Women in Philosophy

This weekend our department welcomed our prospective graduate students, and I hosted one student myself. Last night and this morning we ended up talking a lot about feminism- not surprising, since the director of our program is a brilliant social engineer and probably matched us together because of our similar interests.

I've been thinking lately about how I represent myself as a woman and as a feminist, both personally and professionally. Since coming to grad school, I have been more hesitant to talk about feminism, other than about 5 people who I trust and respect. I don't want to reveal too much here, other than hoping to spur some public or private reflections about how gender dynamics are examined or unexamined in different institutional contexts.

Although I come from a field (biology) that is roughly equally male and female (although there are more male professors), I've been interacting with more philosophers, which is a very male dominated field, but the older generations tend to be pretty reflexive about this disparity (they recognize it, and likely even think of themselves as feminists- consider that many current philosophy professors were in grad school in the 70s).

But I feel that in everyday interactions, gender dynamics often go unnoticed- such as the gender composition of informal and formal groups, the subconscious judgments that get made about me because I am a single woman, and the role gender plays in professional/personal interactions (the line between the two is often blurry in grad school). On one hand, I dearly respect and cherish my professors and colleagues regardless of their gender; on the other hand, I wonder whether how we might be unconsciously perpetuating these disparities, and how actively we are working for equity [please note that by "we," I mean both men and women].

Thoughts from those in philosophy and others?

P.S. If you want to know what partly fueled our evening discussions, it was this and this.

Evelyn Fox Keller

This interview is worth a listen.

Evelyn Fox Keller was trained as a theoretical physicist, wrote her dissertation in molecular biology and made groundbreaking contributions to mathematical biology, and is now one of the preeminent scholars of "gender and science," History & Philosophy of Science, and Science & Technology Studies. Her writings on both gender and the history of molecular biology are also fantastic.


The rest of the interview series, "How to Think About Science," also looks very interesting! Many of those authors are in the field of science studies, like I am.