I am at the Society for Christian Philosopher's regional meeting in Westmont College, Santa Barbara. Out of a total of 20 speakers, there are 4 women (20 % of speakers are women, which seems roughly in line with the percentage of women in our profession). One of the four keynote speakers is female (Eleonore Stump, arguably one of the top authors in philosophy of religion). It is not difficult to come up with names of prominent women philosophers in philosophy of religion (e.g., Eleonore Stump, Lynne Rudder Baker, Nancey Murphy, Linda Zagzebski, Christina Van Dyke, Celia Deane-Drummond.)
From my personal experience, I can also say that the climate for women is inviting and philosophers of religion try to attract women to their field. For example, I received one of the Oxford Templeton fellowships for 2011-2012, even though I am a junior scholar. The philosophers of religion at Oxford (a.o. Tim Mawson, Richard Swinburne and Brian Leftow) have provided a great and welcoming research climate, and have provided excellent feedback on my work. I am a keynote speaker at a conference on cognitive science and philosophy of religion in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland.
Nevertheless, the perception seems to be that philosophy of religion is even more gender imbalanced than other fields, see e.g., here and here. The Prosblogion, one of the prominent philosophy of religion blogs, has only one female contributor (as far as I can see).
Here is the number of essays written by women in three recent anthologies in philosophy of religion:
- The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of religion: 1/14
- The Oxford handbook of the philosophy of religion: 3/20
- The Routledge companion to philosophy of religion: 6/64
Here are some figures for editorial boards of the leading journals in philosophy of religion:
- Faith & Philosophy: 3/38
- Religious Studies: 5/31
- International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion: 2/20
While these numbers could be significantly improved, it seems to me they are not much out of line with many other fields and journals.If we look at the AOS in the PhilPaper survey according to gender, we see that only 2.3% of women respondents list philosophy of religion (the figure for men is not that high, 5.8%) The difference is significant (p = 0.044 - I don't know if this p value controls for all pairwise comparisons).The only other significant p-values for AOS are philosophy of physics (female 3.3% vs male 7.5%, p = .03), logic (4.2 vs 11.5%, p = .001), metaphysics (16.5% vs 27.6%, p = .001). Given that philosophy of religion often clusters with epistemology (which has an insignificant gender difference, but nevertheless, more men working in it than women) and metaphysics, this is also not surprising. [Note: given that there are fewer women than men, the percentages don't mean that there are about twice as many men working in philosophy of religion than women. 83.4% of respondents were men, so the percentage of women in philosophy of religion is lower. What I'm interested in is whether it is significantly lower than the percentage of women in other disciplines].
What puzzles me is the following: it is a sociologically robust phenomenon (actually, one of the few findings that robustly pop up in religious surveys across countries) that women are more religious than men. Now there are many excellent atheist philosophers of religion, but at least according to the PhilPaper survey, the large majority of people working in philosophy of religion are theists: 72.3% of those who list PoR as an AOS self-identify as theists; of those who do not list PoR it's only 11.7%, a highly significant result (p <.001) And anecdotally, I get the impression that people work in PoR and are not theists are at least friendly or receptive to theism (they are 'friendly atheists', to use William Rowe's phrase, i.e, they believe that there is at least room for rational disagreement on the question of theism). So given the connection between theism and philosophy of religion, and given that women are more religious than men, one should expect, if anything, more women in philosophy of religion than in other fields.
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