Assault by a thousand paper cuts

I am an older woman who entered philosophy naively in the 70s. I barely noticed that I was about the only other woman in my undergraduate classes and at the graduate level, I was one of two in my cohort group. However, I found my professors in college and in graduate school nothing but respectful and they seemed to treat me equally to the men in my program. Most of my fellow students did likewise. I went to a Jesuit grad program so we are not talking about the most enlightened group in academia when it comes to feminism but I never felt belittled because I was a woman. 

However, I was full of doubts and an ongoing sense of inadequacy that lingers many years later. My male colleagues, to this day, never exhibit any sense of doubt in their own competence, in teaching or scholarship. But I am always second-guessing my abilities and finding myself coming up short. Interestingly, I am now invisible, as if every (almost every–unless you are amazing) woman at my age. Men–not so much. I envy the respect students give the men, regardless of their teaching or scholarly activity, and how student evaluations are still skewed towards seeing men as smart and women as mean. 

All of my feelings and thoughts could be due to my objective lack of strong teaching skills and exemplary scholarship. –And my lack of a warm and friendly personality. I am not blind to my own inadequacies. I would not lay all the blame on the systemic sexism that still runs deep in my country. But I am not so sure that in addition to some of the dramatic and obvious stories of sexism and bias i read on this blog, many of us fall prey to a more insidious and hidden assault by a thousand tiny “paper cuts.” caused by messaging all around us. I am outraged by some of the stories posted here and how women are overtly dismissed and objectified. But there may be many of us who secretly envy our male colleagues in their confidence and acceptance by the students, no matter how old they are. And that bears witnessing.

It’s the micro aggressions

I’m just finishing my first year at a ‘top-ranking’ (whatever that means) PhD program. Before starting this program, I studied philosophy in Canada at two distinct institutions. Never, before coming to this program, have I felt so uncomfortable being a woman in philosophy. Even in situations where I was the only woman enrolled in a course, I did not find it to be a problem (other than the fact that there being only one woman enrolled in a grad class of 15 is a problem in itself).

Even though I have had some quite negative experiences at my present program, I gather from the testimony of others that I have actually been treated pretty well and taken somewhat seriously, comparatively. Many of my colleagues have experienced sexism, sexual harassment, and blatant discrimination, which I have been fortunate to have somehow avoided.

What I am struggling the most with are day-to-day microaggressions. Little things like noticing that your professors seem to be much more comfortable with and close to students who are men. Certain professors have groups of students that they converse with, laugh with, and seem to have a genuine report with. Relationships of this sort are not developing for me–nor do I see them existing among any of the graduate students who are women.

Additionally, no one has really shown any interest in the fact that I am there (or any of the women in my year, for that matter). Isn’t that sort of the job of the faculty? Taking interest in the new students? Getting to know them?

Regarding classroom dynamics, I notice that questions and comments are received much more favourably when they are presented by a student who is a man. When a woman asks a question or raises a comment, it tends to be a) misunderstood b) not deemed interesting enough to warrant attention/development, or c) briefly discussed only to be brought up again by one of the men, which somehow changes it into a point worthy of more attention. Rarely do I hear a professor (who is a man) praise any of the women for their contributions to discussion.

And I could go on…

Anyway, I’m so frustrated by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about issues like these. Overt problems (even though they are hard to deal with too) are a completely different thing–for there are at least usually systems in place for sexual harassment, blatant discrimination, etc. It is frustrating and depressing to think that there may not be anything that can be done about the sorts of problems I have been mentioning. Plus, there is always the worry that my interpretation of what is going on is not correct. I often feel like I might just be looking for things that aren’t there, or seeing patterns where there really aren’t any. I think that, deep down, I know this isn’t true, but I don’t trust my personal experience enough to feel like I have anything solid that would warrant some sort of action. My observations and experiences have been corroborated by many other women in the department, but it still feels so hopeless.

I love philosophy–at least I thought I did–but this whole experience is really making me wonder whether I can continue in such an environment. I’ll never be part of the boys club, and the time I spend in my department is a constant reminder of that.

What it’s like to be out of philosophy

After all the ups-and-downs, ins-and-outs, rough-and-tumble politics of a graduate career, as a “woman of color” (a term which I despise, but for which no adequate substitute really exist), the final nail was hammered into the coffin of my philosophical aspirations just over two years ago. My Ph.D. program expelled me, under the thin veneer of academic failure. Internal appeals failed me, and the prospect of pursuing external appeals through various deans and administrators, even should they succeed, seemed to exhausting to consider. As information about how other (white, male) graduate students were treated, it became clear to me that had I received even slightly comparable consideration and treatment, I would have been able to finish. No one will ever admit my expulsion had to do with race or gender, and indeed, there is a very good story about why I was expelled and department policies. On paper, it is all legitimate. The story completely fails to explain why white, male students were not subject to the letter of the law, and given chances I was not owed. The message was clear: THEY can fuck up frequently and continue, but YOU are always a fuck-up and we will run you out.

There was definitely a grieving process. After all, a Ph.D. in Philosophy had been my singular objective for more or less a decade – my entire adult life, at the time. I organized my life around, I made my choices to reflect it. It occupied a significant portion of my emotional life. It defined, in part, who I thought I was.

That was, as I said, about two years ago. As life moved on, my life changed form. Though employed as a philosophy professor at a community college, and, thus, technically a professional philosopher, I began to mentally disassociate myself from the profession. I no longer identify as a professional philosopher. When, in social settings, someone says, “You are a philosopher?” my joking response is to say, “Shhh! Don’t tell anyone!” and promptly change the subject. Rather than regularly checking blogs, I wandered onto them only occasionally – sometimes realizing months had passed since I’d visited them (once a daily activity) – and then only in some sort cathartic rubber-necking type moments. I signed off of email lists and gave away books (well, not all of them, but a lot of them). I stopped listening to philosophy podcasts, and gradually eliminated all but a few philosophers from my social life. The ones who are still in my life are people with whom I, as a stringent rule, never discuss the profession or philosophy at all, except as a passing remark here and there.

I became involved in legislative advocacy for higher education in my state (so I still deal with plenty of, uhm, colorful behavior). I subscribed to the local symphony. I went to hear bands and traveled to places where I wasn’t going to conferences. I made friends who are artists and real estate agents and accountants and school teachers and chefs and most definitely not philosophers.

I realized recently that I was happier than I had been in years. In fact, I was happier than I had been since I first started taking philosophy classes as an undergrad. This realization was both joyous – that I had recovered from such a brutal and unfair ending to my hopes and ambitions – and melancholy – that something, which I had loved so much and brought me so much joy when I first encountered it, had been reduced, through the racist and sexist actions of its principle advocates – to a increasingly distant memory that is better banished from my life.

I wonder how many people out there feel the same way.

Aggressive discussion

I’m a MA student in an area of philosophy where there’re less women. I have a somewhat aggressive personality so I don’t find it too bothersome when I find myself in what might have been sexist situations. However, I sometimes observe other girls who are less aggressive than I am and it makes me sad watching them struggle to get their voice out over all the male students.
I was taking a UG/MA combined seminar course where the gender ratio is just slightly above 1:10. The professor is a male who is very conscious of gender issues and tries his best to be sensitive and fair. There are a few male students in the classroom who are fairly aggressive in general – they constantly cut each other off and always speak very loudly. I have interacted with them outside of class and, from what I can gather, they are not really sexists: they do hear my points and get into meaningful discussions with me. It’s probably just their personalities to be loud and have short attention spans.
What is unfortunate is the fact that these guys can be quite intimidating (without actually trying to intimidate) – they are bigger physically, louder, and appear to be more confident (irrespective of how well they understand the course material). Aside from myself, there is only one other girl who comes to classes every week. She is a quiet Asian girl who speaks very softly. Sometimes she would be making a very good point but the guys just started talking and no body could hear her. The prof is too polite to silence them and, even if he does manage to shush them, the girl would either be too intimidated to resume or thought she was making a stupid point – which she totally wasn’t. After a couple of times she just stopped speaking. Even if the prof asks her opinion (I suspect because he has noticed this) she would just say very little. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame on those guys, because it was supposed to be a free discussion, and people did cut each other off rather frequently. I’ve always wondered how anyone could’ve done anything to change the situation. It just feels to me that nobody is really at fault here (except maybe the guys can be a bit more respectful, but let’s face it, philosophical discussions can get quite intense).

Take notice, and act

Let me preface this by saying that I am truly grateful to all of the women and men who have made, and who continue to make, our discipline a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable discipline. I consider myself honored to know and work with some amazing, supportive, philosophers. That said, we are not there yet. Things are not changing quickly enough. We, as philosophers and as human beings, should not tolerate anything less than equity any longer.

Ever since its inception, I have found this blog therapeutic. Many of the stories here comport all too well with my own experience. There is some comfort in knowing that I am not alone. I have been amazed, time and again, when colleagues and friends express surprise at the stories they find here. I am amazed that they do not realize similar things are happening in such close proximity to themselves. I am amazed that some of my colleagues—some of whom have, at times, behaved horrifically themselves—fail to recognize the inequality that is right in front of them.

I note this because I have myself been discriminated against, harassed, propositioned, excluded, talked over, disparaged, and so on. Many of my own colleagues either don’t know the details, or haven’t noticed events that have taken place right in front of them. They don’t realize that what might seem like one-off bad jokes, disrespectful comments, and offers of romantic and sexual interaction are just small pieces of a much larger pattern. They don’t realize the extent to which harassment, discrimination, and even assault take place within our discipline.

We tend to think the problems are someplace else. We tend to think our friends cannot possibly be part of the problem. We cannot possibly be part of the problem. Often, we are mistaken.

Philosophers: Take notice. Listen. Act. Please. These are not just anonymous stories on a blog. These are real people. Real lives. Real suffering. Sometimes your colleagues, and sometimes your friends.

How philosophy seems to change women

Where are the girly-girls and why is it not ok to be one?

The majority of women I meet in Philosophy are tom-boy-ish. Many of them have short hair, wear no make-up, and dress like their male contemporaries (tramping gear or jeans and a tshirt). Of course, I don’t have a problem with women choosing this, if they are choosing it. Not all women want to wear makeup, dresses, have kids, etc etc, and I totally support a women’s right to chose what she does with her body (her clothes, her hair, her fertility). But what I do have a serious problem with however is the fact that, in my experience, women like this seem far disproportionate in philosophy. Where did all the girly-girls go, and why is not ok to be one?

I don’t know if this is due to the women in philosophy, or the men, or the institution.
-Is it that the women think that they need to be like the men in order to be accepted into this philosophy club?
-Or is that the men have driven away the more feminine philosophers (by hitting on them, harassing them for being too girly, or just not taking them seriously)?
-Or is that the institution does not make room for women? It certainly does not make room for people with families or spouses (double body problems) or caregiver commitments, given that graduates new on the job market have to apply for bunches of jobs and take whatever they can get at some horrid institution in the middle of nowhere.

Furthermore, many of my girlfriends in philosophy have changed since they went on the job market or got accepted into various prestigious grad programs. They’ve gone from having what I thought of as a modern kind of feminism (women don’t need to be like men in order to be equal to men), to changing into these tom-boy-ish women. I’m not convinced they’re doing it because that was the kind of woman they always wanted to be, rather than the woman they feel they have to be in order to succeed in philosophy.

The thing that I find the scariest is that they seem to have been brainwashed into this by their fellow women in philosophy. Friends who went to institutions where other female grad students or young female academics were tom-boy-ish, have themselves become like that. They’ve changed the way they dress. They all started a trend of dumping their boyfriends and partners in favour of their career (in most cases, it was not clear that a choice between the two needed to be made). They’ve decided to only sleep with men who agree that there will be no relationship (what if they fall in love, is that not allowed?). They talk about how their Doctoral dissertations will change the world, and hound other younger women about whether theirs will too, and how. It seems that the women are becoming just like the men that oppress them.

*Sigh*

Highlighting sins but not pointing fingers

All the following events happened to me, a woman in philosophy, with different people (some women), at different stages of my career as an undergraduate and graduate student.

I once found myself hugged by one of the professors I worked with, in his office. He wanted to be empathized with for the troubles he was having in his personal life: he said he needed “some love”. I was paralyzed by the surprise and embarrassment. Fortunately another student knocked on the (closed) door and he let me go.

Another professor frequently looked at my body when talking to me during office hours. I never knew how to deal with it, and it made me extremely uncomfortable, mostly because I suspected he was not paying attention to what I was saying.

I was at a conference with my partner, also a philosophy student. My advisor made sure to introduce my partner, who is not one of his advisees, to all the members of the admissions committee of a very good department to which my partner was applying. At the same conference there was a famous philosopher, with whom my advisor was on friendly terms. I was writing my undergraduate thesis on the work of this famous philosopher. I thought my advisor would introduce me, given how he behaved with my partner who wasn’t even his advisee, but I waited in vain. I therefore introduced myself to the famous philosopher and talked to him about my work (the famous philosopher—also, guess what, a man—did not really engage in the conversation, but answered politely to my questions with, more or less, yes or no). When I told to my advisor that I had introduced myself, he merely said “good job!” My partner was a man.

A different advisor often remarked on my outfits (in the presence of other students) and declared he was in love with me in an email. He was married and he sort of made clear it was a form of Platonic love. He did always engage me philosophically, but I refrained from seeing him as much as I would have wanted because I feared he would take it as a sign of romantic interest.

At a conference once I wore a summer dress that left my shoulders and part of my back bare. I later found out that some women graduate students and a woman faculty member berated me because of my “skimpy clothes”, through which I “debased the entire category of women”. They wondered how women could be taken seriously if they dressed like that. Admittedly, these quotes are second-hand. The faculty member works on feminist philosophy.

A male colleague once told me laughingly that a bunch of male graduate students were exchanging emails about my dissertation topic, which was so “feminine”. He did not seem to think for a moment that there was anything wrong with that behavior, or with expecting me to share his amusement.

Another male colleague, who had been hitting on me constantly and who had talked about my “boobs” in front of other male students, once asked me—again in front of other colleagues—why I presented myself like a “whore”. In the past, I had always acquiesced and tried to go along with the jokes (because they are only jokes, right, and you don’t want to come out as one of those party poopers without sense of humor). This time I coldly replied: “I don’t present myself as a whore at all, why do you see me that way?”. To my surprise, he shut up!

When I was at another department as a visiting student, one of the students there, with whom I had a fling, boasted to prospective students that among the benefits of the program there was being able to sleep with visiting students. I was right there.

I was once at a dinner with faculty members and graduate students, and during what I thought was a philosophical conversation, I made the mistake of mentioning, as a philosophical example, a detail of my personal life that routinely gives the impression to men that a woman is “easy”. After that, a faculty member started to mildly flirt with me, to my surprise and dismay. He stopped after I stopped saying hi to him in the halls, or acknowledging him in any way. For all that time, I felt guilty, as if I was the one who did something wrong.

Later on, in a seminar discussion, I made sure to make a similar point without using my personal life, but by using a sociological generalization. Still, what the men present in the seminar took home was that I was “easy”, and another faculty, during an evening out, made a joke about me that gave the impression that I had relaxed sexual morals. Other male students felt entitled to make similar jokes. I wrote an email to the professor, explaining why his joke was inappropriate. He apologized profusely. So that one went well! (It goes without saying that whether or not I am actually “easy” is irrelevant here.)

Once I was visiting my partner who was in a different PhD program. Prospective students were also visiting that department at the time and I joined them for a night out. I kept asking people about their research interests. Nobody ever asked me about mine. I was just his girlfriend, after all.

There have been many more events similar to this last one, which, more than sexual harassment in its various forms, arguably constitute the most damaging way of undermining women’s academic self-esteem: instances of subtle, widespread, and often unconscious forms of sexism. I personally experienced what so many women reported experiencing on this blog: a woman makes a point, sees it fall flat, and then hears the same point being repeated by a man and acknowledged; a woman is paralyzed by stereotype threat; a woman is rarely, if ever, asked to read or discuss a male colleague’s work; and so forth.

A final meta-reflection: it took me a long time—in fact, more than a year—to finish writing this submission. It was not because I had a hard time putting together anecdotes. (In fact, I left some out.) It was because I spent a long time worrying about being identified, and subsequently worked on making the submission as anonymous as possible.

My preoccupation with anonymity was not only due to the fear of backlashes in the professional sphere, but mainly due to the fear of disrupting some friendships that I still hold with some people mentioned in the post. After all, some of the offenders are still my friends, and this is absolutely unsurprising. Human beings are weak-willed, opaque to themselves, inconsistent, and prone to error. All human beings, men and women (and people who refuse to identify with one gender) alike! Many men who say something offensive and who slip into sexist behavior don’t mean it, don’t realize it, or can’t help it. They may regret it afterwards, but are unable to apologize. They may apologize, but then do it again.

My aim in submitting this post is, like everybody else on this blog, to share my experience as a woman in philosophy, and to highlight sins but not to point my finger against the sinners. Some sinners deserve to be pointed at, of course. Unfortunately, the worst offenders, in virtue of the gravity of their crimes, often go unreported and hence unpunished. But in my case, my main aim is to contribute to make my male and female colleagues aware of things that happen to women in philosophy, hoping that this will bring about awareness and change.

Blogs like this one should not be seen by men as a self-righteous “J’accuse” to specific (mostly male) individuals, but as an appeal to all people of good faith who want to improve the profession. As a post on the Feminist Philosophers blog recently reminded us, the status of women in the profession (and of all minorities, if I may add) is everyone’s business.

The uncertainty of the well-intentioned

There is a younger female graduate student in my department with whom I have had a lot of really good conversations. She is smart, open-minded, and insightful. I get a lot out of our discussions, and I would like to think that I respect her just as much as anyone. But sometimes she talks to me as if she’s afraid that I’ll disagree with her, as if she has to make sure to put things gently – with a smile – and to pull back at any sign of resistance. It makes me feel uncomfortable about contradicting her, and I end up talking to her differently than others in my department. That, in turn, makes me feel like an awful sexist, like I’m helping to create an environment in which she’s treated delicately because she “can’t handle” the normal intensity of philosophical discussion, and because she’s “too gentle and sweet to really be argued with.” I want to talk to her in a way that makes her feel comfortable, but sometimes I suspect that my instincts about how to do that are telling me to treat her “like a cute, dumb girl.” I wish I knew how to do the right thing.