http://lemmingsblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/apa-report-status-of-women-in.html

I also hope so. Does anybody know of any other existing relevant study?

In the “top” 20 grad departments according to the Leiter report, and based on Leiter’s list of faculty, though confirmed either by contact with a member of the department or by website with photos, there are about 19% women.

I’ve done research on the number of women published in seven “top” journals over the past five years. One notable result was that in Mind, 95.5% of the articles (not including discussions and book reviews) are by men. The percentages of women in Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs look better than the others.

However, if we look at journals in related fields oriented towards language and mind we find this:
Mind and Language: 26.5% women
Linguistics and Philosophy: 24.4% women

I don’t have access to numbers of submissions, numbers of papers sent out to referees, refereeing processes, etc. All of this should be examined before we can bs clear what conclusions to draw.

After the APA I intend to publish my comments in the Hypatia “musings” column, and will also make the data available on a website.

“I’m not sure what ‘minimal care’ I need to make to make a tentative hypothesis on my own blog; I considered myself to have sufficient reason to mention it that it seemed worth thinking about to me.”

Well, when one entertains a thought such as “Men and women vary in their styles of writing and arguing” I think one needs to be careful. May I ask him what is his sufficient reason to think that this proposition seems to be true. Surely he is free to say all sorts of things in his blog but I assume some sort of explication must be available for the remarks of a philosopher if he wants to be read and understood by others.

But even if the explanation is entirely that women disproportionately publish in ethics, and “top journals” disproportionately don’t publish ethics, there remain fairly specific places where sexism could rear its head; most of this could well be unconscious sexism, done without malice, but for that reason all the more difficult to fight. If this is the (or an) explanation, we should certainly worry about these three factors:

(1) Why do women disproportionately specialize in ethics? Is it that they’re made relatively unwelcome in epistemology/metaphysics/science?

(2) Why do top journals publish relatively little ethics? Do people unconsciously devalue ethics because the field is considered feminized?

(3) Alternatively, why aren’t more journals that do specialize in ethics considered top journals? Again, is ethics unconsciously devalued because it’s considered more of a woman’s field?

Of course I’m layering speculation on speculation here. But I think there is some evidence that ethics is undervalued; Kieran Healy’s study of the Leiter rankings showed that strength in ethics contributed less to a department’s overall prestige than strength in metaphysics/mind/language, epistemology, or philosophy of science each taken individually. And I think the pattern is pretty widespread outside of academia that jobs that women hold are ipso facto considered less prestigious, so it wouldn’t be too surprising to see something similar working in philosophy.

I also think that it might be worth adding history to the list; in my experience the history applicant pool has more women in it than M&E pools, and general-interest journals seem to publish even less history than ethics, while history ranks below ethics in the Healy study.

I know lots of philosophers, male and female, have suggested to me that a large percentage of female philosophers work in areas that relate to ethics, especially applied ethics. Their reason for thinking this is based on the fact that, in their experience on the hiring committee of a Canadian university, where affirmative action is taken rather seriously, it is difficult to find very many females within an applicant pool working in, say, M&E (of course numerically there are many who do, relative to none, but the point is what percentage that makes up of the total number of female philosophers, and I am suggesting it is low(ish)). Instead, the emphasis seems to be on ethics.

If there is, in fact, a lean in the AOS of female philosophers towards ethics, and applied ethics especially, then perhaps that might be a partial explanation of why there are so few papers in top journals by women. One might partially test this hypothesis just by looking at female philosophers in top programs, and how many publish in top journals AND how many in journals that specialize in applied ethics.
Since top journals publish in, hopefully, most areas, and if a large percentage of female philosophers are working primarily in one particular area, an area that might be likely to be underrepresented in such journals in the first place (e.g. applied ethics), then perhaps the underrepresentation is to be expected.

Even if this tentative suggestion is true, I still think the underrepresentation is unaccceptable. This is merely a different explanation of it.

Second: What are the reason(s) for this?

1. Something in the work itself? (could be: women are more likely to have a ‘womanly’ writing style, which the mostly male reviewers respond less well to; could be that submitted work by women tends to be in areas that are less ‘hot’; could be that the work is of lower quality, and thus gets rejected at higher rates…)

2. Something external to work? (Could be: women just submit fewer articles; women are less likely to submit to ‘top’ journals; journal editors/reviewers are often aware of who wrote the paper and are more likely to reject a known woman paper than a known man paper; men are more likely to network with other men and this gives advantage at the review stage…)

I myself have always been struck by the seemingly lower publication rate of top women when compared to top men. It seems worthwhile to think a bit harder about the probably varied reasons why this is so.