catwoman15

You're right. But we all know there's misogyny in the field (in fact, we know better than anyone else, having been at its hands). We know that white men are the gate keepers because misogyny. But pointing out that someone has internalized misogyny is not going to HELP anyone on this thread. It isn't going to give the women the resources, confidence, or support that they need to succeed. But I'm also hesitant to buy into a monocausal narrative of the problems, they can't all be at root caused by misogyny and internalized misogyny (I guess you could buy into that if you wanted to be vulgar about it, but I don't.). One person saying that dresses are less authoritative than suits is pointing out the sexist norms of culture. Perhaps it could have been more delicately stated, to capture the nuance that there isn't anything intrinsic about it, but rather that it's socially constructed to seem that way. But the poster probably isn't wrong that a dress is less authoritative than a suit, because we live in a sexist culture and a sexist world. I didn't downvote you, and I'm not going to tone police you, but constructive comments are more helpful than merely pointing out that misogyny is everywhere. Believe me, I know it, and it seems like Philosophe knows it too given the nature of her first post. What, I think, was behind the comment was apprehension and fear, apprehension that she would ever be seen as an expert, and fear at what she's gotten herself into. A little understanding, a little care for each other at this juncture is helpful and can still address the complicated problems of the profession.

You know, there's something to be said for internalized misogyny in philosophy. Namely, the way that women think of themselves and treat themselves, especially with regard to their philosophical abilities, is often due to being socialized in a misogynist society. We suffer more often from impostor syndrome, we're less likely to feel like we have an 'innate' ability to do philosophy, we don't seek help as often from professors because we feel like we're stupid, or too dull to be helped even. Also, feeling unauthoritative in a dress stems from the fact that you'll be seen as less authoritative. When you teach, students will question your competence, your credentials, and your authority. They will ask you on dates. They will treat you like their friend. One thing that will help you feel more authoritative is to do "super hero" poses, intentionally put your hands on your hips and look in the mirror for two minutes. (like, there have been studies on this, it works y'all) Take up more space than you ordinarily would, you will be more confident. As to philosophe's notice that women flock to the "less rigorous" sub-disciplines. You're right. But there's a chicken and egg question at the root of it. Was it seen as less difficult, so women (thought to be less capable), made easier headway? Or, did women make headway, and then it seemed less difficult because women entered it? [There's some evidence to the later, given some empirical data, but it would have to be generalized from other fields.] Even still, I'm in one of those "softy" disciplines, but it's strange, because I don't do "Feminist Philosophy of X." Whereas all the other women in my department do. So, even within these softy subspecialties, women are further segregated heavily to the feminist version of that kind of philosophy. I have no doubt that some women do it because the men make it difficult to make headway, and the less men you surround yourself with, the more supported you will be/feel. It's a complicated problem, but the solution isn't to blame women for internalized misogyny. Because, to a certain extent, it is advantageous to individual women to follow misogynist norms (so-called, benevolent sexism) while still being bad for women as a whole because misogyny is bad for women as a whole. The solution isn't to yell at each other about how much sexism they've internalized, the solution is to build solidarity and get men (and women) who have power and authority as allies in the struggle.

There was a study done on it ( here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01306.x/abstract) that was published in hypatia. Showing that the biggest drop off of women is between taking intro classes and majoring. But, the study doesn't control for the fact that a lot of people take intro classes to try something out, and have already decided to major in something else. The study also found that the drop is mitigated by the presence of more women on faculty in a department.

It isn't uncommon for younger generations in philosophy to be more, say, 'open minded.' But this isn't what controls the discipline. The discipline, as a whole, is overwhelmingly gate-kept by 50-70 year old men. Those who rose in the philosophical ranks quite a bit before our time. They are on admissions committees, hiring committees, conference organizers and chairing committees, and fellowship committees. Someone did a survey of the Leiter Report and noted that there is a correlation between women on faculty and Leiter Ranking, the higher ranked your program, the fewer women on faculty you have. This is not causation, but it is an interesting correlation, but I hesitate to provide reasons other than a suspicion that it has to do with the sexism of the discipline as a whole. Second, it's nice to think of yourself as open minded and sort of 'liberal' with regard to the way you assess people. This, though, actually has nothing to do with combating implicit bias. In fact, people who think they are unbiased are often those with the greatest biases (and members of underrepresented groups themselves have negative biases about the groups of which they are a part). Philosophy's underrepresentation problem is complicated and can't necessarily be tied to any one factor, but it is probably more like a perfect storm of factors (both social and institutional) that combine to make it difficult for women and people of color to succeed in the discipline. (Also, I have links to a lot of studies and papers on the topic, if anyone wants to read them.)

+1 This seems totally right. I've known many women who were assholes, just general jerks. I've also known many men who are just general jerks. But, having a reputation for being a bitch as a woman usually means that you refused to be talked down to, talked over, and know your place. It's hard to tell the difference between jerk and assertive if you don't know the person. I just tend to give the benefit of the doubt to women who people think are jerks, so that I can assess whether they are really jerks, or are just more assertive than 'women should be'. Sometimes they're jerks. Sometimes they just refuse to know their role.

You might consider a Fulbright application (which I admittedly don't know much about), or a predoctoral ford fellowship (if you're a permanent resident of the US). Both of these programs have already had deadlines this year, but you could apply for a predoctoral ford in the fall (even if you're already attending a program).

Yeah, I'm sorry I was so quick to jump on it (you seem like a thoughtful person, and men who want to work with women and think women's contributions are valuable are a good thing, not at all a bad thing), I'm just a tad sensitive over the issue because I am one of those strong personalitied women. I have the reputation of being a bitch that goes along with it, rather than the reputation of being assertive, confident and smart.

I know this is meant well, but it strikes me in the wrong way. It's a weird generalization about women that doesn't seem accurate. I'm in a program with an alright gender balance, but I still watch men steamroll women in seminar on the regular. I also watch women clam up and be quiet, then after class say brilliant things. Leaving it up to "strong women" to put men in their place is putting the onus on the wrong party.

HEY!! I'm a philosopher and a lady. I'm not an applicant, but I was (once upon a time). Also, I'd say there is a dearth of women in philosophy, considering that only 15% of tenured and tenure track faculty in philosophy are women (and that's reflected in the participants on this forum, when I brought up an issue of gender in another thread, it was promptly decided that such a problem was not philosophical and wasn't relevant to philosophy). Anyhow, I'm a woman and I think I may be the only one around here (unless you're one too, then that makes two). If you wanna chat I'm more than happy to! ETA: I have a lot of underrepresented group specific information about graduate studies (especially funding) which I'm happy to talk about. If you want to, I'm happy to send it along.

Thanks, I definitely don't think google translate is perfect--but it seems odd to me that for SOME programs (my own included) you cannot use ANY digital tools, not even an online dictionary. In the real world, if I needed to translate, I'd use a good online dictionary, and google translate for phrases that were proving difficult to render well into english. I absolutely do not think that you can feed google translate a paragraph and get a great translation, but I can get the start of a translation that, along with a dictionary and some learned grammar skills, can be rendered into pretty good english with half the time of looking up a metric ton of words, by hand, in a five pound dictionary. I've mostly stopped defending myself on this thread, because a lot of undergrads and philologists think they understand the mechanics of the discipline and graduate school better than I do. I think people think I'm being a jerk about it, but honestly, most philosophy is conducted in english, most philosophers are not continental philosophers, if you're a historian, classicist, or continental philosopher than language skills will be very important, but otherwise, probably not.

There are two thing, also, that I think it's important to mention. 1) You have severely limited time in graduate school. During this time you have a ton of commitments that are new and a bunch of old skills that are not good enough that you need to hone. For some people it will be a language. But, you also have the weight of 400 pages of reading a week, writing assignments, teaching, grading, writing conference papers, doing service work, and trying to publish. While the idea of learning multiple languages is great, you still have to fit that time in there somewhere when you're already strapped for time, and on a clock with funding. 2) You don't actually have to learn a language to pass a language requirement. A few people have already said it. Generally, you take a one semester course either in translation or in reading, then take an exam where you translate a certain amount of text. This doesn't actually require a huge amount of language skills. Sure, you need to understand the grammar and some basic and philosophy specific terminology and vocabulary, but it doesn't require actually learning enough language skills to be terribly helpful (even if you do research in the works of someone writing in another language, this level of skill is generally not all that helpful). Ideally, we would have as much funding as we need in graduate school to spend time getting all the skills and publishing all the work that we have. This just isn't a reality though. So, it makes sense to focus on those things that will end in a job. For a Kant scholar, one of those things will be learning German. For most of us, though, that thing is publishing.

I share the outrage at reading well for six hours a day. But writing daily is a habit I started quickly when I entered grad school. Not much, 300 to 500 words a day. At first, I was writing a lot of stuff I never used. The habit itself, though, has proved invaluable to my productivity (3-5 conference papers a year and all of my seminar papers).

One thing that you could do, if you aren't already, is to read all of the works cited by a particular article that you really like. Then, the next article (out of the bibliography of the first) that you really like, you can do the same thing. This will help you get familiar with a very specific set of sub-specialty literature, but will also introduce you to relevant stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise read. As to how much you should read...grad students should read as much as possible, but for an undergrad, I would say, as much as interests you.

I feel like I'm being really misunderstood here. It is a good skill to have (which I never denied) what I denied is the necessity for everyone to learn to read and translate two languages. Most of us will (if we can even get jobs) teach undergrads nearly all of the time. Many of us do not need a foreign language to conduct our research (there's ONE notable person in my field who consistently publishes in a language other than english. These articles are translated nearly immediately by someone who is fluent, or by the author themselves.). It is possible that the months I spent acquiring a paltry ability to translate this third language was 'enriching'? Yes. Absolutely. Would that time have been better spent writing a dissertation and polishing stuff for publication? For me, yes. None of this is to imply that language learning and translation are unimportant or not to be valued. There are loads of valuable stuff that I won't ever do, or ever need to do, even within philosophy.

That is totally true. I have a working knowledge of one of my languages. The other is rough for me though--I have a translating ability, but it would be far faster to translate once with google translate, then tidy it up myself. But the point I'm making is that it's a requirement from a time past, when translation had to be done by hand with a dictionary. Most people won't become translators (some will, and for them, it's a really great skill). If you aren't planning on becoming a translator, then simply testing as reading competent in a language is like getting certified to do something that you won't ever really do.

I'm at a program where I had to learn two languages from the standard philosophical array. It was brutal. The most frustrating thing is that if I were in a situation to need to read another language, the first thing I would do would be to use google translate. However, you can't do that on a language exam because it's cheating. In this sense, the language requirement doesn't seem to have caught up to modern technology. Maybe 20 years ago, if you wanted something translated you had to do it yourself. Such is no longer the case, but we still test people like it is.

Just, for the record. A) I'm sorry I started a bizarre misandry situation. This wasn't my intention. My intention was simply to talk about the ways in which philosophy, as a whole, has problems with representation of members of underrepresented groups. So, I'm sorry I fed the troll, I've been lurking and I couldn't not do it--it took more will-power than I have. I'm not a philosophy applicant. I'm abd in philosophy. I came to the forum to talk about dissertation fellowships. Stopped by the philosophy forum to see if I had any advice that could help, then saw the dfindley situation happening.

I'm sorry I'm not making myself clear here. What we call "reverse-racism" doesn't exist as racism. Obviously the events perpetrated continue to have existed. (My earlier post was written in haste, thus making it seem like maybe I have some really weird metaphysical views, when I really don't.) And yes, to the former in your last paragraph. I'm totally comfortable with the fact that I'm not saying anything controversial here. I never intended to. Also, I'm to BSG, I'm not really here to educate you about feminist philosophy or critical race theory. I'm not assuming a conclusion, I'm providing a well accepted definition, which isn't an argument.

The point, really, is to keep in mind that prejudice without power has little effect on society and people; meanwhile, prejudice with power has great effects on society and people. While this use of the terms may seem to be "redefinitions" they really aren't. These are the standard working definitions in critical race theory and feminist theory and have been for a very long time--it may seem like a redefinition, but that could be because your working definition is insufficient to capture the reality of the actual concept. Also, it's a mistake to think there is a possible case of racism or sexism to which power isn't relevant. Without power racism and sexism would cease to exist in any real way.

No. I'm saying that what BSG called sexism could be more aptly called 'reverse-sexism' in the same style as 'reverse-racism' neither of which exist because of the way that power and oppression work. The KKK is racist because people of color have been historically marginalized via various methods of structural and individualized oppression and the KKK is part of that story, taking the upper-hand by virtue of being white. Whether the KKK is very effective or not has nothing to do with it being racist or not.

It actually isn't sexist to use she exclusively. Sexism requires structures of power and oppression to which women simply don't have access. Honestly, it makes me cringe to see someone using all he, but I don't actually disdain them. I was trying to make a point about the great genius young white man, who dfindley seems to think he is, and who is held in such great esteem. Honestly, I'd respect someone more who actually cited women and used 'he' for all their examples than I'd respect someone who plays lip-service to an inclusive discipline without actually respecting women and citing them.

It's also not at all surprising to find a budding, young, brilliant philosopher (in his own estimation) arguing both that academic philosophy is idolatry and also that women should gtfo of his manly paradise of ideas. You can call me a bitch if you like, I understand that it's upsetting when you don't get what you want and feel you deserve. But you being a failure doesn't make me a bitch.

Am I the only one who is legit curious as to what dFindley's goal is here? I know there's a great troll/not-troll debate. But like..seriously, dude, what's the end game?

I hold in distain anyone who still uses 'he' and 'him' to denote the neutral human. But that's just me.

Does anyone know if this will be announced this year? I know that in the past, the fellowship was announced quite late, but I'm wondering if the fellowship program has been cancelled. Really, any info on it would be appreciated.