Listen to the Band!

Female Grad, a, um, female grad student in philosophy who you might remember from a few posts back, has been good enough send along her thoughts about how we, as philosophers, tend to talk about sexism in the discipline. I'll have more to say about her thoughts a little later on, but for now let me just say how extremely fucking important her idea is that sexism can be--and often is--invisible to introspection. This bears a lot of thinking about. --PGS

It's nice to get a chance to steal someone else's audience for a little while, especially for this topic which is so close to home for me.

When I read PGS's (excellent, by the way) post, I thought, this comment section isn't going to be pleasant. But all thing told, it wasn't so bad. There were some clueless things that turned up. But not the really nasty and virulent misogyny one can find so easily on blogs. It seemed to me that there were a number of people who genuinely wanted to recognize a problem if there was one, and they just didn't see one; there were some false assumptions, some good old-fashioned arrogance, and the ubiquitous call for more empirical evidence. Even though there's room for improvement, I think it indicated good things about philosophers in general (or at least the ones who read and comment here). We are generally a good group of people who want to be just in our interactions with one another; the ongoing issues of sexism and racism aren't problems of bad intentions.

That's the main thing I wanted to get at in this post. In discussions of sexism, there is a tendency to get defensive because one feels like one is being attacked, being accused of being a Bad Person. The blunt truth is that, pretty much unless you are young and from a Scandinavian country, we were all raised in some kind of sexist environment. It varies from mildly sexist to rabidly so, but most of us were raised in sexist environments and pretty much all of us are, to a greater or lesser degree, sexist. There are quite few people who really do just think women don't belong in the field and should stay home and learn to cook instead or writing dissertations. Most of us don't want to be sexist, and most of us don't think we are sexist, and so accusations of rampant sexism in philosophy seem baseless.

The problem with sexism in philosophy (in my oh-so-humble opinion) is its invisibility to introspection. When the topic comes up, people reflect, Do I think women are poor philosophers? Am I doing anything that hinders the success or thriving of my female colleagues? Why, no. I see no evidence of sexism in my beliefs or actions. And conclude that the accusations are overblown. But that's the deal with having been raised in a sexist culture - these things are invisible. Until you really know what to look for, and really start paying attention to stuff you might not have before, you aren't going to notice it.

Because the sexism is there, but people don't usually know what to look for. And then they protest that they don't see it. And I think yeah, 'cause you're looking in the wrong spot. It's not something you can just introspect and discover, oops, here is my nasty greenish sexist belief pile, and now I will purge them and be sexism-free. The reason why women in philosophy just notice this stuff more is because it affects us on a day to day basis. After a while, you really start to notice how it adds up. And then someone comes along who is not affected by this stuff, who has never had to pay attention to it before, and they make a comment to the effect that maybe you are just being too sensitive (as if gee, I hadn't thought of that, thanks for pointing out the obvious).

So - if you've never had to deal with this stuff, and if you haven't put a substantive amount of thought into it (and probably some reading, too), chances are you don't know what the varieties of sexism in philosophy look like. And now that I have had to learn the hard way what it looks like, it's annoying to have someone tell me that perhaps I haven't, you know, considered the other obvious explanations. I have had to put a lot of time and thought into it, and I have now done a good amount of reading on it, and damn! it is annoying to have someone point out the mundane and obvious as if you hadn't ever thought of it yourself. It's kinda like reading one article on a topic and then deciding that the practitioners in the field have got it all wrong (and proceeding to tell them all this, while wondering why they are rolling their eyes).

Upshot is: we aren't accusing people of being intentionally Bad. The sexism left in philosophy is mostly the unintentional kind. In order to get rid of it, we need to know what it looks like (and that brief introspection will not get you there). And so when women list their experiences of sexism in philosophy, it's because this is what sexism looks like. These kinds of cases. None of us were there for what happened to her except her; and so we can rampantly speculate ad nauseam about whether or not her judgment of sexism is appropriate. We'll never know. There is never enough info that you can put in a comment to definitively make a case for sexism. But what we should get out of this is a sense of what sexism still looks like, so that we can all start looking for those kinds of things, and start recognizing it more when it happens. That's what will make it a more just profession.

--Female Grad