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.
We talked recently (I think) about how I would like a woman on my committee. While my work isn't directly related to "gender studies" or whatever, I feel that it would be beneficial to have a female mentor in graduate school. Though, I must say there is a pretty incredible community of female scholars we have seemed to find here. I have more to say about the "men's rights movement" but am slightly time limited here. I DO think that men are expected to fulfill certain (oftentimes undesirable/unattainable) attribute, just like women. I am thinking of the Old Spice man, and similar characters that openly discuss what it means to be "manly" albeit tongue in cheek in this instance.
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I will have to admit that as a woman in philosophy, I notice the overwhelming presence of males in the field more so than I think the men do. It's difficult at times. Certainly, most everyone is nice, but sometimes it really can feel like a boys' club.
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