I hit the academic philosophy job market in 2011 and stayed there – in some form or another – until 2015. Things really sucked back then. It was hard for anyone to get a job, but women and other under-represented groups faced special difficulties, both on the job market and in the years before hitting the market.
We talked about these things all the time in those days. But I mostly dropped out of those discussions after 2015. It’s not that I lost interest in the topic, exactly. I still think it’s an important topic. Rather, it’s that I’m no longer a part of the philosophy profession. Sure, I’ll always have a PhD in Philosophy, a publishing record, and an interest in the topics and issues. So I’ll always think of myself as a philosopher. But I landed a non-academic job in 2013. I published my most recent article in a philosophy journal in 2016. And I now sport a decade long career outside of academia.
But I recently found an occasion to peer back in. I’ll do so by looking at data showing a very different job market situation. Data now show that women do better than men on the philosophy job market.
What’s going on there?
Philosophy Job Market and White Male Resentment
Among other things, the early 2010s brought lots of white male resentment politics to philosophy. In retrospect, it wouldn’t be wrong to call it a rise of Trumpism before Trump. White bro resentment blogs sprung up. Even (meta-)meta-blogs. Brian Leiter did his Brian Leiter thing, building ‘anti-woke’ resentment politics before those became trendy. And so on.
It was a shitshow. The shitshow happened, in part, because of the job market situation, which was, in fact, quite real. The 2008 recession and 2010 election pretty much killed the job market. Other factors exacerbated it: the anonymity of the Internet, the rise of social media, the desperation of job seekers, and the often clueless PMC politics of progressive academics who had already secured tenure and had no meaningful stake in the game.
I was a young philosopher in those days, and I saw it all happen, spending a fair bit of time fighting against the dudebro crowd. Why? Aside from being a person who cares about these issues, I specialized in several areas of philosophy relevant to these debates. Feminist philosophy among them.
Brian Leiter said various silly things about me on blogs. One white male dudebro philosopher sent me a ludicrous lawsuit threat. One anonymous chickenshit even sent a death threat. And so on.
Fun times. Ask me about it over a beer sometime.
As readers might imagine, I wasn’t impressed by the white male resentment politics. I even co-authored an article on issues women face when attempting to enter academic philosophy.
The Claim
What were the dudebros on about? Their main claim – usually anonymous – was that women got the jobs! Or, at the very least, that women held unfair advantages on the market. They thought all this explained their own difficulty in finding jobs. But, I mean, yeah. It was pretty close to South Park. Dey, indeed, terk er jerbs.
These claims didn’t impress me. Sure, they had a few anecdotes and rumors. But studies up to this point didn’t support the claims. And claims that unqualified women were getting jobs were just wild. Almost everyone who gets a job in philosophy – then and now – holds outstanding qualifications to do the work they’re hired to do.
I left it at that. Dudebros made claims. Their claims were false.
The Turn?
But in the years since those debates, new studies rolled in, and they told a different story. Studies in the field after 2011, for example, showed that women no longer face overall disadvantages on the job market. That is to say, they now got jobs at rates about equal to men.
And then studies started telling a very different story. A 2022 article in Metaphilosophy showed women getting jobs in philosophy at higher rates than men. The study used data from 2012 to 2019.
In short, studies show a full turn. In a little over a decade, philosophy moved from a field where men held advantages on the job market to one where women hold advantages on the job market.
What should we make of that? Are we now seeing the Revenge of the Dudebros? Were they correct all along? What does all this day about the politics of academic philosophy?
The Research
Let’s take a closer look at that 2022 Metaphilosophy paper, using Justin Weinberg’s post at Daily Nous as a guide. Pablo Andrés Contreras Kallens, Dan Hicks, and Carolyn Dicey Jennings draw one key conclusion relevant to our concerns here: women and people who attend so-called ‘prestigious’ universities do better on the job market than men and people who do not attend such universities.
What does that tell us?
First, let’s talk about what it doesn’t tell us. The data do not support the dudebros, at least not their original claims. Why? Because only newer data show any advantages for women over men. The data from those days said no such thing. So, if the dudebros turn out to be right, it’s like the case of the weatherman who predicts a storm on Monday and then claims success because a storm blew in on the next Friday.
Second, it really only tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why women now enjoy advantages. Let’s turn to that question.
Explanations, Part 0 (What It Ain’t)
Kallens, et al. explicitly rule out a few things. Their data control for research area, graduate program prestige, country of origin, and graduation year. So, in short, women do not enjoy advantages over men because they’re more likely specialize in ‘hot’ fields (such as applied ethics), attend grad school at fancier universities than men, are likelier to graduate from the US or the UK, or spend more (or less) time on the job market.
I mention this only because lots of people appeal to those things, especially research area. But that’s out. It’s not any of those things. So, I’ll (mostly) avoid talking about them in what follows.
Explanations, Part 1 (The Right Stuff)
That leaves us with a few possibilities. Could women enjoy hiring advantages over men because they out-compete them? Defenders of the notion have a plausible story to tell. At each stage of their career, from high school to undergraduate studies to graduate studies to the job market, women face greater barriers to success. Those barriers mean that the women who succeed at each stage have to be better at what they do than the men who succeed. So, women who end up with a PhD in Philosophy are simply stronger candidates. And so, they’re more likely to get hired.
In short, due to the barriers they face, the women who make it have the ‘right stuff.’ When you remove discriminatory barriers on the job market, they win the job lottery more often than men win it.
That’s the story, anyway.
Due to my own political views, I find this an attractive story. But it doesn’t work as an explanation. Ultimately it doesn’t fit what we know. For one, women were probably held to even higher standards – relative to men – 10, 20, and 30+ years ago. So why didn’t they hold advantages on the job market then?
I know, I know. They didn’t get jobs back then due to greater discriminatory barriers and systemic biases in the job market. But I see little evidence that such biases have really been dismantled, even now. Yes, philosophy departments talk a big game about getting bias out of their hiring systems. But they haven’t shown us good evidence that they’re doing so. At least not at the kind of scale needed to make a lasting difference. I suspect whatever biases against women that existed 10+ years ago still mostly exist today.
The ‘Fair Market’
But whether or not readers buy any of that, the explanation simply puts too much faith in ‘fair markets.’ It puts too much faith in the ability of the market to sort candidates according to their qualifications.
Anyone who’s been involved in a philosophy job search in the last couple of decades knows there are waaaay more qualified candidates than job openings. Even relatively undesirable jobs in relatively undesirable locations attract a couple dozen (and up to a few hundred) highly qualified candidates who are more or less indistinguishable in terms of how good a job they’d do. In line with overall numbers in the profession, about two-thirds of those candidates will be men and about one-third will be women. And when we look at most applicant pools, even the 10th or 20th (and in many cases, even the 40th or 50th) best candidate in the pool will have an impressive CV and would make a great professor.
Here’s my point. The entire idea of one candidate being “the best” in such an environment is sheer madness. For any job, there’s more than one woman and more than one man sitting around pretty much equally at the top. For almost any job in academic philosophy, there’s no such thing as the most qualified candidate.
Explanations, Part 2 (Intentional Efforts)
Over at Weinberg’s thread on Daily Nous, the conversation quickly turned to what the original philosophy dudebros said. Commenters discussed the possibility that women are more likely to get hired because philosophy departments make intentional efforts to hire more women.
Do they?
I’ll give a complicated series of answers to this question. Those answers occupy the rest of this post. But here’s the short answer: probably. At a broad level, I think that once you rule out things like graduate department prestige, area of specialization, women out-competing men, and sheer chance, then you’re left with departments making intentional efforts to hire more women.
But elimination alone won’t cut it. To fill this out, I think we need to say why they’re doing so. And it surely isn’t going to be for the kind of conspiratorial reasons the dudebro crowd favors.
I’ll begin by distinguishing between so-called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ narratives.
The Positive Spin
Kallas, et al. put it like this. Maybe departments moved away from hostile interview climates (e.g., held in hotel rooms) and toward less hostile ones ones (e.g., Zoom and other online formats). Maybe they now conduct more searches in specialties where women work. And maybe they actively mitigate implicit biases in their searches.
The problem, though, is that none of this is very convincing. Kallas, et al. don’t find it convincing, either. In fact, we even ruled much of it out earlier.
And much of the story doesn’t fit the facts very well. As the authors point out, most places switched to online interviews after the data started showing women doing better than men. Not before. Plus, there’s not much evidence departments are doing anything to systematically limit implicit bias. Finally, the authors’ own data rule out the point about areas of specialization, as I pointed out (twice) above.
So, again, it’s not clear why the Metaphilosophy paper even really lists this as a possible explanation. It’s highly unlikely. The authors seem to be going out of their way to avoid the ‘negative’ spin.
The Negative Spin
So what’s the negative spin? Commenters in Weinberg’s thread reach for it over and over. The gist of it is that various people – hiring committee members, department chairs, deans, and so on – put their thumb on the scale and make extra efforts to hire women for faculty positions. They take active steps to give women in applicant pools advantages over men.
To be clear, even though I call this the ‘negative spin,’ the people who make a claim like this do so from lots of different perspectives and starting points. And they take different attitudes toward it. Some argue it’s an overdue corrective to decades of hiring bias against women. Others argue it’s an illegal hiring preference that unfairly punishes men in 2023 who had nothing to do with the actions of men in decades past.
I’m not going to settle that debate. But I can lay out some of the evidence for the ‘thumb on the scale’ view.
Anecdotal Evidence
Much of the evidence is anecdotal. Quite a few anonymous commenters reported in Weinberg’s thread that they’ve been part of hiring committees with an overt preference for women. Some report the preference among search committee members. Others report direct orders from their chair or academic dean to hire a woman. I myself have knowledge of one – and likely two – searches at universities that had, at a minimum, a shadow ban on hiring a white man. And quite likely an unwritten order from a dean.
I’ve suspected it in other cases I’ve seen. During my time on the job market, I saw a couple of cases of all-male philosophy departments advertising a hire in feminist philosophy. At the time, I figured they did this as part of a clumsy effort to finally cut the shit and hire a woman after decades of discriminating against women and hiring only white men. Quite possibly under orders from a dean.
So, it happens. It gets us nowhere to deny it ever happens. Even if some of the anecdotes are untruthful, they’re not all untruthful.
But I have no idea how common these things are. Obviously no one collects data on it.
A Variety of Methods
Departments don’t need to act that directly in order to produce searches that mildly advantage women over men. Some philosophers report that their departments impose gender balancing on interview or fly-out lists. Some send subtle signals, like tailoring ads to women or advertising in sources (e.g., SWIP email lists) where women are more likely to see the ads.
I’m not arguing these are bad ideas. More subtle methods can function as useful ways to counteract other kinds of bias. But my point is that these things also happen and that, cumulatively, they would explain data showing that women hold mild advantages over men in the job market.
Why? Gender balancing an interview list, for example, would produce a situation where about one third of the applicants are women, but half the people interviewed are women. This slightly tips the playing field and makes it a tad likelier than chance that a woman gets hired. If, say, 50 universities do this, it’ll produce a few more women getting jobs than would’ve gotten jobs by chance alone.
It would especially have an effect in a job market where there’s basically no difference between the top 10 or 20 candidates.
The Conclusion?
And so, my very tentative conclusion is that the ‘thumb on the scales’ story probably explains why women hold mild advantages on the job market.
That said, the case for it really isn’t all that great. It’s just that we do have a case for it. And we can rule out all the plausible alternatives.
The Judgment
This takes me to my attitude toward these things, especially with respect to my own efforts at finding a job in philosophy a decade ago. When I think back, for example, to that case of the all-male department putting out an ad in feminist philosophy, does the outcome and likely motivation bother me?
Nope. It doesn’t.
Even at the time, when I first suspected what was happening, it didn’t really bother me. It certainly doesn’t bother me now. Back in those days, I told myself I wanted a job in academia. But I didn’t really want that job. At no point did I ever really want to work in an all-male department with so much history of misogyny that it hadn’t hired a woman in decades.
I wouldn’t have been happy in that kind of workplace.
Look, careers are complicated. Sometimes people on the philosophy job market wrap themselves up so much in getting any job that they fail to consider what kind of job they’d genuinely enjoy. For me, working in an all-male philosophy department is something I likely wouldn’t enjoy.
The vast majority of my friends during my adult years have been women or non-binary people. My best work relationships have been with women. And as a faculty member, I’d probably form better relationships with colleagues who are women than with those who are men. I wouldn’t have done well in an all-male department.
Explanations, Part 3 (Class War)
Let’s pause to take stock.
The data now show that women hold (mild) advantages over men on the job market. We don’t totally know why, but we can make reasonable inferences. Hiring departments are implementing policies – both stated and unstated – that produce preferences for women over men. This probably happens often enough to cancel out biases against women and produce an overall landscape slightly in their favor.
That leaves us with many questions about how to respond. I’ll argue that white male resentment politics constitute a poor response to this situation. The dudebros are wrong about the underlying politics of why this situation emerged. As graduate student workers, job applicants, and junior faculty members, the young philosophers of the current era would do best to respond very differently.
Why? The dudebros aim at the wrong targets. And they miss the steps they could take to address the underlying forces at play in a way that could improve the situation.
Neoliberal Politics and University Administration
I think we have to start by thinking about diversity preferences from deans and other university administrators as taking place within a deeper class war between university administration and faculty. I’m sure some deans genuinely believe in diversity and DEI for reasons of fairness and justice. I’m sure a few more of them have pragmatic reasons for supporting these things, such as making their universities more attractive to diverse bodies of students and more useful to their local communities.
But the core function of admin support for diversity and DEI relates to underlying labor trends in academia. We know from piles of research that as women enter a career field, salary in that field declines.
University administrators know this, too. And they’re under strong pressure from competitive markets, university trustees, and so on to reduce labor costs. Those university administrators are counting on a bunch of clueless dudebros to bash the women they hire rather than join together with those women to fight for their common interests.
The Solution
I’ll conclude by expanding on that last point – the one about worker solidarity.
If you’re a worker – a worker in any field – and you find that the entry of certain people lowers the salary and security of people in that field- you shouldn’t respond by shitting on your fellow workers. For one, it’s not their fault that the system works this way. But, more usefully, bashing them won’t help anyone except the bosses. The bosses want to keep you divided.
The boss, in short, counts on that underlying misogyny. It damages both the women it targets and the men who use it. It won’t help the men get a job. And it’ll push the women to accept worsening labor conditions.
Instead, you find ways to fight alongside them. The best way forward for everyone in the profession is for various groups – people who get tenure stream jobs, people who work in adjunct roles, etc. – to unionize and join with their fellow faculty, adjuncts, and precariously employed academics. Together, these groups can fight to hold the line against erosion of salary and decline in faculty power.
And once that happens, philosophers will undermine the conditions that lead to gender inequity in hiring.
