to embrace the New Consensus.
Delete4:24 thinks a UK scientist, Tim Hunt, was witch hunted by a UCL feminist, because of Title IX. Disagree with this geographically incoherent nonsense and the response is a conspiracy theory about "quasi-MRA loons".
Delete4:53, if you don't think that the US climate contributes to the overall anti-men current in global English-speaking academia then I don't know what to tell you.
DeleteThe problem with wanting fewer women in philosophy is that the public is no longer interested in male-domination of any field. Tim Hunt made the public (that's men and women alike) aghast when they had no idea what work he did. Like it or not, people believe sexism against women is pervasive and wrong. All types of people. The public. So an all-male philosophy department is not going to be liked by the most conservative dads you can imagine, etc.
Delete4:56, if somewhere in your mind you believe that, for example, Louise Mensch, multiple Nobel Prize winners, the female Master of Churchill College and many others are all "quasi-MRA loons", then you are suffering from conspiracist paranoia and need to see a doctor.
DeleteNobody wants fewer women in philosophy. People just don't want to be unemployed because someone thought they'd better hire a woman because of made up discrimination claims.
Delete"Like it or not, people believe sexism against women is pervasive and wrong."
DeleteEh? Do you think your lies are acceptable? Tim Hunt did nothing wrong and was subjected to a smear campaign of lies, fabricated by a couple of feminists, and which were then contradicted by multiple witnesses.
5: 13 You are missing the point, the smear campaign worked because of what I explained in 4: 57. It would not work if the public were not going to react as they did.
DeleteEh, 5:19? You seem delusional. You imagine someone agrees with sexism? Is that actually your point? Who, exactly? No one agrees with that. It's just a conspiracy theory.
Delete5:34 do you not keep up with the popular media? What is your evidence that the public is not concerned with sexism?
DeleteIf you read in any detail of what took place in the smear campaign against Tim Hunt, what's most disgusting is the absolute contempt in which its perpetrators hold the truth, even though they are journalists (and one particularly absurd figure who was a major player in something called "Retraction Watch", devoted to uncovering the fraud of others).
DeleteThey simply lied again and again, and when called on the lies, made up more lies to cover them.
These are the sort of moral standards to which the SJW crowd hold themselves.
5:48, "What is your evidence that the public is not concerned with sexism?"
DeleteWhat is wrong with your mind? Of course people are concerned with sexism. Are you delusional?
"Wallace: "...a lot of these “not-statistically-significant” M/F gaps tend to point in the same direction, which can be significant in of itself." The wall of hypocrisy is starting to show some cracks."
DeleteI have no idea what this is intended to mean. But the statistical point I was making was just this: if I have N comparisons between X and Y (or, in this case, M and F), and the null hypothesis is that X and Y don't differ except through random noise, then the probability that X is greater than Y in all N comparisons is 2^-N. So if N is reasonably large and all the indicators point in the same direction, you can reject the null hypothesis at quite a high statistical-significance level even if the individual differences aren't significant on a case-by-case basis.
Advice: Just get over it. Sometimes things don't go your way and life's not fair.
ReplyDeleteThis is great advice for people who think that "the seminar room" is an unfriendly atmosphere for women.
DeleteExcept women evidently don't have to worry about the seminar room as much as men.
DeleteWhat happens to men in a seminar room?
DeleteI think the point was just that women can perform less well in seminars (and any other quality indicators) and still get hired over men, as the data indicates.
DeleteIn some cases, yes it is. I'm sorry that people are trying to correct for sexism and you're not getting your dream jobs.
DeleteExcept I'm not that sorry, because I'm a white person, and I don't get all bent out of shape when attempts to correct racism work against me. I acknowledge that it's in everyone's interest in the long run (including mine), and that in the short term, it's actually kinda fair.
I'm not sure why that's so hard for you guys.
What "sexism"? Give one data point.
Delete"I don't get all bent out of shape when attempts to correct racism work against me."
DeleteWhy are smear campaigns and witch hunts acceptable?
Here's a data point for you, 5:37: "the proportion of women in the placement data (28% in this subset) is smaller than I would have expected, given other data on women graduates (31% in 2011 according to one source)"
DeleteThe fact that the proportion of women hired matches the proportion of women graduating suggests that if there are explicit biases in favor of women in the hiring process, these are correcting for (rather than over-correcting for) sexism.
No, please provide one data point of "sexism" against females. All the objective evidence shows a significant amount of sexism against males.
DeleteThat is exactly the kind of data point you were after, 5:50. Because given the fact that hiring rates match graduation rates, there are two hypotheses: either women who are interested and dedicated enough to finish graduate school are inherently less talented than men who do likewise, and the parity in placement and graduation is evidence that women are being hired disproportionately to their talent, or women who finish are just as talented as the men, and the data on hiring, combined with evidence that universities have policies to explicitly favor women in hiring, is evidence that these explicit biases in favor are correcting for (rather than over-correcting for) biases against.
DeleteI have no idea what your point is, 6:16. Can you explain it in English?
DeleteIt's pretty simple: 6:22:
DeleteThere is some evidence, both in terms of data and anecdotally, of explicit biases in favor of female candidates at the hiring stage in philosophy, yes?
However, the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women (28% vs 31%, but as pointed out on DN, given small total numbers this is probably within margin of error)
So either the explicit biases in favor of women are in fact correcting, and correcting pretty accurately, for biases (whether explicit or implicit) against women.
Or, the women who graduate are on average inherently less talented than the men who graduate. What the parity in hiring numbers shows, then, is that despite being inherently less talented women are being hired at the same rate as men.
"However, the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women"
DeleteSo? The evidence shows that, amongst those hired, men perform on average twice as well as females hired on publications (and three times as well wrt to high quality journals).
The two further statements you make do not make any sense.
Hm, I think your numbers might be off.
DeleteWe know that the odds of a woman being hired within two years of graduating is much greater than the odds of a man being hired. About 85% higher.
How is that consistent with biases in favor of and against women somehow balancing out? If they balanced out, wouldn't the odds be the same for men and for women?
I understand that there are various possible explanations for the difference in odds. It's just that the data do not seem to show two trends that cancel each other out.
Hi 5:50, as Wallace points out at DN, the numbers you point to are not statistically significant. But the increased odds for women getting jobs is 85%, which is very significant. The odds of women who are on the market for the first time getting a job is even higher.
DeleteWhat I don't understand is how that can be consistent with the proportion of women hired being the same as the proportion graduating.
Oh, sorry, that was addressed to 6:37 -- then 7:03 appeared as I was writing 7:09.
Delete"The evidence shows that, amongst those hired, men perform on average twice as well as females hired on publications (and three times as well wrt to high quality journals)."
DeleteRight, and this fact, combined with the fact that the proportion of those hired who were women matches the proportion of those graduating who were women, is evidence that there is explicit bias in favor of women.
The question is whether this explicit bias in favor of women is correcting for bias against women, or not.
The fact that with explicit bias we see parity in hiring and graduating numbers is evidence in favor of the claim that the explicit bias we see in favor of women is correcting for bias against women. And so is evidence for the existence of bias against women, which is exactly what you wanted.
Think about it this way: imagine that there were none of the explicit biases in favor of women that we hear about. The numbers of women being hired would likely drop, right? So women would be being hired in a rate lower than their proportion in the group of graduates. And it seems like this would be evidence of unfairness, unless we have reason to think that women who graduate in philosophy are on average less talented than men who graduate in philosophy. But we have no reason to think this.
"The question is whether this explicit bias in favor of women is correcting for bias against women, or not."
DeleteEh? What "bias against women" do you mean? There is no evidence for that. It's like feminism is a fixed immutable ideology inside your mind, and cannot be removed by critical thinking. So, it's "true" - even if all the evidence shows it is false.
The evidence shows that the academic performance of females drops off, to around 50% of that of men. Therefore, in a meritocracy, we would expect fewer females to be hired amongst the corpus. However, they are hired, being held to lower expectations. This implies prejudice against men.
The rest of your comment doesn't make sense. You appear to believe that the existence of prejudice against men implies the existence of prejudice against women? And you believe this despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever.
7:41, I've explained this to you multiple times now. You've both failed to understand and been really rude about your failure to understand. I am 'writing in English', your claims about what my 'fixed immutable ideology' and my lack of critical thinking skills are baseless, and I have clearly explained multiple times that I do not think merely that the 'existence of prejudice against men implies the existence of prejudice against women'. The question is whether evidence of explicit bias in favor of women in one particular respect, combined with other facts, gives us reason to think there are also other biases - possibly implicit - against women. Futher the evidence does *not* show that the 'academic performance' of women drops off. The evidence is limited to publishing, which is hardly evidence of a person's academic performance as a whole, which is what you would need to support your claim.
DeleteIt's really quite simple: unless we have reason to believe that the women who graduate in philosophy are inherently less talented than the men who graduate, we should expect women to be hired in proportion to their numbers. Women are being hired in proportion to their numbers. But we also have evidence of explicit bias in favor of women. These two facts combined are evidence of bias against women.
Maybe an analogy will help: if you have to put a brick on one end of the scale in order to keep it level, that's evidence that there is something heavy on the other end, even if you don't know exactly what.
7:54, "unless we have reason to believe that the women who graduate in philosophy are inherently less talented than the men who graduate ..."
DeleteThe objective data shows that men outperform women. You pretend the data doesn't exist. It does and is listed above. The evidence shows, amongst the whole corpus of those hired from no prior position in 2012 and 2013:
1. "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much."
2. "The average publication rate for women hired was about 0.8."
3. "The average publication rate for men hired was about 1.5."
4. ".... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men."
5. "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."
"unless we have reason to believe that the women who graduate in philosophy are inherently less talented than the men who graduate"
Delete(not 7:41) - Remove "inherently" (why is it there?) and we do have reason to believe that.
No, 8:20: what we have is (weak) reason to believe that women are, on paper, less *qualified* than men who graduate. This is not the same as less talented. And the point of affirmative actions is often to try and select for talent rather than qualifications, on the basis that merely selecting for qualifications simply reproduces the problems of the past.
DeleteThink about it this way: if you thought that qualifications were a reliable, unbiased indication of merit,desert and talent, then you would not advocate for any form of affirmative action. So merely pointing out that affirmative action in favor of women has the result that women who are on paper less qualified have an easier time getting hired than men does not show that there is bias against men - to assume this begs the question against the affirmative action advocate.
So what we do have is a reason to believe that women who graduate are on average less qualified on paper than men who graduate. But we do not have evidence that women who graduate are less talented. The absence of this evidence, combined with the fact that hiring rates are proportional, is reason to believe that the explicit biases are in fact balancing things out (and so are not evidence of all-things considered bias against men).
8:18, if you can't understand something, it doesn't help to just repeat lies and data. I am not 'pretending the data doesn't exist', in fact almost every single comment I have made mentions the evidence of explicit bias. The comment *directly* above yours mentions the evidence about publishing in particular.
We have independent reason to believe it. I did not mean that the reasons were here in this data set. Studies on testosterone, the historical record, etc. provide some prima facie evidence. (I like how you say "on paper". Where else would the qualifications be?)
DeleteYou are making affirmative action advocacy out to be more extreme than it has to be. In fact, there are several good reasons to favor affirmative action even if one does not share your very radical view about talent that can never be represented by qualifications because of "the problems of the past" or whatever. (Whether they're good enough is a question I don't want to get into. But they're there.)
Here is a question for you. We have metrics - what you call "qualifications" - for determining what you call an individual's "talent". You suggest that all of these systematically underrate women. Why all of them? Will metrics like, say, publishing really good papers after tenure, making a contribution to the field, etc. evade this systematic underrating, or will it never end? When will this hidden "talent" start to show?
Affirmative action is illegal.
DeleteDo you have a particular jurisdiction in mind, 9:31? Are you referring only to public entities, or private ones as well?
DeleteAffirmative action is illegal. It is also considered immoral by everyone I have ever spoken to. Do you have someone in mind who agrees with this illegal and immoral practice?
Delete"if one does not share your very radical view about talent that can never be represented by qualifications because of "the problems of the past" or whatever"
DeleteI did not claim any such thing.
"You suggest that all of these systematically underrate women. Why all of them?"
I did not suggest any such thing.
9:27, there might be evidence which would lead us to believe that on average, men might be more talented than women. But the evidence you point to (testosterone or whatever) would have to be very strong such that we should expect that when people already self-select into a group, and that group is 30% women and 70% men, (as opposed to, for example, 50/50) it is till true that *of that group* the average man is more talented than the average woman.
DeleteThe presence of affirmative action itself makes that not just possible but likely, 9:50.
DeleteI understand the point now.
DeleteI'm the poster from September 1, 2015 at 7:09 PM.
I think the person you've been interacting with is ARG.
I'm convinced by 5:50's admirably clear (and surprisingly patient, given the obnoxiousness of some replies) explanation.
DeleteBut for those who aren't: even if 5:50's wrong, why assume the explanation is that women in the field are less *talented*? Believing as you do (I do not) that there is a very strong bias in favor of women, wouldn't another plausible explanation be that if departments have such a bias, they are likely anxious to hire and retain women. So they're less demanding of them overall, and there's less pressure for women to publish? If that were the reason, it would tell us absolutely nothing about talent.
Of course, I think this is still not the correct explanation, but I think it's telling that so many on this board are immediately and tenaciously drawn to the most obnoxious one, when there are somewhat more innocuous ones available.
Instead of your obnoxious arrogance, 5:35, perhaps you can explain why observable male outperformance of women, along with observable anti-male bias, is evidence of unobservable anti-female bias?
DeleteWho *assumed* that was the explanation? Again, the difference between deductive and abductive reasoning is apparently just too much for some of you. Note also that abductive reasoning is not inference to the least "obnoxious" or most "innocuous" explanation. It is simply inference to the best explanation. Concerns like the ones I put in scare quotes, which I have to think of as political concerns, have no real place there.
DeleteThere is a lot of very sloppy thinking going on in this thread. For example, we hear that affirmative action is "an attempt at a correction". No doubt. But the fact that affirmative action is intended that way does not necessarily mean everyone was right that there was much to be corrected for in the first place, and if there wasn't, affirmative action itself will lead to a pool where women are, on average, less talented. This has almost unquestionably happened with affirmative action in other areas, and yet the same arguments pop back up again and again, as though the conversation has never taken place before. This is, of course, not a decisive argument against affirmative action, because there are several independent rationales for the policy. For example, black law students, who do far worse on the LSAT, end up doing far worse grade-wise in law school, too, but this is not a crushing blow against affirmative action in law school admissions. Note too that black law students already received affirmative action in college admissions and will receive it again in the job market (and yet again when promotion and partnership decisions are made). The "corrections" affirmative action makes seem never quite to take hold. I'd be interested in hearing the views of some of the commentators here on that fact. If affirmative action is an efficacious corrective policy, why must it be reapplied at every level of a profession?
Someone earlier in this thread distinguished talent and qualifications. Surely if they are able to make that distinction they will be able to suggest alternative qualifications which would better capture talent, or at least note where in his or her career a philosopher will start to do things uncorrelated with the qualifications in question.
"There is a lot of very sloppy thinking going on in this thread."
DeleteIndeed. In the face of objective evidence that men hired have outperformed women hired, the social justice warriors above repeat their mantra - despite the complete absence of evidence. And the evidence we have of observable anti-male bias is not, somehow, evidence of unobservable anti-female bias.
Above there is a repeated evidence-free assertion of anti-male bias being a "correction". This simply begs the question and assumes, without evidence, that there is something to be "corrected". This needs to be shown with evidence, and not merely asserted on the basis of ideology. There is not something to be "corrected" -- even if people have been successfully indoctrinated to believe this falsehood. It is ideology.
So. Much. Butt hurt.
DeleteEither you completely adopt every aspect of these guys' paranoid worldview, or you're an SJW.
Wherever you find these kinds of either/or extremes, you know you're dealing with loons.
"So. Much. Butt hurt."
DeleteThis is tinfoil paranoia.
6:13, if someone merely deviates one tiny bit from the feminist ideology, using objective evidence, you respond with childish insults. This is black-and-white thinking. Do you think that a female scientist, like Dame Athene Donald, Master of Churchill College Cambridge, is a "loon"?
DeleteLook, doods. The SJWs see sexism against women under every rock. You guys see sexism against men under every rock. You both accuse anyone who disagrees with you of being on the opposite team.
DeleteBut most of us don't agree with either of you, and think both the bros and the SJWs are paranoid loons. So no, 6:32, I don't think Athene Donald's a loon, I think people on this board who require you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons. Just like the loons on the other boards who require you sign every item on their SJW manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons. (For example, I'm already on their naughty list my "disablist" or "anti-birdist" pejorative use of "loon.")
Now, even if you are right, you and the SJWs the ones seeing people out to get them everywhere, not the rest of us. So how "tinfoil hat" and "paranoid" can be your favorite go-to insults is really pretty bewildering.
But then it's not so bewildering, is it? Since it's the likely response you'll raise, you deflect it by using it first.
Dame Athene Donald is the "unabomber"? Weirdo.
Delete"So no, 6:32, I don't think Athene Donald's a loon, I think people on this board who require you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto or be declared the enemy are loons."
DeleteFollow the bouncing ball, 7:07.
Can you give a citation, 7:12, for your loony paranoid claim that someone "requires you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto"? And why is Athene Donald the "unabomber", you weirdo?
Delete7:01 contrasted unabomber comments with Athene comments.
DeleteImplying the opposite is... unabomber loony.
Eh? 7:01 made the paranoid and bonkers claim that someone "requires you to sign every item on their 100 page unabomberesque manifesto". This is tinfoil hat paranoia. The Athene Donald remark was a joke, intended to rile up 7:01. It had its desired effect - as it is easy to stir the emotions of SJWs, who cannot bear to be challenged.
DeleteIn point of fact, Prof Athene Donald, a female physicist, spoke out against the SJW witch hunt of Prof Tim Hunt. Repeated paranoid tantrums, comparing a prominent female scientist to the "unabomber", do not help the SJW cause a tiny bit. It makes them look like childish, paranoid loons.
7:01 here. For those in need of remedial reading:
DeleteAthene Donald: good.
Butt Hurt Bros in this thread: bad.
"deviating one tiny bit from the feminist ideology" (6:32): good.
endorsing the opposite ideology of the Butt Hurt Bros: bad.
Man, I wish I'd gotten to be the female philosophy professor who gave these guys a B+ one time when they were undergrads, launching their lifelong crusades. Would have been fun.
We also need a handy term like "Social Justice Warrior" to identify these guys, to distinguish reasonable skeptics of extreme feminism from extremists, just as SJW distinguishes a narrow, particularly rabid form of neo-leftism.
We could just go with BHBs, for butt hurt bros.
No one here, 7:01, advocates the "opposite ideology", you paranoid loon. If you imagine someone is "requiring you to sign a unabomber manifesto", this makes you sound paranoid and bonkers. This is why you were ridiculed. The butt hurt is all yours.
DeleteIt's fairly amazing to see the contortions feminists will go through to defend their turf here.
DeleteI don't see how one can argue that women aren't on average distinctly less qualified than men when hired for their positions -- the publication record demonstrates this. But then they retreat to the position that, nonetheless, women are every bit the equal in terms of "talent" as men, and that they are selected for "talent" rather than "qualifications". But what does this even mean, and why might we have reason to believe such a thing in any case?
It is hardly as if there exists some well known set of criteria for "talent" independent of "qualifications". "Talent" can't be treated as some kind of ineffable trait to which hirers have access, which is not reflected in qualifications. When departments or people make decisions about degrees of talent, "qualifications" would naturally play a major role in such determinations. Qualifications are the best objective index of talent, especially given that letters of reference, a quick subjective impression based on an interview, etc., are notoriously unreliable.
Moreover, suppose someone is seeking a woman to fill a position and is willing to relax the need for "qualifications". What reason is there to believe that, nonetheless, he or she is not willing to relax the need for "talent"? In fact, of course, any purported independent notion of "talent" turns out to be almost purely subjective and not subject to falsification--and is thus the easiest thing to fudge if one is seeking to achieve the desired end of hiring a woman.
Indeed, if one were to declare that it is "talent" that departments seek in the case of women over men, one might look for some kind of objective marker of "talent", and then predict that women, at least on that marker, would do as well as men. One such might be the publication of articles in prestige journals. But it turns out that on that score, men are if anything only more dominant, not less -- suggesting that they are only more talented than one might otherwise conclude.
One further point is that if departments seek "talent" instead of qualifications for women, and, supposedly, apply some set of criteria to do so, why couldn't the same new criteria be applied to men, resulting in an even more "talented" group of men for hire? How does this purported shift to a new set of criteria change anything fundamental as to the level of talent present in the overall group of women vs. the group of men?
The real fundamental issue here is: why are women, in fact, so much less qualified as a group than men? They come to the job market in numbers proportional to their numbers in grad school, but they are well less qualified than the men when they do. Nonetheless, they fare at least as well as men in being hired. But the question remains: why are they relatively so unqualified? Why isn't the natural explanation that they are less talented or less hard working?
There's finally just the point that publication is more than an indication of talent; it is a good index of the perseverance to get things published. Obviously, departments care about this as well. Why believe they are willing to relax standards for signs of perseverance, but not for "talent"?
8:31, I think you're reading too much into that. I meant only: the SJWs think there's pervasive bias against women in the profession, and the BHBs think the opposite: there's pervasive bias against men in the profession.
DeleteIf you object to the term "ideology", fine, but keep in mind that an ideology can still be true. In the loose pejorative sense, it's a belief, true or not, held dogmatically with an oversensitivity to disagreement or criticism. In the narrower pejorative sense, it's a motivated belief, such as a belief convenient for reasons of class and economic position.
I think both apply, but I'll give you an example of oversensitivity to disagreement.
At 5:35, I gave an alternative explanation of the publication difference that was *consistent* with the BHB's view that there's anti-male bias. It was a view *on their side,* but more moderate than the claim that talent is the explanation.
In response to suggesting a moderate version of their own view, the BHBs overreactd. 5:42 demanded proof of anti-female bias, even though I'd offered a view that assumed anti-male bias. 5:56 whined about the use of the casual use of the word "assumed", then ignored the alternate explanation rather than arguing against it.
These were reactions to someone offering a view that *agreed* with their basic view.
And that's exactly what happens when you ever so slightly disagree with the SJWs, too. They get way too agitated, they ignore the criticisms, and they repeat the same evidence and arguments without responding to the way the critic's have directly address the evidence and arguments they keep repeating.
Ideology.
The unabomber comparison was a silly joke, silly. Ideologues hate jokes.
[P.S. Dammit, I knew they'd pull this shit eventually! Prove you're not a robot wants me to identify sandwiches. A croissantwich is arguably a sandwich. But a bagel with meat is not a sandwich. No, just no.]
Of course it's amazing, 9:17. The ideological level of resistance to evidence is a shock. The reason one can't even say the obvious explanation - here, of the measured outperformance of women by men - is that it's verboten, illegal. Does not compute. Doesn't fit the narrative.
DeleteState the evidence and then, as we see above, the paranoia nuts appear, like 7:01, who yabbers on with conspiracy theories about imaginary "butt hurt", and an imaginary "unabomber manifesto", and an imaginary "undergrad" who got an imaginary "B+" from an imaginary "female philosopher professor". It's paranoid lunacy.
Keep repeating the magic incantation, and all the scary monsters in your head will go away, 9:29: "Paranoia! Tin foil! Conspiracy theorists!"
DeleteOr tell the doctor to loosen your straps, you'll feel better.
Jokes, they're called.
"epeated paranoid tantrums, comparing a prominent female scientist to the "unabomber","
DeleteOnly nobody did that, loon.
Keep repeating it, though. Since you aren't signing the comments, the repetition serves as a useful identifier.
This sub-thread needs a roar.
DeleteHelp me, Obi Wan Kenobi, the butt hurt unabomber requires me to sign his manifesto!
DeleteI'd like to see the new and improved philosophymetablog do a parody of a Metametablog thread composed entirely of images of tin foil and lions, with all-caps brightly colored text "PARANOID!" "ROAR!," and so on.
DeleteBut then, maybe this place is transcends parody.
*In some cases (of women complaining about the seminar room), it is (good advice- but only some cases, and not most).
ReplyDeleteI sure hope the editorial management software for journals won't tell the editors how often I log in to check up on my submissions.
ReplyDeleteAs for me...I sure hope it will tell the editors this, so that they get the hint to finally deliver a verdict on my #$^!@ paper...
DeleteKudos to Jennings: initially she tried to deny that her results showed a pro female bias, now that there's more evidence in the same direction she has stopped denying it. That's intellectual honesty.
ReplyDelete1:03 above listed the data from CDJ's previous hiring spreadsheet for 2012 and 2013. For example, "Women hired had published less than men did, in fact about half as much" and ".... a majority (54%) of women hired had no publications, as compared with 40% of men" and "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."
DeleteDid Jennings comment on why the statistics show that men outperform women? Also, if the numbers hired are proportionate to those who graduate, this is even further evidence that the outperformance of women by men is balanced by strong pro-female bias.
Seriously, again. Hiring of men would be very different if all someone cared for in a colleague was how many publications he had in top journals. It's not an attempt to derail your "strong pro-female bias" (this is subconscious? This is something most philosophers deny they have, but they are wrong?) thesis. Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee? There are so many publications in top journals that this becomes the "noise." You cannot just say "performance" in philosophy is number of publications, because people do not simply get hired on that basis. You are missing the data that shows the men with the most/ best publications get the job over other men.
DeleteI literally have to remind myself that I just assume men are "smarter" on about a weekly basis. It has been helpful to find that young men now writing in the same kind loopy handwriting style I used to associate with just women. It is really hard for me to believe other people have some general pro-woman bias when it comes to talent in philosophy. I can readily understand wanting a woman in a Department (lots of reasons for that), so I can understand a pro-woman bias there- but people speak about this interest. People openly say they want a woman for a position (for reasons). This seems like important evidence that the hiring bias is an attempt at a correction. (I know what comes next, women are the rapists, etc. etc. The rest of the world just has not caught on, etc. etc.)
Delete5:15, "Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee?"
DeleteOf course. Many times. The pro-female bias is a constant feature of hiring committees and is well-known.
5:27, "This seems like important evidence that the hiring bias is an attempt at a correction."
A "correction" against what? Something that exists only inside your imagination?
5:27, "women are the rapists"
Women routinely rape and sexually assault men, according to major crime surveys in the US and UK. You can lie about this if you like. The evidence contradicts you.
"You are missing the data that shows the men with the most/ best publications get the job over other men."
DeleteHiring would be very different if all someone cared for in a colleague was how many publications he had in top journals. Again, have you ever been on a hiring committee? There are so many publications in top journals that this becomes the "noise." "Performance" in philosophy isn't just number of publications, because people do not simply get hired on that basis.
No one has claimed any such thing, 5:49. Publications are a major measure of academic performance. On this measure, men hired outperform women amongst those hired, as the data listed above shows.
DeleteI don't mean to push too hard here, but am genuinely curious. Publications are a major measure of academic performance, but is it fair to say at a certain level of such performance, surely other factors come into play? Let's say one level is: yes, this person is doing enough top-level work, will get tenure. After reaching that level, even if we look to the very top philosophers, do they actually have more publications than other people in their department, etc.? (I truly don't know so I apologize if someone has done this counting up.)
DeleteOther factors include
Delete- teaching evaluations,
- unpublished work,
- letters of recommendation,
- conference presentations,
- research statement
- interview performance.
Feminist activists are trying to downplay the publication measure, because it transpired that men are outperforming women amongst the cohort hired. Had the data been the other way round, feminists would be broadcasting it from the rooftops.
Academic success correlates moderately well with h-index. There are a few significant outliers - Gettier and Wittgenstein, for example. In philosophy, an assistant prof might have h-index of 2-3; an associate professor around 5-9; a full professor usually >10.
Yes, kudos to her and all her hard work.
Delete8:55, yes, and particularly quality of the published work.
DeleteOne of my senior colleagues got tenure (fairly recently) with seven published papers. Another former colleague failed to get tenure despite have fifteen published papers. I wasn't party to the meetings (I'm more junior) but I hear the tenure letters were weak -- the fifteen papers were competent but not original or trend-setting.
Yeah, I'm a little worried. Better start setting trends soon...
It's helpful to remember that, often when these discussions happen, posters admit that SC members regularly consider factors that fall completely outside the list of other merit-tracking factors--e.g., the fact that the department is too male, that female profs would attract more female majors, that the discipline itself is too male. Of course, it's possible that these anonymous posters are just lying, but we can't just assume this is the case. So, yes. pubs are only one merit-tracking factor, but merely pointing out that some female candidates may have other strong merit-tracking features does nothing to address the seemingly common practice of weighting non-merit-tracking factors.
DeleteSee the information at https://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html --despite the URL, the information is updated to 2015. At places with less than 20% female faculty, of which there are many, and at non-PhD granting programs like that too, I bet there is often a lot of pressure to hire female faculty. (Both internally, from faculty who think this would be good for various reasons, and externally from Dean-y types.)
DeleteIt is a further question whether it is justifiable to give some preference to female applicants when your department has 7% or 15% female faculty.
I was looking for the perfect video of a roar so that I could post it here, and I was reminded of two things: (1) that Warner Brother's had some really racist and sexist cartoons, (2) that lions are really cool animals.
ReplyDeleteNo perfect roars though.
Not sexist anymore, citizen. Trans-positive:
Deletehttp://www.philpercs.com/2015/09/is-bugs-bunny-trans.html#more
I said "some". And stop. It's good that we're letting people be who they are now.
DeleteNot really disagreeing, 9:34!
DeleteIn fact, I think that post is symptomatic of the current political climate. Cartoon representations of femininity that once most would agree are insulting to women not only in their exagerrated form but in their essentialist implications, are now rebranded as progressive, because they fit the current ideological obsession with trans-identity.
In other words, the theoretical underpinnings of trans-discourse contradict those of feminism.
I'm not saying that this can't be resolved, but it's a problem that the left is ignoring it.
I also think it's good to let people be who they are. Who suggested otherwise?
As it happens, I don't think any one "really is" a man or a woman in any essentialist way. So, sure, trans people believing they're essentially a given gender is no worse than non-trans people believing the same.
But I do think the more progressive position is to say all sex, sexuality, andgender categories are bullshit, not to constantly invent new varieties of bullshit.
Especially when the new varieties are counterproductive, reinforcing stereotypes about true womanhood and diverting progressive attention away from the real economic inequalities that are the primary source of the suffering and powerlessness of minorities of all kinds.
"... a roar so that I could post it here"
DeleteHello Tinny!
JFP: Jobs for Phemales
ReplyDeleteis Louie Generis really just JW?
ReplyDelete"I'm sorry that people are trying to correct for sexism and you're not getting your dream jobs.
ReplyDeleteExcept I'm not that sorry, because I'm a white person, and I don't get all bent out of shape when attempts to correct racism work against me."
Except if you're a white woman then you don't need to worry about that, because affirmative action helps white women more than anyone.
I am still waiting for someone to put forward a decent argument (moral or prudential) for the claim that the gender imbalance in philosophy is something we ought to try to correct. Absent such an argument, all the hand-wringing about the CDJ data and its implications strikes me as largely pointless.
ReplyDeleteThe argument was supposed to be that the imbalance is due to implicit bias and all sorts of discrimination. And it probably is, given that most people working now were hired decades ago. What his has to do with giving an unfair advantage to current female advantages, as borne out by the CDJ data, beats me.
Delete*current female _applicants_
Delete