For the past ten years or so there has been a lot of discussion about the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy. Though there clearly has been some progress made, the underrepresentation of women is nonetheless still regarded as a problem by most people in the field. Women in philosophy are still significantly outnumbered by men.
Lately, there has been a surge of interest in this question with a number of publications coming out, including three edited collections that address this question: The Philosopher Queens (eds. Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting), Women of Ideas (ed. Suki Finn) and Philosophy by Women (ed. Elly Vintiadis). Inspired by these publications, the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy (EuJAP, https://eujap.uniri.hr) plans a special issue that will be guest edited by Professor Elly Vintiadis on the topic with the provisional title: Women in Philosophy: Past, Present and Future.
Questions addressed could include:
— how women’s contributions to philosophy in the past have been systematically silenced
— how/whether the problem of underrepresentation of women in philosophy is different from the underrepresentation of women in other fields
— whether we can/ought to do more than the things we are doing now to overcome the problem
— what the causes of this underrepresentation are
— what dangers might exist in promoting women’s voices in philosophy in relation to the voices of other minorities (because academic philosophy is not only very male, it is also very white and Western)
— whether, and how, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a special impact on academics who are mothers with children who had to combine academic work with childcare and home-schooling.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive; we welcome proposals about other approaches to the question of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy.