At the end of a laudatory* review of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology the reviewer makes the following point about gender and race imbalance** in authorial choices for Oxford Handbooks:
Second, OHCP contains twenty-eight essays, but only three of them are authored by women. Unfortunately, the low percentage of women contributors (or co-contributors) isn't a peculiarity of this particular volume. After glancing at the table of contents of forty-five Oxford Handbooks in philosophy, I found that fewer than 20% of contributions are either authored or co-authored by women.
(Excluded from this calculation are editorial and section introductions.) The numbers are worse for racial minorities. The obvious solution is for editors to invite more women and minorities to contribute. They should also include essays on underrepresented topics; for example, OHCP could have included essays on Africana and Vietnamese phenomenology. A handbook doesn't necessarily need to contain entries written exclusively by well-established philosophers. It only needs to include well-argued and well-written essays. Of course, one can and should give credit to authors that have been influential in a field. But inviting them to contribute isn't the only way to do this. The editor, for instance, can acknowledge their importance in the introduction. The aim of producing more diverse Oxford Handbooks is not only laudable but also attainable.
* The opening lines of the review: "In putting together The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (OHCP), Dan Zahavi has done a truly marvelous job. He has amassed essays of outstanding quality, replete with fascinating ideas, imaginative examples, and above all, carefully constructed arguments."
** For efforts at addressing the gender component of this issue in allied areas, see the Gendered Conference Campaign, the Gendered Citation Campaign, and a number of posts at New APPS (here, here, and here, for starters). For New APPS discussions of the intersection of race and gender, see here, here, and here, at least. On the intersections with disability, see this category.
UPDATE, 31 July, 9:10 am CDT. This passage from the Gendered Conference Campaign illustrates the non-accusatory spirit with which this post is made. In this case, we should substitute "a low percentage relative to that of women in professional philosophy" for "all-male."
The Gendered Conference Campaign aims to raise awareness of the prevalence of all-male conferences (and volumes, and summer schools), of the harm that they do. We make no claims whatsoever about the causes of such conferences: our focus is on their existence and effects. We are therefore not in the business of blaming conference organisers, and not interested (here, anyway) in discussions of blameworthiness. Instead, we are interested in drawing attention to this systematic phenomenon.
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