In philosophy, there should be no male and female (some hard data on the adverse effects of underrepresentation)

(Many thanks to Bryce Huebner for drawing my attention to this work) - There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than in other disciplines. While there are few hard data on this issue, a new paper by Dana Kabat-Farr and Lilia Cortina throws new light on this problem, looking at the correlations between gender disparity and harassment in a large sample of employees in the military, academia and the court system. Across all these fields, the authors found that a low gender representation for women results in higher levels of gender harassment. Gender harassment is defined as "a broad range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors not aimed at sexual cooperation but that convey insulting, hostile, and degrading attitudes” about people of one’s gender". Concretely, "when comparing a woman who works in a gender-balanced work-group to a woman who works with almost all men, we find that the latter woman is 1.68 times as likely to encounter [gender harassment]." Remarkably, they found no correlation between sexual advance harassment (which we have been hearing a lot about recently) and underrepresentation.

I think these data are highly relevant for the recent news about harassment in our profession, and that there are things to learn from it for concrete policies.

The article also mentioned that women's career prospects are adversely affected when in overly male environments. By contrast, men who are in minority positions (e.g., nursing) have been found to enjoy an advantage of their minority position - this is well documented, and has been termed the glass escalator effect. The likely reason for this is that gender is a salient characteristic about people, and if one is in a minority, it is made even more salient. This makes positive biases about men and negative biases about women come to the fore. Interesting too is that "the gender composition of the immediate work context is a stronger predictor of harassment than higher-order measures of gender predominance in an occupation".  So, reassuringly, even if philosophy is a very male-dominated profession, individual departments can mitigate this to a great extent by striving for gender balance in their hiring and organization of events. 

Concretely, I think these findings should lead us to be more ambitious about gender representation in conferences, departments, summer schools and other professional environments. The current aim of the gendered conference campaign is to avoid all-male speaker lineups. While this is a great aim, in light of the adverse effects of an overwhelmingly male environment, one should perhaps be more ambitious and aim for 1/3 representations. The same is a fortiori true for all male departments: one woman might make them look less egregious than an all-male department, but it would be better to have more women. 

I feel most comfortable in situations where I can "forget" I am a woman - of course, I realize that I am and I am comfortable with my gender assigned at birth. But when I am in situations where I am one of the few women in the audience, or the only female speaker in a plenary session, I do feel reminded that I am a woman, and I feel extra pressure not to ask "stupid" questions, or to make a presentation that would measure up to what my male colleagues bring. In more gender-balanced situations, this feeling disappears and it does not seem to matter that I am a woman. Others seem to forget I am a woman too. To paraphrase Galatians 3:28, in philosophy, there ought to be no male and female.**

**