UPDATE: the editors of the volume on epistemic modality I'm talking about here, Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson, both left comments below to say that they deeply regret the fact that the volume has a 100% male lineup. So do read the comments to get a better picture of the story!
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As many of you already know, the Feminist Philosophers run the Gendered Conference Campaign, and among other things they 'pick on' events with a poor gender balance of (mostly keynote) speakers, especially when it's a 100% male affair. Another venue where this problem presents itself are edited volumes, where the effects of lack of visibility of the work of female philosophers is arguably even more damaging in terms of perpetuating the stereotype of philosophy being a (white) male thing. The issue of edited volumes also comes up regularly at the Feminist Philosophers.
In this spirit, today I came across a forthcoming volume on epistemic modality which looks great in all respects but one: a 100% male line-up of contributors. It is edited by Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson, which is all the more surprising to me, knowing that Brian does care about the issue of gender balance in the profession. (Incidentally, let me add that my colleague Maria Aloni has been working on epistemic modalities (more from a formal semantics point of view), and judging from the great work she's done over the years, I can only imagine that it is worth paying attention to. I'm sure one could think of other women doing relevant work in the area who might have been considered for the volume.)
I certainly do not wish to diminish the value of this (from the looks of it) excellent volume in any way, but I thought it would be useful to bring it up in order to illustrate how easy it is to fall pray to one's own implicit biases concerning men and women in philosophy. Also, it may well be that some women were invited to contribute, but that for whatever reasons it didn't work out. Still, something to keep in mind for those of you editing volumes at the moment!
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