methodology

Diversity and academics

March 23, 2015March 29, 2015 Cate Hundleby3 Comments

The situation of women in philosophy has received a lot of attention lately, including the Gendered Conference Campaign for philosophy developed back in 2009. Including women in academic venues (conference invitations or departmental hiring, notably) is not simply an attempt to make manifest a social ideal. There are many epistemological reasons to demand the representation of women be significant (I tend to find a minimum of 1/3 works well for most the arguments):

Regarding the need to counteract the operation of implicit social bias in selecting people: Reasoners tend to (often unconsciously) prefer men over women. This general tendency tends to remain unaffected by one’s conscious political commitments such that women and feminists are vulnerable to bias against women just like everyone else (we may have ‘aversive bias’). The implicit association test (IAT) now provides massive evidence to this effect that builds on decades of social psychological studies of how people judge each other. (If you haven’t taken the IAT, then you should.) Such studies show that gender bias (e.g.) is not better for those trained to be objective, and in fact they (we?) tend to have a false sense of confidence that makes us actually moreprejudiced. This recent article by Moss-Racusin et al. on this psychological phenomenon shows that faculty members in science are just as biased as anyone else and more so if they consider themselves to be personally objective.
Regarding the ability of women (and other marginalized social identities) to participate: Psychology reveals a robust phenomenon of (mostly unconscious) stereotype threat. It’s complicated, but one aspect of it, one trigger for it, is when few participants (only one or less than 1/3) belong to the same social group as oneself. Minority status is sufficient to trigger stereotype threat. The effects are that people in that group will not perform as well and will be deterred from participating (and they may never realize it).
Regarding the quality of the discussion and emerging understanding or knowledge: (1) and (2) affect this, and there is further reason for concern:
1. from feminist epistemology and philosophy of science:
  1. Helen Longino’s empiricist view of objectivity arising from critical discourse suggests that social diversity provides for a great range of background assumptions and therefore more meaningful criticism and response.
  2. Standpoint theorists argue that women’s experiences (i) provide a more complete perspective, or (ii) a critical outsider perspective, are (iii) less invested in current systems of power, and (iv) simply provide an underrepresented perspective.
  3. Standpoint theorists also argue that feminist and other liberatory perspectives provide valuable input because their understandings are (i) different from the more widely accepted perspective; (ii) are committed to developing understandings of a different future. More women tends to mean more feminist perspectives.
2. from psychology (in Scientific American: I confess I haven’t read the original research) comes evidence that social diversity makes people work harder in groups.

Many of these arguments hold for any marginalized group, but the epistemic values sometimes run up against a lack of people having adequate training. That is no longer the case for women in philosophy, as we can be found in decent numbers (again 1/3) in almost all fields and subfields. At this point, the exceptions where women are not well-represented may well indicate that the field has been constructed in some way to include only the work done by men and thus that the field needs to change. (Despite great progress over the last 200 years, work remains quite gendered, and that includes academic work.)

Including women and other marginalized people may well require broadening a field or its methods, and that is good enough reason for change, but it’s justified on epistemological grounds as much as socio-political. It’s not easy to do, at all, and token efforts may be quite ineffective, as Carla Fehr (2011) argues. The above are all “diversity as excellence” approaches and they demand a lot of work to be effective. I’ve written this post in the hopes of saving people a step when you are called on to make arguments for the epistemological value of diversity, such as solid representation by women. You have here almost a dozen reasons, just to start with.

Methodology

October 7, 2013October 7, 2013 Cate Hundleby

I’m a philosopher and so untrained in methodology although my work in feminist epistemology intersects extensively with feminist methodology. A method of only a very rough sort thus can be found in how I choose textbooks for analysis in my the database.

Textbooks are suitable for the database if intended for introductory philosophy courses. I exclude other disciplines to keep things manageable. What counts as critical thinking varies greatly from discipline to discipline, and often connects with the disciplinary methodology.
I include introductory argumentation textbooks because that has become the standard way to teach critical thinking in philosophy, and only a few textbooks (Pinto, Blair and Parr and Kenyon, that I know of) do not focus on argumentation.
However, books with 50% or more on formal logic do not make the table since that material tends to be covered in separate courses. Likewise, textbook publishers tend to include argumentation skills under critical thinking and distinguish that from formal logic.
I try to prioritize books by scholars in the field and academic publishers over commercial publishers. My larger goal is to encourage adoption of the more scholarly textbooks, and I try to provide the resources to allow instructors to find their own way to those books.

Suggestions and advice are welcome!

Addressing gender bias in philosophy

November 4, 2012November 10, 2012 Cate Hundleby

Gender bias has become a hot subject in philosophy, not merely as a topic for epistemology — in the work of Lorraine Code, Nancy Tuana , and Miranda Fricker, for instance. Thirty years of feminist epistemology bears currently on the discipline in ways that it hasn’t since the emergence of the field in the 1980s. Whereas at that point a central contention was that women might bring different ways of thinking or different concerns to the discipline, now the issue is that all people — including philosophers — tend to be biased against women. Over fifteen years of research on implicit bias shows that across cultures (classes, and professions) people tend to underestimate women’s ability and qualification. Take the demonstration test and see! (Though the test is not meant to offer a personal diagnosis, taking it can be profoundly humbling.)

The effects of bias in philosophy have become apparent because women are now around 20% of philosophy departments, and often more. This is a rather meagre advance over the last thirty years, and the continued under-representation and leaky pipeline has earned the name “the philosophy exception” because it is so poor relative to women’s advances in other fields. Nonetheless, enough women work in the discipline that when philosophical forums neglect women there is quantifiable reason to complain. (This contrasts with the case for people of colour and other marginalized philosophers who don’t yet constitute a significant number of people in the discipline.)

Further, the evidence about implicit bias suggests that the reason for the problem is not personal or curable (though perhaps treatable) at the individual level and provides reason to demand systematic and institutional attention to the problem. Witness the Gendered Conference Campaign that “aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), [and] of the harm that they do.” This campaign recently received an apology from a co-editor of a Canadian philosophy journal, Dialogue, Mathieu Marion.

Ordinary critical thinking does not serve us well in addressing implicit bias. At least, reflection does not affect how implicit bias enters into our pre-discursive evaluations, poisoning our reasoning from the outset. To address and root out the default switches, the fast thinking in Daniel Kahneman’s terms, demands we develop a new set of tools. I think some of those tools may come from argumentation, as a discursive practice, and I think the success of the Gendered Conference Campaign bears that out: they write letters to organizers of events that under-represent women pointing out the problem. Philosophy will not be the same in ten years, we have reason to hope, for women; and that should set a precedent that allows the discipline to better address intersecting forms of marginalization.

We are all vulnerable to implicit bias — me too! And ordinary philosophical methods are no help. Introspection is a weak defence against socialization. So we must rethink our methodology, but philosophers don’t like to think about methodology. There can be good reason to stick with a general argumentative rigour, and follow intuition as well as evidence. However, the utter lack of any methodological sensibility renders philosophy prone to the vague pronouncements most susceptible to implicit bias. For instance, terms such as “smart” seem to apply most frequently to young white men, argues Jennifer Saul in The Philosophers Magazine.

Instead of introspection and personal resolve, assuming that good will can be adequate to the problem, addressing social biases head-on requires making equity into a principle of organization. Most of us reach for the names of old white men when looking for someone important or interesting to feature if we receive no further guidance. Organizational resistance to that proclivity can help us head it off, giving ourselves new patterns of practice by asking ourselves to look first for women, people of colour, disabled philosophers, and other marginalized people to feature in our forums.

Sometimes too, women and other marginalized philosophers may be harder to engage as speakers and authors. After all, women do more work than men hour-by-hour, in all cultures and classes; and other forms of social marginalization bring with them other obstacles to ready participation. Those obstacles provide another reason to prioritize the inclusion of people who are not men, not white, not able-bodied, not straight, and so on, and to do so systematically from the start of our editorial and organizational work. Without that priority we succumb not only to implicit bias but to systemic discrimination that lowers the quality of the philosophy we promote.

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