Kieran Healy posts a very good follow-up to (among other things) my earlier post on why there aren’t more women in philosophy. I think a lot of the points he makes are correct, but I’m still not sure it gets to the heart of the matter. Kieran notes a number of reasons why some academic fields, particularly well-established academic fields, might be less friendly than they think they are towards women coming into the profession. Those are presumably among the causes of there being so few women in philosophy. But they aren’t I think the only causes.

At least from my occasional observations, the gender split in philosophy is already present in undergraduate classes. (Remember class, the plural of anecdote is data.) And while that may be caused in part by there being so few women in the professorship, I’d be surprised if it’s the only reason.

I’d be more surprised if the reason was something particularly to with the subject matter of philosophy. Kieran gives one (pretty conclusive) batch of reasons for thinking this is not the root cause, let me add another. Much of analytic philosophy is very close, in subject matter and approach, to theoretical work in linguistic and cognitive sciences. And those fields do not, as far as I can tell, have anything like as striking a gender gap, even within the more theoretically oriented sub-fields. Some areas of analytic philosophy, notably ethics and history, are not like cognitive science, but those are the areas that do best at attracting and keeping women. The idea that there is some distinctive characteristic of analytic metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language that is not shared by either analytic ethics or philosophical history, or by formal semantics or theoretical cognitive science, and it’s this characteristic that drives women from the profession, is not highly plausible.

But that doesn’t get to the heart of explaining why our undergrad classes are so imbalanced, especially compared to all nearby fields. I’d be disappointed if the suggestions Kieran makes, that women are held to a higher standard, that the profession is just displaying a familiar tendency towards homogeny, and so forth, turned out to be major parts of the explanation of this phenomenon. But when it comes to social sciences the argument Brian would be disappointed by p therefore not-p is not exactly valid.