Judging Pay Inequity

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case disables an important tool for addressing pay disparity between men and women. How can feminist philosophers address this decision?

Sadly, the decision endorses a burdensome barrier to filing discrimination claims but is not suited to a philosophical response. The majority decision is deceitful in that it does not openly question the legality or morality of workplace discrimination. It gives support to discriminatory practices without justifying the change on principle.

It is, however, suited to a political response, and the Congress should work to overturn the ruling.

A New York Times article analyzes the fact that Justice Ginsburg gave her strongly worded dissent orally:

The oral dissent has not been, until now, Justice Ginsburg’s style. She has gone years without delivering one, and never before in her 15 years on the court has she delivered two in one term. In her past dissents, both oral and written, she has been reluctant to breach the court’s collegial norms. “What she is saying is that this is not law, it’s politics,” Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford law professor, said of Justice Ginsburg’s comment linking the outcome in the abortion case to the fact of the court’s changed membership. “She is accusing the other side of making political claims, not legal claims.”

Feminist Law Professors offer a brief analysis and many links.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent is here.

Women in philosophy

At the Central APA in April, I was part of a panel on women in philosophy ("Why are Women only 21% of Philosophy?"). The other panelists were Elizabeth Minnich, Sally Haslanger, and Abigail Stewart (who was unable to be there, so Sally read her paper). Berit Brogaard at Lemmings has blogged about this session here and a post on critical mass of women in executive positions at Feminist Philosophers reminds me of it tonight. Sally Haslanger's paper from that session is linked through this post as well and also can be found here along with other information about women in philosophy. For those who are interested in this topic, my paper is available here.

I would really like to recommend Haslanger's paper. It contains recommendations that I also endorse. Among these are suggestions for "disrupting bias". For instance, she recommends that established feminist philosophers submit work to "mainstream" journals, make reference to feminists in their work, and use the terms "feminism" and "feminist" in their work.

P-SWIPping

I spent last Saturday at the annual Southern California SWIP. As frequently happens when I go to this spring meeting, I found myself thinking back to the first SWIP meeting I attended. It was at Ann Garry’s house in Pacific Palisades and it must have been an early one, though in the blur of graduate school memories, I am not really sure. It was probably 1976 or 1977. I remember that Nancy Cartwright was there and someone presented a paper on make-up. My friend from graduate school, Joanne Waugh, and I were the only women not dressed in denim and we felt very out of place. I think we were out of place pretty much everywhere in those days.

This weekend. what really struck me as I remembered that meeting was how SWIP had turned out to be an unexpected anchor in my life, even though it was 15 years before I went to another meeting. I thought that feminism and philosophy really had nothing to do with each other and I did not really understand what the point of the meeting was. I wasn’t going to do “feminist” philosophy just because I was a woman! I mean, I was a feminist in the sense that every sensible woman who came of age in the 60s was. But it took me those intervening 15 years to begin to understand the ways in which gender had played a role in my life as a philosopher and was absolutely relevant to my philosophical work. So that first meeting serves as a benchmark and gives me some insight into the ways in which we can be blind to the forces that shape our own lives.

This particular meeting was great though small. Sandra Harding hosted at UCLA and Libby Potter, Helen Longino, and Alison Wylie each presented papers on gender and science in the afternoon. Libby is working on practice theory and the idea that epistemic practices and moral practices could be “overlapping” practices might give us some insight into the dual role of the epistemic and moral in the sciences. Helen’s paper reviewed her idea that there might be feminist epistemic/pragmatic virtues that differed from the “standard” list (sometimes attributed to Kuhn, but mentioned by many). This was an illuminating update of this idea, which was spelled out in her 1995 “Gender, Politics, and the Theoretical Virtues” Synthese 104: 383-397. One of the most interesting aspects of her presentation was the focus on the ways in which each of these lists, the alternative feminist and the traditional virtues, are pragmatic, but at the same time epistemic virtues. Alison looked at the way interests in gender issues had emerged in archaeology in the 1980s and how, though not explicitly feminist in origins, interest in gender seems to have led to a more explicitly feminist archaeology. The developments in this particular discipline provide a case study for further investigating the role of standpoint in the sciences.

All in all, the meeting was a welcome respite from the madness of end of semester grading and a chance to talk with friends. Thanks to SWIP for providing one means through which the much-needed intellectual nurturing of women philosophers takes place.

Update: I just thought it would be nice to add pictures from the prior year P-SWIP. Also check on the P-SWIP webpages.

SAF website change

The website for the Society for Analytical Feminism has moved its website to http://faculty.rcc.edu/crasnow/SAF.html. The SAF provides a forum for feminist philosophical research in the analytic tradition. (The "analytic tradition" being broadly construed, since feminism values inclusivity.) See the Call for Papers for the SAF's second conference, posted below.

Feminist Philosophy Blog

Hooray for a new blog dedicated to feminism and philosophy:

Feminist Philosophers: News feminist philosophers can use
http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/

A welcome addition to public discussion of feminist issues from a philosophical perspective!

Back to Blogging--again

How annoyed I am with on-again, off-again bloggers. Most of all myself!
But with encouragement from Sharon Crasnow (this blog) and from Helpychalk, I have a renewed sense of commitment for the summer, just when so many others are taking their vacations.
So, the blog now continues its mixed coverage of feminism & feminist philosophy and philosophy of science & ecology while in the non-virtual world I spend my summer writing about feminist epistemology and completing research on the presettlement vegetation of the Connecticut Tract in western New York.

CFP: 2nd Conference Society for Analytical Feminism, April 4-6, 2008

University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

Sponsored by

the University of Kentucky, Office of the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

and the Vice President for Research

The Society of Analytical Feminism is sponsoring a conference in Lexington, KY, April 4-6, 2008. The Society invites the submission of papers that address feminist issues in any area of philosophy, including philosophy of language, philosophy of science, metaphysics, race theory, normative ethics, metaethics, Kantian ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, Ancient philosophy, rational choice theory, and epistemology. The general theme of the conference is an examination of the relationship between analytical feminism and these areas of philosophy, including contributions that analytic feminist philosophy has made to these areas and ways in which it may have changed approaches to problems in these areas.

Invited speakers are:

Louise Antony (U. Mass, Amherst)

Ann Cudd (U. Kansas)

Robin Dillon (Lehigh U.)

Julia Driver (Dartmouth College)

Ann Garry (Cal State, L.A.)

Sally Haslanger (MIT)

Miriam Solomon (Temple U.)

Mariam Thalos (U. Utah)

Charlotte Witt (U. New Hampshire)

Alison Wylie (U. Washington)

Papers should be about 20 minutes reading time, prepared for blind review, and submitted by email to the conference organizers Anita Superson (superson@uky.edu) or Sharon Crasnow (sharon.crasnow@rcc.edu) by October 1, 2007. For further information, please contact Anita or Sharon.

CFP: Canadian SWIP

Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy Conference 2007
October 12-14, University of Alberta, Edmonton

Conference theme: Communicating Feminisms

The 2007 Program Committee invites submissions on any feminist philosophical topic that relates to the conference theme, broadly construed.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Moira Gatens
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney

Feminist scholarship continues to contribute massively to knowledge across the disciplines, to public policy formation, and to popular discourse. Yet as feminist research has become more diverse and developed, perceptions of it are often reductive or one-sided; this has tended to limit the extent to which feminist methods and insights are communicated in extra-academic contexts. This conference seeks to develop new strategies for representing feminism and communicating feminist research to audiences within the academy and beyond. How can feminist theorists be in conversation with empirically-minded scholars? How can scholars of feminist philosophy draw on the experiences and insights of the world outside the university to make better theory? How do feminists of different theoretical schools and political persuasions collaborate across our intellectual differences? What connections might be drawn between extra-academic feminist political practice and feminist philosophy?

Submissions of long abstracts (1000 words) are invited (for eventual presentations of 20 minutes, or not more than 3000 words). Submission reequirements and full contact information can be found at
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~cheyes/research/CSWIP.htm

DEADLINE: March 12 2007.

Scientific outreach and training

Alan Leshner has an editorial in last week's Science (12 January 2007, p. 161) calling for scientists to be better trained in public outreach.

He distinguishes between public education and public engagement:

Efforts that focus simply on increasing public understanding of science are not enough, because the problem is not merely a lack of scientific comprehension. In some cases, the public generally does understand scientific content in a fundamental way but still doesn't like it.

I wish that Leshner had space in the editorial to elaborate. He seems to be thinking about the debate over teaching evolution in schools, among other issues. Of course, not all scientists are working in areas that are in need of spokespeople to resolve public controversy, so his proposal for across-the-board training of graduate students in public communication is inefficient. One of his other suggestions is that academic institutions should reward people who engage in public outreach. This certainly seems true. Sometimes such efforts count as "service," which is widely considered less important than teaching and research. Arguably, though, communication with non-scientists is also a form of teaching.

I have two additional thoughts. First, when it comes to communicating about science and policy issues, what is lacking is not just the media and communications training that Leshner mentions but also training in normative reasoning and the role of science in society. Often, scientists are discouraged in their training from thinking about the normative assumptions in their research. Second, public outreach about scientific issues that affect policy can be (and is) undertaken by scholars outside of science. Philosophers are just one group that have played a key role in communicating about science and ethics with regard to biology education, the stem cell debate, species conservation, and disposal of nuclear waste.

Evolution and social constructivism

I attended a talk last night by David Sloan Wilson on "Evolutionary Social Constructivism."

His thesis is that evolutionary theory provides a "unique" theoretical framework for understanding not just the diversity of life and patterns of anatomy, behavior, etc. in living things, but also for understanding human behavior and human experience. The humanities and social sciences, he argued, are only just beginning to recognize the power of evolutionary thinking. He argues for increasing access of students and academics to training in evolutionary theory and for recognition of the value that evolutionary frameworks will have for fields as diverse as economics, psychology, politcal science, social work, literature, and religion. He also believes that there are schools of thinking in the humanities (he mentioned "potmodernists," whoever they are) which are "anti-evolution" (whatever that is), which I suppose (this was not clear) means that they treat humans as disembodied thinkers without situated biological bodies and ancestral histories.

I think he meant two things by "evolutionary theory." For one, he meant the history of human evolution, including how the story of human evolution explains our range of behaviors and psychology. For instance, in their book Unto Others D.S.Wilson and Eliot Sober examine how altruism, or prosociality, can be explained by group selection. Second, by evolutionary theory he also seem to mean any process that involves replication and selection. He included recent and short-lived phenomena in cultural evolution among the things that we humanists could better understand if we embraced evolutionary theory more whole-heartedly.

I'm in favor of promoting education in evolutionary theory--for undergraduates, for academics, and in grade schools. And I think that Wilson is right that "thinking through evolution" will be a fertile method with as-yet-undiscovered applications in the humanities and social sciences. But I fail to see the connection with social constructivism or how the term "evolutionary social constructivism" adds something useful to discourse.

"Social constructivism" already means too many different things to too many different people. In education, it indicates the philosophy that learning is collaborative. In social theory, it is a way of conceiving of social reality as created by interactive social processes--social constructivists investigate the actions and texts that support institutions and norms. In philosophy, it is both an anti-realist ontological thesis (that categories of things are not given but are human inventions) and an epistemological thesis (that knowledge bears some mark of the social context of its production).

What would "evolutionary social constructivism" mean? According to Wilson, it is a program of studying the effect of human evolutionary history on the objects of study of the social sciences--on rationality, on social behaviors, and so on. But this seems to be in opposition to social constructivism, not a revision, modification, or refinement of it. Social constructivism emphasizes the contingency and open-endedness of what we know (and of social institutions, learning, etc.). Although there is an element of historical contingency in how our evolutionary past happened to play out, evolutionary explanations tend to emphasize a way in which behavior or abilities or knowledge is determined. It also seems to be a thesis at a different level than a social constructivist thesis--it does not make a claim about what there is (ontology) or what we know (epistemology). It is a program of study.

Standpoint epistemology and dinner conversation

Last month I aired my frustration about a situation in which a logic professor dismissed any and all testimonial evidence on the basis of a (misapplied) informal fallacy.

In blog comments, Khadimir said he would have tried to figure out what "in the person's constitution" led her to reject the legitimacy of public assistance programs. These sorts of dinner-table political arguments do usually call for an exchange of political beliefs about the proper role of government, the trade-offs between positive and negative liberty, whether someone's station in life is a mark of their character, and whether suffering builds a sense of personal responsibility. And, in reality, the conversation did take these directions.

But I'm interested in the practical epistemology of the social situation, and also in Khadimir's comment. I'm tempted to diagnose this libertarian position as being the result of privilege. But psychologizing is too easy. And too easy to refute. Privilege doesn't cause someone to dismiss the needs of the poor and disabled in any straightforward sense of 'cause'. A more subtle analysis of the knowledge claims and social conditions is needed.

How can some people claim to know that they are harmed by welfare programs when others claim to know that they are not harmed, even though they are not receiving payments themselves? I assume that none of us at the dinner table that night had received social security payments, or disability benefits, or WIC or food stamps or Medicaid or Pell grants. Where does our knowledge of public assistance programs come from? Why do some of us know that they make our civil society run better and more fairly? Why are some of us glad that these programs exist, just in case, even though we think we can count on our educations, our training, our job experience, and our families to get us out of the kinds of financial binds we are most likely to face?

I think we can look to social epistemology to explain the differences in what people know about social fairness and about social luck. Social epistemology also has something to say about why some of us do actually know something about public assistance. We know it in a very real, very detailed way because we know people who have depended on public assistance and who have tangled with its bureaucracies. This is knowledge that comes from personal experience, and there is no "mere" about this kind of anecdotal evidence.

Miranda Fricker has a term for the systematic misrecognition that allows someone of privilege to believe that what she "knows" about public assistance (or any kind of oppression) is on a par with what someone who is oppressed (or identifies with the oppressed) knows about being dependent on aid. She calls it "credibility overspill."

Norms of credibility track power. At the dinner table, our conversation about politics was also guided by subtle (and not-so-subtle) power relations. Gender, professional status, argumentation skill, comfort with adversarial methods.

In addition, the libertarian was able to deny the credibility of any source of justification that she encountered. Why? Because any knowledge--first- or second-hand--of what it was like to need public assistance would have been clouded by being a recipient of financial aid. And those recipients could be dismissed in two ways. First, they just have a greedy interest in receiving money they do not "earn." And second, their station--as poor, as needy--lowers their epistemic status. Their testimony is not as trustworthy as a college professor's testimony about how the political landscape looks from her perspective.

Is "credibility overspill" also a barrier to learning new things? If you're in a position of privilege, you can afford to not notice certain things about what everyday life is like for the less privileged.

Philosophers grab at research funds

The Leiter Reports blog links to a faux grant proposal that will make philosophers giggle: a program for nano-philosophy.
(The .pdf by Robert Stainton and colleagues at University of Waterloo is here.)

This is an exciting time for consumers – but also for researchers who can count on endless grants in nano-engineering, nano-computing, and so forth.

In an effort to bring philosophy on board, members of University of Waterloo’s
Department of Philosophy began the search for very, very small philosophical questions.

Feminist philosophy has a role to play in examining the tiny question:

Is abortion always obligatory?

And philosophers of science, likewise, may address the compelling question:

Can science be naturalized?

I would also like to suggest that in the modern endeavor to press inquiry all the way to the bottom, there's a role for positive--and not simply critical--philosophy, with metaphysical conjectures such as:
"I exist, therefore I am."
"Where there is nothingness, there is not; where there is being, there is."
"DASEIN: there you are."

The Source of Knowledge in Experience

Someone just asked me why this blog, with its dual interests in analytic feminist theory and philosophy of science (and, especially, in their intersection) is called "Knowledge and Experience."

Identifying the source of knowledge as being in personal, but also (and necessarily) shared experience is a presumption of both feminism and of science. Naturalism is therefore a fitting methodology for investigating social groups and gender relations, as it is for investigating natural phenomena. A recurring theme we have taken up in the blog is how experience grounds knowledge, how experience shapes what investigations are taken up and which theories are accepted, and how a failure to take experience into account is often to blame for misconceptions about how the natural and social worlds work.

Philosophers who theorize about inquiry and about social action, as we do, have an interest in doing philosophy in a way that touches, moves, nudges, directs the world outside of academic philosophy. We fall short when we are unable to communicate the importance of theory outside of our circle. In endorsing pragmatism (and dismissing a certain kind of metaphysical posturing), William James wrote that

the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.)

Women in Science: Strategies for success

The New York Times published an article in yesterday's (Dec. 19) Science section about women in academic science--barriers to equitable participation and the advice they receive about overcoming hurdles. The article is called "Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches," but it will be freely available for only a week, so here are my comments, which serve as a summary.

It's not clear what precipitated this news article. Many of its references are to a September 2006 National Academies of Science report on the status of women. The NAS report repeated several well-known points, such as that although women make up more than half of graduates from biology programs, they account for only about 15% of full professors in science departments at top-tier research universities.

The challenge it offered to universities to reform academia was stronger than previous reports. It places the burden of reform squarely on the shoulders of university administrators to show that they are doing everything they can to promote parity for women, and not just to show that they are doing nothing to hold women back. It strongly recommends policies that provide for paid parental leave, on-site child care, and revised tenure clocks for parents.

The National Academies also reported that although men publish slightly more than women in the sciences, they also receive more financial support through grants and university leave, and that when this factor is controlled for, men and women publish at about the same rate.

Although bias against women's research may be small for any given project, it adds up over the course of a woman's career. Likewise, women are more likely to be assigned administrative service work, a burden that may be small at any given time but which adds up over the course of years.

The NYT also mentions an article (no citation available) which showed that letters of recommendation written for women job applicants were six times more likely to mention the candidate's private life than letters written for men. Women are more likely to be evaluated on their teaching in recommendation letters, while men are more likely to be evaluated on their research. Since top jobs often value research over teaching, this subtle bias may contribute to women's difficulty in getting top research jobs.

Philosophers at a dinner party

The scene is a lovely dinner party (thanks to Catherine), hosted by philosophers for philosophers, non-philosophers, and some precocious children (who were introduced during the evening to the concept of a "wet willie," no thanks to Greg). What do philosophers talk about when they get together off the clock, so to speak? Temporary and accidental intrinsics? Modal adverbials? Borat and how funny we find his racist humor in spite of ourselves?

Not these philosophers. They talk politics. One of their number, Ivy educated and with an AOS in metaphysics, proclaims herself a libertarian. Not that kind of libertarian. Not the kind whose main concern is to secure reproductive freedoms. Well, yes to those liberties, she concedes, but our primary political problem is taxation, and all the lazy folks who rely on welfare because they would rather not work a real job.

Another dinner party-goer, defending some of the folks who are on disability and drawing social security, offered up some personal experience in support of government support for those unable to find or hold a job for medical reasons. Another, a criminal defense attorney who deals with people on federal assistance, also tried to defend the importance of federal aid to maintaining civil order (at the very least). But our libertarian friend held her ground.

Why? Because she doesn't accept "appeals to authority" as good reasons. And now we come down to it. For what do we teach Introduction to Logic?

A logic professor brushing aside personal testimony (first- and second-hand) with the 5-cent fallacy "appeal to authority" has lost the key to epistemology. How can there be knowledge if we don't base it on experience? If all appeals to authority were suspect, we would know precious little, including how to interpret our own experience.