Disciplines
Continental Philosophy | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Philosophy | Women's Studies
Abstract
One can use phenomenology, along with the usual tools of scholarship and analysis, to make the point that the promises of the 1960’s and 1970’s especially those of the women’s movement, have yet to bear significant fruit in the academy. Hence, for everybody’s non-thingly phenomenology of non-practice, a handy-dandy wiki-check on the net yields the claim that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender,” with a rather dismal addendum reporting that in “2004, the percentage of Ph.D.s in philosophy going to women reached a record high percentage: 33.3%.” In 2007, according to the NCES report, 54% of all doctorates went to women. What is significant is that, despite this numeric advantage at the starting gate, women have continued to be represented by a much smaller proportion in their respective professions, especially including philosophy, a percentage that diminishes as one goes up the academic ladder. And I am here to tell you that when you get to the top there is no top there, not unless you are deferential, friendly and polite, have good social skills, and bat your eyes. If the women’s liberation movement sought equality in general, that is: not to be judged on the basis of sex (which includes gender-bias and among other things lookism, ageism, freedom of sexual orientation, and this includes but is not only a right to same-sex- or trans-orientation), and I mean this as a lamentable minimum, more than forty years later we are nowhere near such equality.
Recommended Citation
Babich, Babette, "Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & the Virtues of Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground" (2010). Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections. 28.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/phil_babich/28
Included in
Continental Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Women's Studies Commons
