A few days ago I posted the first installment of a discussion of how gender inequality on the domestic front may affect gender inequality professionally. I discussed women’s limitations in terms of traveling for work, and now I will focus on similar limitations concerning professional relocation. But let me start with a caveat, which occurred to me after writing the first installment: the observations here do not pertain primarily to philosophy, in fact they seem to hold at least of the academic career in general. Indeed, traveling to conferences and the willingness to relocate so as to go after advantageous jobs seem to be part and parcel of academic work in general. So the observations offered here cannot in any way explain why gender balance in philosophy is so much worse than in other disciplines. Nevertheless, I think it is still useful to reflect for a moment on the effects of gender inequality on the domestic front, and possibly on ways to mitigate them.
In order to discuss the issue of relocation, let me start with two anecdotes. The first concerns a distinguished young philosopher/logician who is now just forming a new, exciting research center. He has hired something like ten people to get the center started, and unfortunately all of them are male. I asked him in private what he thought about it; he replied that he deeply regretted this outcome, and that he had made serious efforts to prevent this from happening, in particular by approaching several female potential candidates and encouraging them to apply for the many positions available at the center. But they would often reply that they couldn’t apply, as relocation was out of the question; their partners had jobs elsewhere. (I have to admit having been one of the female potential candidates who gave him this exact reply…) So in the end they had virtually no female candidates applying, and thus no wonder that there were no female hires.
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