I noted in another post the apparent difference in impact of the Philosophical Gourmet ranking of one's PhD granting institution on tenure-track placement according to gender, following up on posts elsewhere (here, here, and here). In this post I want to follow up on a speculation that I made in comments that the apparent difference in impact is due not to a difference in the way prestige impacts women and men on the job market, but due to a difference in the way that the Philosophical Gourmet tracks prestige for areas that have a higher proportion of men versus areas that have a higher proportion of women.
You may already be familiar with work by Kieren Healy that shows that the Philosophical Gourmet ranking especially favors particular specialties: "It's clear that not all specialty areas count equally for overall reputation... Amongst the top twenty departments in 2006, MIT and the ANU had the narrowest range, relatively speaking, but their strength was concentrated in areas that are very strongly associated with overall reputation---in particular, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Language, and Philosophy of Mind."
In comments on a post elsewhere, Benj Hellie listed the numbers of women and men who were responsible for evaluating departments for the Philosophical Gourmet in 2011 by specialization, which I calculated at the time to be 12% total women reviewers (but an average of 15% women per category). The Board of Advisors for the Philosophical Gourmet has 10 women, making up almost 18% of the board. But even this last percentage is lower than the percentage of women employed in philosophy, which is listed here at 21%. (It is closer to the percentage of women employed by Gourmet ranked institutions, which is listed at 18.5%.) One possibility is that the low number of women involved on the board and in evaluation is partially responsible for the fact that the Philosophical Gourmet overall ranking especially favors M&E. I was curious as to the distribution of areas of specialization of board members and how it broke down by gender. To discover areas of specialization I went to home pages (or, when these were lacking, Wikipedia pages) and used either first listed area of specialization or specialization following "best known for" language. Here are some pie charts that illustrate the proportional make-up of the board by AOS (An Excel spreadsheet with the information I used to create the pie charts is here):
As you can see here, even for the small sample of women on the Philosophical Gourmet Advisory Board (10), women tend to specialize in areas that are less responsible for overall rank.
I next looked at tenure-track placements from 2011-2013, since I already have data on the first listed AOS for these placements, as well as the gender of the candidates (for commentary, see the post here). Below are pie charts for the entire set of placements, as well as placements broken down by gender:
The same basic trend that we see in the board members shows up here. Namely, a smaller percentage of women occupy M&E fields than other fields of philosophy. What does this tell us? Women employed in philosophy (to say nothing of women in graduate programs) tend to specialize in a broader set of areas than men employed in philosophy, while the areas with a higher proportion of men are just those areas that make the biggest contribution to the Philosophical Gourmet overall ranking. No wonder, then, Gourmet ranking makes less of an apparent impact on women than on men; hiring committees may well be using prestige equally for men and women, but the Gourmet tracks prestige better for areas that have a higher proportion of men.
How could the Philosophical Gourmet Report improve on this trend? An obvious move would be to make a concerted effort to involve more women in the ranking process, both on the advisory board and in evaluation. Brian Leiter has noted elsewhere that a greater proportion of women are invited than accept these roles, which is noteworthy, but to me this just means that a more creative effort will have to be made to keep the board and the evaluators representative of the field. In concert with this effort I think it would help the Philosophical Gourmet to involve more philosophers from areas that currently have poor representation. It would be great to know what the proportion of philosophers is by area of specialization for the field as a whole, and I would bet that this is different from the proportion of philosophers on the advisory board. How different, I don't know, but at least M&E fields appear much better represented than value theory fields, where these each have an argument for being the most central areas of philosophy. Moreover, if the proportionality of areas of specialization for tenure-track jobs is representative of the proportionality of areas of specialization for the field as a whole, then value theory fields are grossly underrepresented on the advisory board.
Do you have ideas for what the Philosophical Gourmet could do to improve? Leave them in the comments (which I will moderate).
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