Avoid the elites

As an UG, I attended a university that is moderate to mediocre in reputation. I say this as someone from a city that is highly concentrated with Ivy-leagues and their close seconds, so I went into the school feeling like I was already as a bit of a disadvantage if I wanted an academic career.

I chose to major in philosophy and a science, and pursue a B.S. over a B.A. I was maybe one of a handful of women in both departments when I started school, something that really changed (to my excitement) by the time I graduated. While in both of these departments, I was consistently approached by professors to participate in various out-of-classroom academic events, asked to mentor or speak with younger students (sometimes females, but most of the time just youngins) and even given a scholarship award based on merit in the philosophy department (ironically, the day I was awarded was the day I told them I had decided to minor in philosophy but fulfill the entire curriculum- I didn’t want to take the liberal arts requirements to get a B.A. as opposed to the B.S.). Suffice to say, I, as a very young-looking, outspoken, and conventionally good-looking enough female, was treated as one of the most favored students in the entire department (I not only felt/ appreciated this, but was told this by many other students in the department). As a consequence, other students (male and female) came to me with respectful, even playful discourses (I remember running away laughing from a male philosophy student as he shouted through our dorm room, “Examples don’t constitute arguments!”) and some even came to me for advice on papers when we were in the same classes. I had an excellent experience, graduated with my degree in science, and never looked back at it with anything but fond memories.

It wasn’t until reading this site, hearing from other female Philosophy students, and looking further into the matter that I realized that my situation wasn’t the norm. It had never even occurred to me that I should or could have been grateful for being treated the way all the other students were treated- that this was such a persistent and pervasive problem in other schools, and that I was lucky to escape something I didn’t know still existed.

I think the main difference here, honestly, is that because my school had a reputation as being less than elite, the professors were what I’d call “teaching professors” (think “teaching hospital” but in philosophy). They weren’t at the tops of their fields, nor were they churning out pieces for reputable journals like clockwork. This gave them the freedom to, well, mentor their students instead of competing with them. It made it such that students who were sincerely interested or invested in philosophy -male or female and even un-identified in one case- were treated with complete and utter respect and appreciation. The number of times I awkwardly approached a male professor to chat about some idea that came into my head at 3 AM the morning before and was met with nothing but an open mind…I feel blessed now to have gone to the school I went to.

The point of my story? I think there seems to be a heavy theme of “at X impressive university” and “Y elite school” within a lot of these posts. Perhaps the problem is cultural, but not the culture of philosophy in general…philosophy in the context of privilege and elitism. My advice to aspiring young philosophers? Go to the shitty schools. Make them better with your presence. Squeeze everything you can out of anyone who is willing to give you the opportunity, and take what you learn with you wherever you go. There is hope! The elites are only elites because they are coveted. Take that away from them…who knows what the future of philosophy could look like.

What should I tell my junior colleagues?

Now that I’m a mid-career woman in philosophy, I’m facing a new problem: how to talk to my junior female colleagues about gender issues. I want to give them what I didn’t have: an older woman who can reassure them that they’re not imagining things, commiserate about disrespectful behavior from students and colleagues, and brainstorm solutions. I want to warn them about the extra service work they’ll be pressured to take on and the few colleagues from whom it’s best to keep one’s distance. But when I’ve tentatively broached these topics, my junior colleagues have reassured me that they’ve never experienced sexism in the profession, from students or colleagues, and that this department is wonderful and egalitarian. They almost seem to resent my raising gender issues, as if it’s patronizing for me to worry about them. Perhaps it is. But, having participated in hiring and personnel discussions for my junior colleagues, I know full well that they have experienced sexism. Quite a bit of it, in fact. Yet I don’t think I should tell them that. They need to find their own place in the department, form their own relationships. I certainly won’t be helping them by getting them to feel hostile or wary towards the department. And maybe I’ve been wrong about things. Maybe I interpret everything through a gender lens, and if I had just been a more optimistic and forgiving person from the beginning, my first years in the profession would have been happier and more productive. So I’ve taken to just giving generic advice that’s appropriate for all: keep writing, show your work around, don’t let service and teaching work drain you. And inside I wonder if maybe I’ve just been imagining things all along.

Bad advisor/Good advisor

I am fortunate to have suffered relatively little sexism. Interestingly, however, the reason I suffered so little is because my advisor was overtly sexist.

I had my children during graduate school. Many professors questioned whether I was really going to “stay in philosophy.” One senior woman looked at me thoughtfully and said a department might be okay hiring me because I’d already had my kids and therefore (presumably) would not go having kids on their time.

My advisor, who until I’d started having children had been reasonably supportive, absolutely turned on me. He would ask sneering questions such as “When are you going to give birth to a paper?” He made it clear that he thought by having children, I’d shown I wasn’t serious.

Finally, I got sick of it, and switched advisors. My new advisor couldn’t have been more supportive. He was awesome. I know I wouldn’t have written nearly as good a dissertation as I would have otherwise, nor would I have gotten as much career help and advice.

On being harassed, and being supported

Female junior faculty member here. I was recently harassed at a conference, for the first and hopefully the last time. The offender started out making what I thought was reasonable conversation. Then when no one else was around, he made a weird comment about my body and asked if I “work out”. I told him my physical appearance was irrelevant and changed the subject, but he didn’t take the hint. He started coming in to talks, shortly after the speaker had begun, and sitting next to me, so that it would be awkward for me to get up and move. He would try to distract me during the talk, and would also touch me on the back and shoulders. I wasn’t especially frightened, but I was annoyed–I was at the conference to pay attention to the speakers.

Another woman at the conference, who had been another of this guy’s targets, saw what was going on, and approached me during one of the coffee breaks. She asked me if this guy was touching me, explained that he had bothered her too, and encouraged me not to worry about being polite. “Just stand up and walk away when he sits next to you”, she suggested, so I started doing that. He finally got the hint and got someone to deliver an apologetic note, which I found an inadequate substitute for not bothering me in the first place.

I wish I had not waited so long to tell my friends at the conference (it probably made it more awkward for me that most of them were men). Once they heard what was going on, all of them were supportive: they believed me and agreed to keep an eye on the guy. But I particularly appreciate the woman who actively noticed what was happening and reached out to me. (She also made a bunch of smart points in the Q&A sessions, so she was just all-around winning at this conference.)

Hang in there, in spite of it all

I am writing this to tell any potentially discouraged readers to hang in there. I have experienced sexual harassment, dismissiveness, discrimination on the job, and other offensive behavior throughout my time as a grad student and professor in philosophy. Yet I love doing philosophy and teaching so much that none of this can dissuade me from my purpose. I feel lucky to have this rare opportunity to be a philosopher, and nobody’s sexist crap is going to stop me. Don’t let it stop you either if you love philosophy.

As an undergrad philosophy major, I cannot count the number of times I made a point that was dismissed or ignored by the professor, only to have a male student make the same point and receive praise. All of my male undergraduate professors actively discouraged me from applying to grad school on the grounds that my abilities were not up to par. Nevertheless, I was accepted by four top-20 programs.

My grad school mentors were wonderful, supportive, and egalitarian. Unfortunately, from other faculty I witnessed several instances of both physical and verbal sexual harassment of female grad students. For three years, I was the only romantically unattached, heterosexual female grad student in my program. I was pestered and harassed almost daily by the male students, including everything from offensive sexual comments made in the middle of class to relentless efforts to hook up. The specific physical attributes of female students who took philosophy grad courses were enthusiastically discussed in our dept. lounge. Every time the department sought student input into a hiring process, my preference for a candidate was attributed by the other students, in front of the faculty, to my supposed romantic attraction to him. I was frequently quizzed by fellow students about which faculty member(s) or student(s) I would be willing to have sex with, hypothetically, despite my refusal to respond.

When I began attending conferences and APA events, my trusted mentors had to tell me which male professors I should avoid being alone with. Sometimes they accompanied me to parties so that I wouldn’t be harassed. While this may seem like a negative story about the prevalance of sexism, it’s just as much a positive account of the other guys who had my back and wouldn’t tolerate bad behavior. Eventually I received many interviews and a few job offers, and all of my success on the job market was directly attributed by my fellow male students to the fact that I am female.

Once I became a professor, I learned what it is like to work closely with men who cannot seem to visually acknowledge your head up there above the breasts. I learned to deal with male students who tried to intimidate me about grades or come on to me. (Specifically, I learned to keep my office door open, and to inform someone else as soon as a student started behaving strangely toward me.) I do not work in feminist philosophy myself, and apparently that has encouraged several male professors to share with me their view that feminist philosophy is junk and not really philosophy. For a while another single female worked in my department. Some male professors hoped that I might be able to report on her sex life, about which they knew nothing but suspected everything. I have had to listen, in the department office, to my colleagues’ descriptions of escapades at strip clubs.

Though all of the aforementioned events were annoying, they did not intimidate me. The sexism that nearly shook my resolve came later, in the form of having my research devalued because I was female, being judged according to different standards from men in pre-tenure reviews, being pressured to take on more teaching and advising duties than others, and eventually being treated unfairly with respect to family/medical leave. Luckily, my resolve is fairly stout. In the hiring process, I have seen numerous female candidates ignored either because their cvs mention the word feminism, or because they are perceived to do “soft” work in ethics. In awarding scholarship funds to our own students, my colleagues consistently downplay females who have stronger records on paper in favor of males with whom they are friendly. My teaching evaluations are good, but male faculty have often commented (in direct contradiction to the facts) that this is probably because I am not a rigorous teacher or strict grader. I am treated like a secretary whenever menial tasks like note-taking must be done, and one of my colleagues (who happened to vote unsuccessfully against tenuring me) told me in all sincerity that I would make a good secretary.

I’m now past worrying about what my colleagues say to or about me. However, I want to create a terrific climate for our students, insofar as it is in my power. I have had to choose my battles for the sake of preserving both job and sanity, but in the long run I’m winning the war. To all the women and men who want to change things: don’t lose heart!