MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 27: COMMENTS NOW OPEN
Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers) have posted this remarkable paper on SSRN:
In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term ‘intuition,’ and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.
If I may summarize a bit too crudely from the paper's very careful discussion of these matters: if female undergraduates tend to have intuitions about standard philosophical puzzles that differ from the "official" intuitions sanctioned in the literature, then it is perhaps not surprising that the females pursue philosophy (at least intuition-driven philosophy) at lower rates than their male counterparts.
Perhaps after folks have had a chance to actually digest the research and the analysis, we'll open a thread to discuss the paper.
UPDATE: I hope those interested have had a chance to read and think about the Buckwalter & Stich paper--Wesley and Steve will try to respond to comments and questions over the enxt few days. Comments are open, and signed comments are far more likely to appear. (For some reason, the link to the paper on SSRN no longer works, not sure why, and I can't seem to find the right one. But I know close to 1,000 folks downloaded the paper while it was there.)