For a couple of days I have been mulling over whether Catarina's take on the National Post article about Eric and Mark's modest proposal is right. In the end, I don't think I agree with it.
1. First of all, and I think that this is an important piece of context, the article was not as such about the Gendered Conference Campaign. The GCC is not news: it is three years old and newspapers are not (usually) interested in reporting three year old events. It is about Eric Schliesser's proposal that some speakers at a male-only conference should be publicly named as having failed, before accepting the invitation, to ascertain that only males had been invited. As the journalist paraphrased Eric: "Proceed with a Berlin-based conference that features 14 male speakers and no women, and I will essentially launch a campaign to take you down professionally." (By the way, I don't think that the reporter implied that these were Eric's words.)
2. Of course, the GCC is the background for that call. But it is obvious from reading the piece that a) a thorough analysis of GCC was not the journalist's agenda, and b) that her interest was piqued by the (shall we say?) boldness of Eric's direct intervention in the program of a conference that he wasn't actually organizing. It's a little utopian to expect that the National Post (of all newspapers) would pay a great deal of attention to the GCC, and pretty unexpected even that something on this blog would have come to their notice.
3. Against that background, I find that what Catarina's criticism unrealistic and not totally fair:
"apparently, it is only when male individuals put forward a proposal to improve the gender balance at philosophy conferences that it gets this kind of attention. Not enough is said . . . on the Gendered Conference Campaign of the Feminist Philosophers, which has been running for years, and which is ultimately what got the whole thing started."
It's not as if this journalist had been following the GCC for years and decided that it had crossed the threshold of importance when Eric wrote in HOPOS and he and Mark wrote their piece on NewAPPS. It is rather that somehow the latter piece came to her attention and she decided to write it up. That she went on to provide a link to the Feminist Philosopher's blog is to her credit.
4. What I say above is substantiated by my conversation with the reporter. When she called me, she didn't know much about GCC or about what the headline (not necessarily written by her, by the way) calls a "philosophy gender war." My long conversation with her covered the issues of gender equity in the subject. Now, I am portrayed in her article simply as opposing Eric and Mark. I would have been more comfortable being portrayed as a supporter of GCC and of gender equity in philosophy, but as one opposed to the "modest proposal." That would have been more in line with the conversation. But given the context, I think it's a minor error. (And the article is not about me, in any case.)
5. I don't think we should treat pieces like this as if they were deep and comprehensive discussions of big issues. In an otherwise very interesting blog post from Western's Rotman Institute, Amy Wuest writes:
[Matthen's] response, “[m]aybe X is thoughtless about gender issues, but is it up to me to quiz him (or her)?” seems to miss the point since responsibility is again parsed on an individual level. Not only does this seem to belie his assumptions, but he also—like the National Post author—artificially narrows the field of solutions.
The problem with this is that I was precisely talking about individual responses, and so was the reporter. Apropos Eric and Mark, I was saying: I support the GCC but I don't think it is the responsibility of individual invitees to enforce it. (If I violate GCC when I am organizing a conference, which I do about four times a year—organize, I mean, not violate—then talk to me about it.) And even if it is the responsibility of individual invitees, I don't think it behooves me to disparage them in public.
6. One final point. Wuest above compares the GCC with civil rights issues "when the south was desegregating." I honestly don't think that the GCC is like that. It is, of course, a campaign for human equality. But the wrong it seeks to redress is not of the same magnitude as those of apartheid and segregation in the southern USA. I did support action against indirectly involved people (such as those who played rugby and cricket against all-white South African teams) in the latter cases; I don't support action against anybody with regard to the GCC. That's not simply inconsistency. It's a judgement about what kinds of action are merited in different kinds of cases.
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