Katharina Nieswandt (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Concordia University) alerted me to this new study on the gender ratio in philosophy. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, it provides the first inferential-statistical model of the causes of gender-inequality in the profession. Their primary findings?:
Overall, our findings provide (of course defeasible) evidence for the claim that students choose philosophy because they perceive a good fit between philosophy, qua requiring brilliance, and themselves, qua being brilliant, combative, systematizing, and indifferent towards “worldly rewards,” like family-life and money.
Future research should investigate whether these factors are causes of the gender gap or perhaps partly the result of a self-serving, stereotypical image that philosophy students develop after choosing philosophy as their major (perhaps reinforced by the discipline’s culture). More research is also needed of the relations between combativeness, systematizing, and the sense of belonging in philosophy: Is combativeness really the driving factor behind gender differences on these variables, as our research suggests? In addition, it would be important to test to what extent our results generalize to comparisons between philosophy and other fields than psychology.
Philosophical readers will ultimately be most interested in interventions. Foundational research rarely licenses pragmatic steps directly, of course, but the following two inferences appear justified: First, there probably is no quick fix for philosophy’s unequal gender ratio, since that might be part and parcel of a general social perception of certain abilities, character traits and life priorities as female or male. Second, pre-university interventions might be necessary, given the well-replicated finding that gender stereotypes develop early...
Comments