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Women in Philosophy:
What’s Changed?
Helen Beebee looks back on the last ten years
Ten years ago, Jenny Saul and I – as Directors of the Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) and the British Philosophical Association respectively – wrote a report, Women in Philosophy in the UK. We wrote it because anyone with a cursory acquaintance with UK philosophy departments could see that at graduate student and staff levels women were woefully underrepresented, and yet the situation was one that most philosophers either seemed not to have noticed or else had noticed but were uninterested in addressing – or indeed even talking about. We thought the time had come to do something about that.
One positive change that’s happened in the last ten years is that all of this is now old hat
The report presented some statistics, which didn’t make for pretty reading. On the basis of a large-scale survey of philosophy departments we discovered that, while some 44% of undergraduate philosophy students were women, the numbers rapidly declined – to 33% at Master’s level, 31% at PhD lev-
el, 26% at permanent lecturer level and just 19% at professorial level. We floated some potential explanations for why women were leaving the profession at such an alarming rate – implicit bias, stereotype threat, sexual harassment – and briefly explained why these barriers to women’s participation was unfair. And we made some suggestions for addressing the situation: better representation of women on reading lists, websites, conference speakers and hiring panels, more use of anonymous procedures in student admissions and assessment, provision of childcare at conferences, and so on.
One positive change that’s happened in the last ten years is that all of this is now old hat. That women are significantly underrepresented is pretty much universally known; and that it is a problem, rather than merely a fact, is (to most people) not a claim that needs to be justified. And very many of the suggestions we made are now both widely implemented by individuals and widely enshrined in departmental policies and practices. (We followed up the report with the BPA/SWIP “Good Practice Scheme”, launched in 2014, to which some 28 UK departments and 13 learned societies currently subscribe. We like to think that this has helped to provide both a framework and an incentive for departments to think
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Forum about how to address the problem.)
Of course, we can’t take all the credit for kick-starting those change – or the other positive changes that I’ll talk about in due course – because another thing that’s happened in the last ten years is a massive increase in the amount of attention that’s been given to issues surrounding diversity and inclusion more broadly: by the media, by universities, by the government, and so on. To name a few: the #MeToo movement became a major focus of activism and media attention in 2017. Students and students’ unions have become much more vocal about – and the media has started to pay attention to – sexual harassment and sexual violence on campus. The many and various ways in which women are victims of discrimination and harassment have been brought to a wider audience through Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism project, and books such as her Everyday Sexism and Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women. In 2017, the government brought in legislation requiring employers with more than 250 employees to report annually on the gender pay gap. A light has been shone on the racism that permeates British society – and universities in particular – by high-profile activism and campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter and the National Union of Students’ Decolonise Education campaign, as well as widespread media reporting of campus incidents. Same-sex marriage was introduced in 2014. And so on.
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