But one question: has anyone thought of asking women who’ve dropped out at some point why they did? I realize that from the social sciences perspective asking people why they make the choices they do is unprofessional but it might be worth a shot.

I can tell you exactly why, though my dissertation was in metaphysics I ended up spending most of my career writing on feminism and issues in “applied ethics.” Shortly after I got a tenure-track position, a senior colleague came into my office for a chat and told me that he knew a sure way for me to get tenure: I should “get into feminism.”

It’s also easy enough to see why women are more scared about job prospects: the non-academic options for men with “worthless humanities degrees” and without special credentials are better for men than they are for women. English and other traditional humanities disciplines are teachable; the new subjects that attract women—apparel merchandising, nutrition science or whatever—provide vocational credentials. Philosophy provides a generic humanities degree that isn’t either. Guys believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that with a generic humanities degree they still have viable non-academic fallback positions—generic entry-level office park positions where there’s some hope for advancement into management. Women recognize that there are no decent fallback positions: every reasonably educated woman is by default a secretary—sorry, “administrative assistant”—unless she gets some special vocational credential.

We’re homo economicus we are—remember, that’s “homo” not “vir.”

1. A higher percentage of students attend universities in the U.S. than in most other countries, with much of the growth taking place in the last few decades. Moreover, much of the student population growth is due to women. This makes me wonder if, say, the population of students were smaller, the gender balance in philosophy might be closer to 50-50. In other words, many more students now come to U.S. universities to study business, education, nursing, etc., and perhaps these are disproportionately women. (The number of philosophy majors, for what it’s worth, has stayed fairly steady for a long time, even though it has declined as a percentage of student majors.)

2. A lot of U.S. universities give their students many more options than they might have elsewhere. At my university, students can major in Apparel Merchandising, Nutrition Science, Urban Planning, and something called “Liberal Studies”. Perhaps women are attracted away from more traditional academic disciplines in favor of these?

We had 57 seniors graduating with a major in philosophy last year. Of those exactly 2/3 were men (38) and 1/3 women (19). I think this 2/3-1/3 split pretty much accords with the distribution of our majors over the last several years.

To obtain honors in philosophy, students have to write a senior thesis. 20 seniors completed the senior thesis; of those 8 were women and 12 men. 10 students received honors on their thesis; 3 were women and 7 men. These numbers fit with the overall 2/3-1/3 split.

Finally, we had 9 students go on to graduate study this year(most of them students who graduated in 2008 or 2007): 6 men (two to MA programs) and 3 women (all 3 to PhD programs). So that is again pretty much in line with the 2/3-1/3 split.

As to the department itself, we have a women in philosophy group which is mainly active among the graduate students. We have an active philosophy club which was co-founded by a female undergraduate student, who is now off to graduate school, but we don’t have an undergraduate women’s philosophy group. We have 4 women on the philosophy faculty out of 20 tenured or tenure-track faculty members (including faculty with concurrent appointments in other units and not counting two male non-tenure track faculty). We don’t have an introduction to philosophy class, but in the Philosophical Perspectives sequence in the Humanities Core, taken by first year students as one choice among several sequences, my anecdotal impression from 6 years of teaching is that the split is closer to 50-50.

Explanations? I don’t have any.

I stress this because I think it is an American habit to insist that one is color blind or gender blind. I suspect that this is exactly why Stephen Colbert successfully gets laughs when he milks his insistence of his “blindness” on his television show. We laugh because we recognize it as an American cultural expectation, that gender/race/difference shouldn’t matter, and that (well-intentioned) people affect not to notice it.

Therefore, I briefly criticized commentators on Leiter’s blog who insisted chauvinist comments are obviously irrelevant to philosophers’ works. This is demonstrably untrue on notable occasions (Kant, in particular, reveals a great deal of fascinating metaphysical commitments in the course of detailing the scarce rational capacities of women). More importantly, to persist in insisting that we “read around” such comments in the canon is to continue to deny recognition to, or to misrecognize, those students in the room on the losing side of a gendered comment. I realize that to insist it is irrelevant is well-intentioned. However, it is not the way to proceed. It is also a partial answer as to why women and minorities do not get the impression that they are, as Margaret Walker has so eloquently said, “welcome to enter and expected to enter.”

I agree that we shouldn’t expect the same kind of explanation everywhere. I just mean to sound a note of caution about alleged explanations of American data that would suggest false predictions about Australia, Brazil, Holland, etc. I think there hasn’t been nearly enough attention in this literature to differences between cultures, and how this impacts what happens in philosophy.

Richard,

That’s an interesting hypothesis. I don’t know which Australian states have high school philosophy – maybe there will be an interesting gender gap between those that do and those that don’t.

I have to say though, I’m reasonably sceptical about this ‘explanation’ because of the Aust-US comparison. I’d say that philosophy degrees are much more useful in the US than in Australia. That’s because in the US, philosophy degrees are excellent stepping stones to law school, and law school is really lucrative. But in Australia law is an undergraduate degree – philosophy is much less clearly useful.