It has been a long time since I have encountered blatant and overt sexism at a philosophy conference. So, I admit being surprised. And I admit thinking immediately, “Wait, why am I surprised?” I was having lunch at the conference hotel restaurant with three other philosophers–all men–who were attending the conference. This is really good conference that was started three years ago and all of us had attended every year since its inception. A prominent male philosopher approached the table. He jovially shook hands with all three of the men at the table, commenting on the fact that they, along with him, had become regulars at the conference. Not only did he not shake my hand, he did not even acknowledge my presence. I doubt any of the men I was sitting with noticed that he blatantly ignored me. I chose not to ask them later if they had noticed, not wanting to deal with the standard sorts of excuses they may have offered given that the attribution of sexism is always (like anything) underdetermined by the evidence. I decided to cut my emotional losses: It would have been worse to have it happen and then have witnesses deny that it happened than just to have it happen.
While philosophy is no longer (technically) my department (I’m now a postgrad in classics) and I’m not a woman, I just wanted to express how very grateful I am for all that this blog does. I have seen, so many times, women casually cut out of philosophical conversations, talked over, or otherwise marginalised. I have found it very hard to stand up to people when they aren’t being explicitly or overtly sexist, but are still excluding women. It makes it slightly easier to do this, when I keep in mind all the stories I’ve read on this blog. Just wanted to say thanks, I suppose, and how humble I feel, knowing that the women who equal me in achievement are often far exceeding me in effort. Getting rid of this kind of discrimination would make philosophy a better environment for everyone, even those of us not directly impacted by it. So again, thanks. I didn’t have anything positive to contribute, but felt that (even if you get a hundred of these e-mails a day) you might like to know some of us would like to do better, and are glad when we are asked to.
After I was placed in the very last session of two consecutive conference programs, I started noticing that those very last sessions of conferences, which hardly anyone attends, and last sessions of the day, during which nobody can concentrate, are where most of the female speakers get stuck. Just the latest example I was perusing has 4 female speakers out of 49, and 3 are in the last sessions of the day, 1 in the second last. At least there’s always the old “I have to leave early to get home to my kids” excuse for switching to an earlier session.
On being part of a couple: 6 years ago my husband accepted a very prestigious professorship at University X in country Y. I work in the same field but am much more junior (at the time I was 10 years out of my Ph.D.), so I did not ask for a position for myself, though I did expect to be offered a minor, temporary position. Before leaving for the new job the star philosopher who had recruited my husband met with me to discuss my options. The star philosopher suggested to me that I put together a combination of grants and working half-time in a particular segment of the commercial sector, consonant with my interests. (For the sake of anonymity let us say it is a restaurant, more or less what the level was here.) I objected to this, wanting to remain in academia. My career wasn’t going badly at all! We agree that I would apply for grants for two years, and then everyone would take stock at that point.
I did not handle the suggestion to work (even half-time) outside of academia, or the remark of one colleague, that my husband’s salary is so high, why did I even need a job?or the general atmosphere, very well. In fact I was so upset, I mentioned my situation to a few of my husband’s new colleagues (at parties, after a glass of wine). They did not feel sympathy for me—probably a natural response, when someone is indiscreet in that way.
Final result: I very soon come to be regarded as “difficult.” The grant situation doesn’t really work out, although I do end up getting funded for 1.5 years, sort of after the fact. Life in country Y becomes untenable, in spite of friendships formed with some very nice people in the end. My husband and I both return to our previous jobs. I obtain tenure. My career takes up where it left off. I publish, I receive prestigious fellowships, I receive numerous invitations to speak—though never in country Y, which has hosted so many in my field.
Moral(s) of the story: When you are exposed to sexism, don’t lose your composure. You are supposed to be quiet about it. Second moral of the story: don’t tag along when your other half gets a great job, hoping you will be offered something too. Third moral of the story: work hard and you will be able to look back on the hard times from a better position.
Since it has been a while since there has been an update, I just wanted to say that there are so many more stories than the ones that get posted here. I hear horror stories from friends of mine. They are not my stories to share, so I won’t repeat details. It is just sickening that the misogyny in our profession is so pervasive, and so many of the stories are things you’d never know about unless you were personally involved, or unless someone who was involved told you directly.
The process was completely unfair
Posted: January 10, 2012 by Jender in women held to different standardThis happened within the last three years. I had to be on a search committee outside my area because I’m the only woman in the department (our affirmative action office doesn’t like male-only search committees). It was clear from the beginning that half the committee already had their guy chosen and the other half had their guy (both guys already having been met on the conference circuit). But to please affirmative action, a woman also had to be offered a campus visit. There was an excellent female candidate from a top-5 program, with glowing letters of rec (the other two candidates were from much lower-ranked programs). But for one of the committee members, what finally swayed him to vote for her to get a campus visit was that he happened to know she was married to a top-notch person in a cognate field, and “I’m sure her husband checks over her work, so that gives me more confidence that her work is good.” So we had the campus visits and the female candidate did very well. Nearly everyone agreed she was the smartest of the three. She was also described as “charming” and “delightful.” Now there was a danger she might actually be hired. Suddenly new concerns were raised. Her website was checked to see how far along her papers were. Her dissertation summary was read to see if it was really that promising. And then a search committee member contacted a buddy of his, someone who just graduated from a second-tier program and who happens to know the candidate. The buddy said those glowing letters of rec from top people didn’t really mean anything because the people in her (top-5) program were just trying to get her out. So on the basis of that one junior person’s word, all the letters were discounted. That, added to the vague worries about her potential, torpedoed her case, and we hired one of the guys who had been wanted all along. I think a good case could have been made for hiring any of the three candidates, so it’s not that the outcome was unjust, but the process itself was completely unfair. Unfortunately, I have no way to prove that — it would be my word against everyone else’s — so I’ve just kept my mouth shut.
I turned in my final copy of my dissertation two weeks ago. I had a bad dissertation experience in a department that went through diversity training some years back after complaints from (the few) female graduate students. I was originally scheduled to defend seven months ago, but my defense was canceled the night before my defense because 1)two members of my committee did not read my dissertation until the day before my original defense date, 2)these same two members had issues with four of the five original chapters, 3)one of the two went out of the country for the month after my original defense date.
I spent the summer revising to meet the demands of the one committee member who did not leave the country. This involved doubling one of the chapters that involved a lot of formal work. At the end of the summer, the member who went out of the country still had not read the complete dissertation, but insisted on my adding an additional chapter. This same member still hadn’t read the entire dissertation right up until two weeks before my defense.
After my defense my director apologized for the delay, and another member emailed an apology. Over the summer the member of my committee who is outside of my department emailed me twice to remind me that his role on my committee was to act on behalf of the Graduate College to ensure fairness.
I was offered a teaching fellowship last year, but lost it because I was not allowed to defend before the beginning of the fall semester. I am on the market again, and the prospects for my specialization are not good this year. The advice that my placement director gave me is not to lose hope because there are many success stories from our department. All of these stories are about male graduate students. He had no success stories for former female graduate students.
I can’t help but think that all of this happened to me because I am female with a specialization dominated by males.
At the end of my APA talk, I was gathering my papers and still fielding some questions. A placement officer from a Leiterific department came up to another panel member – who may or may not have been on a search committee, but certainly represents a department in the middle of a hiring process – and greeted him warmly, than lowered his voice to say ‘You guys are giving our guy a shot at this, right’? I happen to know that this department is in the middle of a hiring process because my application is presumably somewhere in the ‘not interested’ pile, as we speak.
While at the APA, I also attended the talk on implicit bias, which nearly deteriorated into a fight over whether prestige bias (bias in favour of prestigious institutions) is a good heuristic, or a moral failing.
My worry, in putting these 2 issues together, is a reminder that prestige bias doesn’t function on its own. It functions alongside an old-boys-club style of networking that we should be (and perhaps are) embarrassed about as professional philosophers.
I am a graduate student at a top five Leiter department and was on the market this year (2011). I had seven interviews at the APA (three at Leiter ranked schools) and one on campus visit at a top twenty Leiter department. My husband was also on the market, he had six APA interviews. While walking with my husband from the smoker back up to our hotel room, one member of a search committee who had interviewed my husband stopped to talk to him. At some point, he turned to me and posed the question (not to me but to my husband), “is this your wife?” My husband said yes. After asking me directly what I do and where I went to school, he then asks if I am on the market. I say, “yes.” He asks how many interviews I have had, and my husband chimes in on my behalf, “well, she has more than me.” Then this male philosopher at a top thirty Leiter school smiles condescendingly at me, turns to my husband and says, “Don’t worry, it’s just because you have a Y chromosome.” I just stand there awkwardly, in disbelief, and then walk away.
I’ve faced a lot of sexism in my days in grad school, but this charming episode just about takes the cake.
I think of quitting when…
Posted: December 20, 2011 by Jender in failure to act, failure to challenge sexism, failure to take women seriously, ignoring women, insults, trivialising womenQuitting teaching philosophy in my department is on my mind:
Every time my male colleague laughs at me behind my back with our students.
Every time my male colleague ridicules me in front of our students.
Every time my male colleague asks our students to discuss my teaching style with him behind my back.
Every time my male colleague dismisses a point I make in a meeting without good reason, and expects that his mere dismissal of my point is sufficient for others, and myself, to accept his position.
Every time my male colleague treats me with utter contempt, then turns around and asks for my advice on student issues/publishing/the job market/life in general.
Every time my male colleagues pretend they are not on campus so they don’t have to meet with me to discuss departmental business, and sit laughing together about the fact that I am on my own in my office trying to run a meeting effectively through google chat instead of meeting with them in person.
Every time one male colleague, who claims to be a feminist, follows the lead of the other male colleague in demeaning or marginalizing me, presumably because it’s easier for him to fall in line than to challenge oppression.
This post really resonated with me: my male-dominated subfield is *exactly the same*. I see the same quiet resistance to engaging with the ideas of even well-known women in the field. Their views are sometimes mentioned, but are largely ignored compared to their male counterparts. Even when they are well known, few people engage with their ideas in print. Citation occurs, but only minimally. In contrast, work by men which seems about equal in quality or even inferior to the work by these women is often picked up and discussed and often engaged with in print, allowing the male author to easily “enter the field”.
It’s a powerful way to subtly exclude women. In fairness, I suspect people (both male and female) don’t even realize they are doing it.
Unsettling incidents
Posted: December 12, 2011 by Jender in insults, pretty women are stupid, women are incompetentThough I have found many of my colleagues and professors over my several years in philosophy to be positive, there have been some incidents which have made feel uneasy about being a woman in a philosophy department.
The first incident arose when a fellow grad student went on a pseudo-scientific rant in front of many female grad students about how females are just wired in a way that is inferior to men, and as such would always be inferior philosophers (or mathematicians, or anything that involves complex reasoning).He also went on to claim that girls were just too emotional to be as rational thinkers as men. He was very convinced of these facts, and many students in the department were offended (both male and female). What compounded matters, was the fact that though the females in the department chose to largely ignore his baseless comments, one male student in the department decided to take on the “knight in shining armor” position and actually physically attacked the gentleman in question for his comments. While it is nice to know that even males recognize these sort of comments as offensive and baseless, the way he reacted was as though he thought that we, the passive, meek females needed some sort of valiant hero to “protect our honour” for us. This did nothing to help the cause.
The second set of incidents revolves around the idea that women cannot be both intelligent and attractive. I have had one professor, after knowing me for several years, confide in me that when I first took his class he automatically assumed that because I was “pretty” that I was also stupid, but then was eventually surprised to learn, once he placed my name and essays to my face, that I was actually not a complete idiot. He also said the he assumed most pretty students were idiots. This is related to another incident where one of my other female colleagues was made fun of by a professor for not “dressing like a philosopher,” just because she chose to dress in a “mainstream stylish” sort of way. I fail to see how either looks or attire has anything to do with “being a philosopher” or being intelligent.
Something which has come up only obliquely on this blog is the issue of credibility. It seems that when male philosophers propose theories, even very implausible ones, they are given weight in the way that women doing the same simply are not. In my field for example, I have proposed something like a theory of X. Now there are male philosophers who are also working on problems related to X, whose names one hears constantly, who regularly appear on lists of plenary speakers at meeting related to X, whose names then get attached to theories, which people then write about etc. But I can only think of one woman whose ideas are discussed in the literature. And this is not a small field.
It is not that I feel neglected especially, but I cannot foresee a day when my name will be attached to a theory, or even an example, in the way that has happened with the men working in my subject. Now I cannot speak for other fields necessarily, but my sense is that this holds true for philosophy in general.
Male philosophers seem to enter “the discussion,” if not the canon; women philosophers rarely do.
Confessions of a “Golden Boy”
Posted: December 6, 2011 by Jender in failure to act, failure to challenge sexism, ignoring women, implicit bias, trivialising women, women are tokensRecent mention of ‘golden boys’ reminded me of an experience I had in grad school. One year, my department had an opportunity to nominate a single PhD student to contend for a substantial dissertation research grant from the University. Unbeknownst to me, my ‘golden boy’ status led to my nomination; in doing so, the department passed over another extremely well-qualified female student. But, one of the department’s few female faculty members took it upon herself to nominate the female student in addition to me.
As it turns out the selection committee got it right, and the better candidate won. When the winner was announced, a senior (male) faculty member took it upon himself to inform me of the situation. He told me that, I was the department’s “unanimous top choice”; that female faculty member X was “being insubordinate” by going “behind the department’s back”; and that the winner “wouldn’t have won had she not been a female”.
It would take far too long to list every aspect of implicit and explicit bias, subtle and blatant sexism in this brief conversation. I was simply shocked, particularly since I wouldn’t have known any different had this faculty member not pulled me aside. All I could manage to say was that I was happy my fellow student had won, and that I was convinced she really deserved it more than I did.
Looking back, I wish I had taken the opportunity to call out the sexism on this occasion (and in particular to stand up for the actions of the female faculty member). It still bothers me, and makes me question whether the other benefits I received in grad school were merited, or were merely the result of gender bias in my favor.
A list of worries
Posted: December 5, 2011 by Jender in double standards, failure to take women seriously, trivialising womenA list of worries I have for female assistant professors…
These worries, which may be a little clumsy, constitute a sort of working list that I stay more or less conscious of. I just keep seeing these issues arise, and have dealt with them first hand in my own case. In every case they echo [stories I have recently seen in discussions on the internet]
Do not coauthor, you will not get credit for your work like a male colleague would.
You are expected to be a good teacher, so the outlier comments on your student reviews will be a focus of your colleagues. They will expect you to satisfy the class entirely, since you are female.
You will not get credit for any invited publications, regardless of where they go. (This happened to me.)
Invited talks will not count.
You will be asked by your colleagues “who you know” when it comes to any invitation. Again, you will not get credit for these like your male colleagues will.
You can gauge the low expectations your colleagues have for your work by their first reaction to news of a publication- what question do they ask? If it reveals the expectation that your publication is in a lower quality venue than it in fact is, then you have an uphill battle. Your tenure packet will need to be much better than it would be if you were similar but male.
The poster sent a follow-up email noting that despite these worries she did get tenure.
The Smoker: What are we, as a profession, thinking??
Posted: November 15, 2011 by Jender in harassment, implicit bias, Maleness of philosophyI have two small children and am pregnant with my third, and will be “on the market” for the first time this year. This means traveling to APA with my husband and two children (one is still breastfeeding), working out child care for several days of interviewing, and trying to find clothing that calls as little attention as possible to my pregnant belly.
All this is frustrating enough. But APA interviewing also means spending several nights up late, standing in uncomfortable shoes in a hotel ballroom, sipping cranberry juice while talking to tipsy prospective employers at that monstrosity we call the “smoker.” Has the injustice of this been sufficiently remarked-upon? All the literature on interviewing suggests that it is best done in a structured setting where each candidate gets an equal chance to speak and the effects of bias are kept to a minimum, so what do we think is going to happen when we conduct a second round of “informal” interviews, now late at night, over drinks, and in a dimly lit room? Those of us with small children or heavy sleep needs just need to deal with it, I guess. While I know that there are plenty of men who face these challenges as well, it is hard to imagine a better piece of evidence of the maleness of our profession.
But hey, look at the bright side: the only other time I’ve attended the smoker, I was hit on. This time around, my pregnant figure is likely to keep me from being subjected to that.
Women’s treatment of women
Posted: November 12, 2011 by Jender in Failed efforts to not be sexist, failure to perceive problem, failure to take women seriously, ignoring women, lack of mentoring, presence of womenI am a grad student in a department with a heavy focus on critical theory. Interestingly enough-and perhaps as a result of the strong focus on gender studies in our department-the male faculty members are fairly respectful when dealing with female students and colleagues. The real issues have emerged between the female faculty and female students. Despite attempts at forming a women’s caucus, and despite the fact that our centre is headed by two very distinguished women, the female faculty consistently treat their female students in a patronizing and disinterested manner, while choosing “golden boys” among the other students. Their behavior ranges from condescendingly refusing to acknowledge the arguments and questions of female students in seminars, to discouraging their projects altogether. I have a theory that their own experiences as women in philosophy forced them to be so competitive and hostile; as “exception women” they are more comfortable taking on their male colleagues and feel threatened or insecure about working with other females. Ladies–it’s hard enough being women in philosophy, so let’s not make it any worse for each other.
When a male colleague was invited by a prestigious research-oriented department/university to visit for a semester, the chair of our department took this as a sign that he was in high demand and would be recruited away from the department. He put him up for early tenure and promotion. A few years later, when the same prestigious department/university invited me to visit for a semester, the same chair of our department completely dismissed my value as a research by commenting to me that “they are interested in finding people who are good teachers.”
I’m dealing with the same thing
Posted: November 8, 2011 by Jender in retaliation, sexual harassmentOn your latest post: about having a sexual harasser in your dept. I am having the same problem. Issue is he has accused me and branded me as such by the university where I am studying. Thanks for your blog. It helps to feel less lonely.
