Relatedly, a truly sexist and essentialist view of women's abilities in philosophy has reared its head on the blogosphere, and Showalter seems unable to respond to it effectively. Hope someone here can nip this in the bud. It's in the comments section.
Tara is referring to comments by commenter "Highly Adequate"--comments which include this one:
With regard to the research output of women, think of the study conducted not long ago showing that of the top 500 cited papers in philosophy, less than 4% were written by a woman, and all of those papers were toward the end of the list.
While the study’s author acted as though this indicated women were somehow being suppressed in philosophy, how does that get supported? Isn’t another take on it that women just aren’t producing high quality output?
Ask yourself: which of the papers written by the women actually might be important on their merits as the top papers on the list? If women are roughly 20% of the profession, why aren’t they producing 20% of the top papers? Indeed, if women represent 50% of the potential talent in philosophy, and one makes the reasonable assumption that it is the most talented women who will make it through the rigors of a philosophical career, then why are women not producing close to 50% of the very top papers? Where are the potential women geniuses in philosophy if not in philosophy? Doing social work? Teaching elementary school? Running around barefoot and pregnant because The Patriarchy? Where are they?
My reply: commenter "Highly Adequate" is trolling the site. His or her comments are absolutely pathetic. They are really not worth responding to. In such cases you should ignore the commenter. Trolls are aiming at exactly that: getting you upset or hostile, for example by making you object to an essentialist view of women's abilities.
Luckily, no serious philosopher that I know of holds this view. If anything, there is evidence that women have more long-range brain connections than men, which would allow them to come up with more original hypotheses than men. I don't trust those data either. But there certainly aren't any data showing that men have any advantage intellectually compared to women, especially not in the area of philosophy. So, just ignore the troll. Reasoning doesn't work in such cases. You encounter trolls once in a while on all sites. Sorry that it had to happen on your site.
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