Take a discipline racked by deep insecurity about its worth compared to science, which finds its most pleasing self-image in imagining itself continuous with the natural sciences and aspires to their ‘hardness’, throw in a largely male population, add a desperate job market, a culture of uncritical hero worship of its luminaries, mix in a sphere of ostensible academic interaction used instead for preening and strutting and the academic equivalent of mating, and you have, I think, the makings of a domain, which will continue to remain hostile to women.--Samir Chopra
In light of Brit's experience, one striking feature (as Karen pointed out at once) of the Healy co-citation networks is the near absence of women co-citations in "high prestige" journals (see my first attempt at analysis). How bad are things? In Healy's diagram I couldn't find Marcus, Thomson, Kamm, Wilson (neither Margaret nor Catherine), Wolff, Diamond, Anderson, Gilbert, just to name a few.
A related striking feature of Healy's findings is the extremely short citation-counts: "Our 2,200 articles and 34,000 citations works out to an average of about 15 citations per paper." Now some other time I'll reflect on what this suggests about our collective reading habits. But to cut through all the crap: basically you can get published in high prestige philosophy journals by engaging with very few (I almost wrote "select") high status men. Of course, we don't have informal cartels in philosophy! (Cf. Mohan, too.)
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