On speaking the whole truth

A friend recently asked me which posts on this blog were mine. In looking for them, I came across this one, https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/the-biggest-obstacle-is-having-some-faith-that-i-belong-here/ which I had forgotten about.

The way I had written it at the time, one might think that whatever problems I was facing were entirely in my head. Looking back, I phrased it as I did because I was afraid to say more. I didn’t have faith that I belonged in graduate school, but not because I was imagining that I didn’t nor because I was unjustifiably anxious. It was because my first day on campus the professor who I had intended to work with told me that after seeing my application, he wouldn’t be surprised if I performed so poorly that I failed out and that I didn’t have the right ‘pedigree’ for students at a program of this caliber. Waiting in the hall outside my first seminar, I overheard a group of male students in my cohort discussing that the women in our cohort might have been admitted because of affirmative action rather than merit. And this was just what happened before classes actually began.

I was worried that if I told anyone (even anonymously) why, exactly, I felt so out of place, the people who had behaved inappropriately might recognize themselves in the stories and hold it against me for sharing them here. I am still afraid of that actually, but I’m also now of the view that if speaking the truth about my own experiences costs me relationships, those aren’t relationships worth protecting.

Misguided diversity efforts

I was moved to send this anecdote by seeing this on FP, on misguided diversity efforts:

http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/reader-query-misguided-diversity-efforts-in-recruitment/

About 6 or 7 years ago I was asked to serve on a thesis committee for a thesis submitted to a Swedish University. Apparently there are quotas, so some percentage of women are required for these committees. The thesis had a nontrivial overlap with my own work. Anyway, on the day, the candidate gave their presentation and then there was a break, when one of the other committee members came up to me and said “Thanks for doing this! I hope you didn’t spend time actually reading the thesis?”

Not sure what the fellow meant there…

On being viewed as a token

I always enjoyed philosophy. When I decided to go into a PhD program, I don’t think I was prepared for what I experienced as a woman in the department. I was the only woman in the PhD program (albeit it was a very small department). Soon, I found myself on several committees. This was very exciting for me. Throughout my college and even high school career, I had always been a part of department, joining academic clubs, attending and/or running student conferences, etc. I learned about 2 years in that the only reason I was accepted and on the committees was because I was a woman. This was really hard to digest. I constantly questioned whether I was *good* enough to get a PhD in Philosophy. Thankfully my advisor was great and he tried to go to bat for me on several occasions. But unfortunately he was the only one. During my entire time, I had the impression that I was only a statistic for the department. This left a definite sour taste in my mouth so much so that I changed my discipline entirely to receive a masters in another area where I could work outside of the academy. Though sometimes I think what might have been had I soldiered on in Philosophy, I am much happier in my new profession where I am known for the work I do and not because I’m a statistic.

“Don’t say shitty, undermining things”: how hard can that be?

I was scheduled to be a speaker at a workshop in my area, which was canceled due to lack of funding. The conference organizer wrote this to me:

unfortunately for the only other workshop i have in mind the organizing theme is one where you won’t fit, but on the other hand for purely cynical political reasons i will need a token woman.

When I replied that I didn’t want to be his token anything and found his attitude disrespectful, he told me that the cancelled workshop

was 50% women, so if any of them were tokens they would have a hard time guessing this.

I tried one more time:

Yes, but please also don’t tell them shitty, undermining things. “I will need a token woman” is a rotten thing to say to somebody you want to come to your conferences. (Sometimes friends can say rotten things to each other as jokes, but that one definitely crossed a line.)

His reply?

sorry if you found the joke offensive, but that is the effect of the “gendered conference campaign” which it seems almost everybody but me thinks is a great idea.

I’m almost certainly not organizing any more conferences, thanks for your interest in participating in my nonexistent one.

What it’s like at the APA

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.

Confessions of a “Golden Boy”

Recent 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.

Sometimes you need to know when to get out

Freedom. After dealing with direct sexual harassment, rumors spread by a male colleague that I slept with him to receive attention at a conference – I was in a deeply committed relationship and rather disgusted by the colleague – then having to deal with the fallout of other male figures making sexual jokes about me at the conference, listening to comments about my breasts, weight, face and ‘f@ckabilty’ accusations that I received scholarships because I am a woman – not due to any skill on my part – and the general apathy of my graduate adviser as well as the majority of my professors…. I am free. I have left my department and am changing my career (despite having to earn a new bachelors/MA in my new career).

I can study philosophy on my own, if I so choose. My new career fits well enough with the topics I was studying in philosophy. And, having worked in other places than a philosophy department, I know that I will rarely experience anything near the level of harassment and apathy that I did in my last department. In fact, the men I work with are generally extremely excited to work with a woman who is interested in the same things they are.

Call me weak, call me half-hearted, but sometimes one needs to know when to get out. Judging from the similarities between an abusive relationship and my ex-department – other things shall remain unmentioned – I know better than to think that my department will change anytime in the next 10 years.

Why should we hire a woman?

Message: Now a full professor (in an enlightened department of three women and one man), who teaches feminist philosophy, I’ve been sitting on this one since it happened: In 2000 I was interviewing for jobs for the first time. I visited the University of X for an on campus interview – met with students, taught a class and gave my talk to the dept. I was sitting at the head of the table looking out at all the men – there was one female graduate student there,that’s it. I finished my talk and the questions began. The professor who I would have been replacing raised his hand and said “So…we haven’t had a woman teach fulltime in the department for 40 years, why should we hire one now?” Absolute silence, no one said a word. Rather than saying something clever like, “you clearly shouldn’t as you are not ready” and leaving the interview, I stammered something about perhaps this would help their enrollment,as I would have liked to have had a female role model when I was an undergrad. To this he replied “Well, if we want to recruit more female students why shouldn’t we just hire some hot, young guy?” I was totally flummoxed by this point and just trying not to a)yell or b) cry as I knew either of these actions would reinforce his ideas about women – and I was quite convinced this was the action he was trying to provoke. Again, NO ONE at the table said a word. Needless to say, I did not get the job, and to add insult to injury, they made that distinguished professor drive me back to my hotel where he told me “you did okay, kiddo”. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. I don’t know if the guy they hired was young and hot.

Old dogs and new tricks

I had had many years of experiences with extreme sexism before I got a Ph.D in philosophy in my forties, but that doesn’t make sexism in the refined circles of academia any less humiliating and undermining.

I took philosophy courses in a master’s program at a well-respected state university. One of my master’s thesis advisors harassed me into a affair using quid pro quo pressures; I was desperately afraid this advisor would not sign my thesis if I broke off the relationship, so I waited to end it until after it was signed. I knew I should report this behavior, but others informed me it was a well-known pattern of this professor and nothing would be done. Also, I was old enough to have known better, I thought.

Later, when I was a graduate student in an Ivy League Ph.D. program in philosophy, a male professor used the following example in class to distinguish between two persons: “Smith beats his wife, while Jones doesn’t.” This was intended to be a funny example, and had apparently gotten laughs from earlier generations of students when the university was all male, but no one laughed in the late 1980s with both men and women in the class. Finally the professor noticed the glares coming from many of the students and said, “Perhaps I should have chosen a more sensitive example.” Even old dogs can learn new tricks.

In my first year in that doctoral program, I helped to organize a student colloquium series and gave the first presentation, in which I presented as my own work what was in fact my own reconstruction of an argument from one of Plato’s dialogues. A fellow graduate student, male, asked me if I had done the argument reconstructions myself, despite its being clearly presented as my own work. This was an insulting question which I believe he probably would not have asked of a male graduate student.

Also in my first year of graduate school, after a visiting speaker finished his talk, a male professor invited him and some of us graduate students to his house for refreshments. I was the only female graduate student who attended, and the only female at the gathering except for the host’s wife. I was wondering how I would fit in, when someone started the conversation with the question of which university had the best combination of football team and philosophy department. The men present began to engage in an intense and exhaustive comparison of football teams and philosophy departments, with an eye to ranking them. Not following sports and not being interested in such a ranking, I felt conspicuously female, excluded, incapable of participating, and marginalized. So I decided to talk with my host’s wife, which was much more interesting. This incident is only statistically sexist and was probably entirely unintentional; if I had been a female football fan, I could have held my own.
Still, what proportion of football fans are female? How considerate was it to choose a question that a female graduate student would be less likely, given the average relative frequency of male to female football fans, to be able to relate to?

Later that year, at the annual department party, a senior male professor cornered me and tried at length to persuade me to marry another one of the senior male professors, who was lonely and needed a wife. This conversation made me feel reduced to my reproductive and nurturing function, and quite invisible as a beginning philosopher.

Later in my time there, a fellow graduate student, a male, asked to sit in on my pre-arranged independent study with my male dissertation advisor, and I agreed. However, the advisor spoke almost exclusively to him rather than me, and I felt I had to fight to get a word in edgewise all semester. From this I learned that the practice of philosophy, as many males see it, is not about cooperating to discover the truth, but rather about competing to get the approval of the – mostly male – authority figures.

The way to get this approval was to fight, conceptually, in an agonistic way. One of my professors encouraged me to get more “ammunition” against a philosopher I was writing about. This military analogy turned me off and set me back, as I wanted to see philosophy as a cooperative enterprise in search of truth.

Another fellow graduate student (a married male) was heard in the student lounge bragging about how many female undergraduates he planned to sleep with now that he was going to be a teaching assistant.

In seminars the same thing happened to me as has happened to many other female graduate students in philosophy – my point would be ignored, but when a male made the same point, it was recognized as valuable.

At my first job, in the mid-1990s, a one-year at a midwestern state university, one of my colleagues in the Philosophy Department had a pornographic picture on his office wall. I went into his office and told him that this constituted a hostile atmosphere for his female students and advisees, not to mention his colleagues. When he told me it had “sentimental value” (!) for him, I suggested he remove it and hang it up at home. He replied that his wife wouldn’t allow it in the house. Shouldn’t that have been a clue as to its inappropriateness? Another male colleague, when told of this exchange, explained that the first colleague had actually improved over time, as he no longer displayed his collection of Playboy and Penthouse magazines on the coffee table in his office! So things must be getting better, as many on this blog have argued.

While I had been a feminist activist for many years before pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I had taken many courses in feminist thought, I had not studied feminist philosophy as an AOS or AOC for my Ph.D. degree, so it did not appear on my CV. While I was searching for a tenure track job, the chair of a hiring department asked me to add “philosophy and feminism” to my CV. I found out later that the line had been given to the Philosophy Department on the condition they hire a woman who could teach in the Women’s Studies program. I reflected that I had the background and experience to teach in a Women’s Studies program, so I agreed to change my CV. That is how I was hired into my present position – the male philosophers apparently tried to hire a non-feminist female philosopher who could teach Women’s Studies from a non-feminist perspective. So they got a little surprise when I turned out to be a radical feminist!

Many of the entries on this blog refer to affirmative action, as if there is some stigma attached to being an affirmative action hire. I think women and minorities should worry about the so-called ‘unfair’ advantage given by affirmative action exactly when the white males start worrying about the unfair advantage given by white male privilege. Instead, look to your own achievements and do your best work. If the white males ever start apologizing to you about their white male privilege giving them an unfair advantage, then, and only then, should you even consider mentioning the countervailing “advantage” given to you by affirmative action. Affirmative action exists to help counteract the pervasive unconscious and conscious sexist biases which this blog documents, and we shouldn’t undermine that very important function.

Now that I have tenure and have served as chair of my department at my state university, I find I love my job as a philosophy professor. We have hired new colleagues who are feminist, or at least who try their best not to be sexist, and I have published quite a few articles, often in journals edited by women, and feel freer than ever to study and think and write about what I want to study and think and write about. I enjoy teaching and continually revamping my courses and pedagogy, only seldom receiving openly sexist treatment from students, though I can relate to many of the comments of others about expectations that, as a female, I should be more lenient and understanding. Leniency should be limited to justified circumstances, but instead of some women professors trying to be less understanding, I think some male professors should work to become more understanding! Students need and deserve understanding and respectful teachers.

Recently, I served as an outside evaluator for a nearby philosophy department which had just previously hired a fifth philosopher, their first woman, who was then serving as chair. The senior philosopher in her department would only refer to her as their “fifth man,” even though she is a woman! Some old dogs have trouble with the new tricks.

It is disheartening to think that philosophy as a discipline runs on status competition among males, but that is the picture that emerges from this blog and from a book called “The Sociology of Philosophy” by Randall Collins. Also, I recommend C.P. Snow’s old novel “Strangers and Brothers,” in which he tries to describe in detail the operations of what he calls “private power,” or power as it is used behind the scenes by men. This novel is particularly relevant as it features men jockeying for power in an academic setting.

Thanks for this blog. It has given me encouragement to once again propose that our university prohibit even consensual relations between faculty and students. Currently we prohibit sex between faculty and students during the semester when the student is in the faculty member’s class, the strongest policy we could get through the governance process. Some faculty are apparently very worried about the rights of the accused and the probabilities of false accusations. And I shall try with renewed energy to integrate my feminist values into my own work by more diligently calling sexist assumptions into question in my classes, by including more work by women and feminist philosophers, and by working to create a more egalitarian and supportive environment within the discipline of philosophy.

Why aren’t male philosophers worried about their successes?

What I’m angry about today

I’ve seen a number of posts on this blog and elsewhere from women worrying that some of their advancement has come “because they are women.” And I get that. Especially when so many of our experiences already seem designed to make us wonder whether we belong here.

But for god’s sake, given the overwhelming evidence that women (among others) are systematically: dissuaded from pursuing philosophy; excluded from the kinds of (often informal) discussions where much serious training occurs; dismissed or ignored when they formulate arguments without bombast, and derided or censured when they formulate arguments sharply… given all this, why on Earth aren’t male philosophers worrying that some of their own professional advancement has come because they are male?

If the women’s concern is any legitimate reason for worrying about having affirmative action, it seems to me that the state of the discipline is a much stronger reason for worrying about *not* having affirmative action. And “affirmative action” here has to mean far more than a token effort to consider women in hiring before dismissing them. It has to mean really engaging, at all levels of training and hiring, with the full set of forces that push women out of philosophy, and thinking hard about the role our “meritocratic” judgments play in that process. Personally, I care much more about the thoughtfulness and openness with which people approach those questions than about whether I agree with the particular institutional solution they settle on.

Another side to the story

I don’t know who is being described in this post.

But it could easily have been a post about me. Not long ago, a major department, X, had expressed interest in hiring me. Shortly thereafter, they hosted a conference which was organized by a female philosopher — a philosopher who wanted decent gender balance at the conference she was organizing. She suggested I be invited to speak at the conference.

As soon as I arrived, I began to get the impression that many people at X thought I’d been invited simply because I’m a woman (rather than being someone worth talking to who is also a woman). A few local grad students even said as much to my face. Unsurprisingly, my paper wasn’t well received by the X faculty. The nicest thing anyone from X said to me was that it was “very clearly presented”. X never expressed any further interest in hiring me after this conference.

But here’s the catch. My paper was great. Several very distinguished philosophers not affiliated with X said it was the best paper given at the conference. And when I’ve given it at other universities I’ve received very positive feedback. Now, who knows why the X faculty didn’t like my paper. But it wouldn’t surprise me that they thought it was bad because they expected it to be bad, and that they expected it to be bad because they assumed I’d been invited only because I’m a woman. Whoever that original post is about, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a similar explanation.

What counts as merit?

There has been some talk on this blog that perhaps women are invited as plenary speakers to increase gender balance, rather than on their own merit. The question here is: what is merit? Is it, for example tenure, or being invited to edited volumes or as plenary speakers? Given the implicit bias women face on the job market and other events I think striving for some sort of gender balance (even if that means one female speaker next to four or five male invitees) is not a bad thing. Recently, there was a philosophical conference centered around a highly specialized field on which I (a woman) am one of the few experts in the world. The problem is – I am only a postdoc. So I was not invited as a plenary speaker there, although the five or so plenary male speakers that have only occasionally browsed in this specialized field were.

You’re a woman– it’ll be easy for you

I am a first year MA student in a reasonably well-respected department. I love it, so far, despite being overwhelming in the minority as a woman. However, I recently asked a fellow student about what a professors expectations were with regard to written work. I have been having a difficult time reading this professor and discerning what he thinks about my contributions to classroom discussion. I was told, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about so-and-so’s class. You’re a woman, so they want to keep you, so just write whatever you want.”

I had a rough senior year of college; my GPA suffered; I want to do really well academically, to prove that I belong in grad school. That comment did not help my confidence or give me any sort of direction for the paper.

More classic worries about affirmative action

At my school, we have a lecture series, and in the early years, the Committee Chair noted at a meeting that the next speaker had to be a woman because so far no women had been invited that year. Of course, the speaker’s work had to be good, but the main attribute was that she be a female! The speaker we subsequently invited did not know this was the reason she was invited, of course, but as others on this blog have wondered: is it morally appropriate to invite a speaker because she is a woman, or to pubish her article, or book, or to invite her to a conference, for the same reason? Or to teach the work of women philosophers purely because you want women philosophers represented? To select work based on the gender of the author? Like it or not, these practices attach a stigma to our work, and a male philosopher once said to me: “is your success in your field mainly due to the fact that you are a woman, or is is nothing to do with the fact that you are a woman.” (He was wondering why I got invited to be on an editorial board and he did not.) I realized later that I don’t know the answer; I know (or think) I am good, but how much of what I have achieved of far was, like the speaker we invited that year, due to my gender?

What more do you want?

I’m a graduate student in a department with very few women in the program (at the time this story takes place there were only 3 women that were at all present in the department – including faculty). Many of the faculty seem to understand that this is a serious problem, and have taken steps to try to remedy both the underrepresentation and the climate that results from it (by, for example, accepting more female graduate students and focusing several recent hiring searches on female candidates). However, these efforts have largely backfired. As one of the only female graduate students, I was very involved in a recent job search in which the only fly outs were women. After the final job talk I was stopped in the hall and asked by a group of male faculty members what my thoughts on the candidates were. I said that I thought they all seemed equally qualified, but that candidate X was particularly friendly, approachable, and outgoing while also setting an excellent example of professionalism for the female grad studens. One senior male faculty member interrupted me midsentence with: “Well they’re all women, so what more do you want?” This was the same faculty member who told me in my first year that I had only been accepted to the PhD program because they “went out of their way to accept more women” that year. None of the other faculty members reproached him, they all just wandered away into their offices.

How not to support the women in your program

I am currently a first-year female grad student in a highly ranked philosophy program. While I was delighted to be accepted by a handful of top schools last year, I was horrified to find that no less than 3 of my acceptances were eventually accompanied by some (in all cases, male) member of the faculty directly stating that my gender played a significant part in my admissions decision. It would be naive to doubt that striking a gender balance requires some brand of affirmative action, but when female students are made to feel that they do not really deserve to be in the position they occupy, the good intentions behind the admissions policy are negated to some extent. I declined my place at each of the offending schools.

No mentoring needed: women have it easy

This happened after the turn of the century. When I was on the job market, my placement director told me that I would get a job since I am a woman. He gave me no help whatsoever in preparing my dossier, while giving my male peers substantial help. The problem was not that I did not ask for help: I sent him all my dossier material to look at and asked for specific advice on various issues. At the Eastern APA meeting, the situation was similar. We all got jobs. I’m quite sure that I did not get my job since I am a woman: several years have past and my research productivity is vastly higher than the most productive of my male peers in graduate school. I hasten to add that I publish in the very best journals.

Yeah, it SO easy for the girls

I was having a conversation with a fellow (male) undergraduate student who I had helped, on a number of occassions, with papers, studying for tests, etc. He complained that getting into graduate school would be very difficult for him, but I would get in “just for being a girl.” There were two of our professors present. One laughed, the other nodded. He got into graduate school. I did not.

Great pep talk

When I was on the job market in the late 1980s, I received many more calls for interviews than two of my male peers who were also looking. A couple of weeks before the Eastern APA, the Department Chair (also my dissertation advisor and the advisor of the two male students) called me into his office to tell me that the reason I had so many interviews was because I was a woman and that, furthermore, I was NOT a stronger candidate than the two male students who had fewer interviews. I was instantly deflated and went on the job market feeling like a token and an imposter. We all got decent jobs and 20 years have passed; my research productivity and professional recognition are orders of magnitude larger than my male peers. How well might I have done if my department chair had said something to boost my confidence?

It can’t be her abilities, can it?

My colleague and I are entering the APA Eastern meetings. She and I are co-placement chairs. This year, among our students are x – female – and y – male. Our department unanimously thinks of x as a stronger candidate, and her cv is clearly better. We run into an acquaintance – male, bright, generally liberal – and he asks how our university is doing in placement. We say x is doing great, something like 12 interviews; while y has only 3 but not bad ones, and begin to go through the others. He interrupts us to say “oh, wow, so I guess there really is some huge affirmative action going on.

The conversation, I’m happy to say, did not end there, and a great deal of educating on ignorant bigoted assumptions took place.