I Was Just Guessing at Numbers and Figures, Puzzling the Pieces Apart

In comments, Rebecca does the math:

There was an exceptionally annoying and extended discussion a few months ago on this blog about whether being female gave you some big advantage on the philosophy job market.

With all the obvious caveats, I thought the following might interest PJMB readers. Leiter now has 96 comments on his hiring thread. I went through and counted how many of these jobs went to women and how many to men. I skipped a handful of names that were gender-ambiguous, at least to me. I did not bother to look at how 'good' the jobs were or whether they were postdocs or whatever.

Here are the current results:

85 jobs went to men
20 jobs went to women.
That's 76.5% of the jobs going to men.

There are no good stats on what percentage of philosophy grad students are women but the best figures I have read put it at about 25%.

So unless the original posters are willing to come out and claim that male grad students are just better or more qualified than their female counterparts, that seems to me to be very good evidence that it is no advantage to be female in this market.

Obviously, there's a lot more here we'd want to know. But just as obviously, this is pretty useful point.

--PGS