I noted yesterday that the Gavagai had noted my disposition to generalise wildly about the gender balance of the profession on the basis of little data. But I hadn’t meant to be referring to this:

Which is exactly the sort of reason why a study of the issue should be taken from a reasonable statistical point of view: between the anecdotal whinging of philosophers and the “oooh!” tone of this Business Week article, it’s hard to discern the truth of the matter.

The Business Week article notes that girls are outperforming boys in high schools across the country, and now easily outnumber boys on most college campuses. The ratio is apparently approaching 3:2 in some major universities. I don’t think Brown is quite at that level, but I imagine it does have more women than men amongst its undergraduate population. So are our discussions about so few women being in philosophy classes just ‘anecdotal whinging’? Well, maybe. So I ran some numbers. The following is the percentage of women in various undergrad philosophy classes at Brown this semester (i.e. Spring 2003).

Overall: 35%

In classes taught by women: 34%
In classes taught by men: 36%

In freshman classes: 35%
In mid-level classes: 37%
In upper-level classes: 32%

In freshman classes taught by women: 30%

Now there are obviously some common causes here. The fact that we have a largely male faculty (9 men, 2 women) could be playing a role here. But there’s a pattern to the numbers here. I’m not familiar enough with various statistical approaches to know exactly how likely it is that a student body that is 55% (or more) female could produce these kinds of numbers by chance, but I’m sure it is miniscule. (There were over 400 students between all these classes, so it’s a significant sample.) None of the 13 classes we offered this semester had a female majority – all were 57% or more male.

This is only one campus one semester, so it’s not exactly the most compelling data. But it is a little information beyond just my anecdotal observation. One interesting point is that we don’t really seem to be losing women along the way – the numbers at the three levels are all within the range you’d expect through random noise. Another is that it’s not because we had only men teach freshman classes that we’re turning people away. We just aren’t getting the enrollments to start with. This was spring, so maybe I should go back and look at Fall classes for a comparison to that.