Professional Philosophers: What Makes Them Tick?

This is a good time to post some links and air some thoughts:

No doubt it is partly voyeuristic, but I'm fascinated by the Philosophy Job Market blog. They give some rules for one of my long-time favorite pen-and-paper games: Women in Philosophy Hangman.

Feministphilosophers comment on the philosophy job market: Why do we spend so much money making up complete applications with teaching materials and writing samples, when most of the supplementary applications are not even read? In some fields (e.g. English), an initial application includes only a letter and CV. There may be some disadvantages, but the advantages are the time and expense saved by job applicants, the convenience for hiring departments to not have boxes and boxes of applications to store, and the savings in environmental costs. Moreover, why not electronic applications? The sciences have been doing that for years already.

Last week Rob Helpychalk gave a talk on "A Retrospective Look at Postmodernism," a fun read.

There is a constant stream of reflective and thoughtful posts about teaching philosophy on the blog In Socrates' Wake. I would love to hear if their team has any thoughts on my concerns about attracting women to major in philosophy. A search of the blog says they haven't paid any specific attention to women as teachers or as students, so I'd like to hear if they have any ideas about why women make up only 30% of philosophy students or if there are any unique issues for women as philosophy teachers.

And here's a blog post with more comments than you have time to read--all about the ways in which women are excluded in math and computer science courses. Is philosophy different?