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Letters
Letters
Why So Few Women? • New Realistic Speculations • Incalculable Realities • Embryonic Evaluations • Conservative Concerns • Unrealistic Utilitarianism • Another Maddening Idea • Inescapable Freedom • No Funny Business • The Incoherence of the Coherence
Why So Few Women?
Dear Editor: At the Philosophy Now Festival on 21st November, I attended a talk by Prof. David Papineau on why there are so few women in university philosophy departments. Papineau’s argument can be summarised as follows: in philosophy, only 25% of academics are women. This makes philosophy an outlier in the humanities. So what explains it? Papineau argues that implicit bias and a competitive academic culture can’t explain the difference, because these play a role in other disciplines too, so there must be something intrinsic to philosophy as a discipline that makes it less attractive to women.
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