In a con­ver­sa­tion with Julian Bag­gi­ni on why there are so few women in aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy, Mary Warnock once not­ed that “of all the human­i­ties depart­ments in British uni­ver­si­ties, only phi­los­o­phy depart­ments have a mere 25% women mem­bers.” That num­ber is even low­er in the US. “Why should this be?” Warnock asked. She assert­ed that the prob­lem may lie with the dis­ci­pline itself. “I think that aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy has become an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inward-look­ing sub­ject,” she said, “If you pick up a pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal now, you find lit­tle nit­pick­ing respons­es to pre­vi­ous arti­cles. Women tend to get more eas­i­ly bored with this than men. Phi­los­o­phy seems to stop being inter­est­ing just when it starts to be pro­fes­sion­al.”

It’s a provoca­tive claim, one I’m sure many women in phi­los­o­phy would con­test, though the more gen­er­al idea that aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy has become an arid prac­tice divorced from real life con­cerns might have wider sup­port. The data on women in aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy presents a very com­plex pic­ture. “No sin­gle inter­ven­tion is like­ly to change the cli­mate,” as Tania Lom­bro­zo writes at NPR. Explic­it and implic­it bias­es do play a role, as do instances of sex­u­al harass­ment and coer­cion by those in posi­tions of pow­er. But anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant issue Warnock seemed to ignore is the way that phi­los­o­phy is gen­er­al­ly taught at the under­grad­u­ate lev­el.

In the research on which Lom­bro­zo reports, stud­ies found that “the biggest drop in the pro­por­tion of women in the phi­los­o­phy pipeline seems to be from enroll­ment in an intro­duc­to­ry phi­los­o­phy class to becom­ing a phi­los­o­phy major. At Geor­gia State, for exam­ple, women make up about 55 per­cent of Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy stu­dents but only around 33 per­cent of phi­los­o­phy majors.” This may have to do with the fact that “read­ings on the syl­labus were over­whelm­ing­ly by men (over 89 per­cent).” As Geor­gia State grad­u­ate stu­dent Mor­gan Thomp­son explained at a con­fer­ence in 2013:

This prob­lem is com­pound­ed by the fact that intro­duc­to­ry phi­los­o­phy text­books have an even worse gen­der bal­ance; women account for only 6 per­cent of authors in a num­ber of intro­duc­to­ry phi­los­o­phy text­books.

Does this dis­par­i­ty reflect an unal­ter­able truth about the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy? No, and it can very well be reme­died. The Cen­ter for the His­to­ry of Women Philoso­phers and Sci­en­tists is work­ing to do that with a new site, the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Con­cise Con­cepts by Women Philoso­phers. The joint project of Pader­born University’s Ruth Hagen­gru­ber and Cleve­land State’s Mary Ellen Wait­he, this resource aims to intro­duce “women philoso­phers who most­ly have been omit­ted from the philo­soph­i­cal canon despite their his­tor­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal influ­ence.” So far, reports Dai­ly Nous, “there are around 100 entries… with more to be added every few months.”

Each entry is writ­ten by a rec­og­nized schol­ar. The easy-to-nav­i­gate site has four main sec­tions: Con­cepts, Key­words, Philoso­phers, and Con­trib­u­tors. There are a few names most peo­ple will rec­og­nize, like Mary Woll­stonecraft, Ayn Rand, and Simone de Beau­voir. But most of these thinkers will seem obscure, despite their mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions to var­i­ous fields of thought. Inte­grat­ing these philoso­phers into syl­labi and text­books could go a long way toward retain­ing women in phi­los­o­phy depart­ments. As impor­tant­ly, it will broad­en the tra­di­tion, giv­ing all stu­dents a wider range of per­spec­tives.

For exam­ple, much of the aca­d­e­m­ic work on social ethics in democ­ra­cy might ref­er­ence Adam Smith’s “The­o­ry of Moral Sen­ti­ments” or the pro­lif­ic 20th cen­tu­ry work of John Dewey. But it might over­look the work of Dewey’s con­tem­po­rary Jane Addams (top), who also wrote crit­i­cal stud­ies on democ­ra­cy and edu­ca­tion and who “sees a con­nec­tion,” writes Mau­rice Ham­ing­ton in a short entry about her, “between sym­pa­thet­ic under­stand­ing and a robust democ­ra­cy.… For Addams, it is cru­cial that cit­i­zens in a democ­ra­cy engage with one anoth­er to reach across dif­fer­ence to care and find com­mon cause.”

Addams brought her philo­soph­i­cal con­cerns into real world prac­tice. She made impor­tant inter­ven­tions in the treat­ment of immi­grants and African-Amer­i­cans in Chica­go, sup­port­ed work­ing moth­ers, and helped pass child pro­tec­tion laws and end child labor. But while she has long been renowned as a social reformer and Nobel Peace Prize win­ner, “the dynam­ics of canon for­ma­tion,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “result­ed in her philo­soph­i­cal work being large­ly ignored until the 1990s.” Now, many philoso­phers rec­og­nize that works like Democ­ra­cy and Social Ethics antic­i­pat­ed key con­tem­po­rary issues in polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy a cen­tu­ry ago.

Oth­er thinkers in the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Con­cise Con­cepts by Women Philoso­phers like Dio­ti­ma of Man­ti­nea (whom Socrates revered) and ear­ly Amer­i­can thinker Mer­cy Otis War­ren made impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions to the the­o­ries of beau­ty and gov­ern­ment, respec­tive­ly. Yet they may receive no more than a foot­note in most under­grad­u­ate phi­los­o­phy cours­es. This may have less to do with explic­it bias than with the way pro­fes­sors them­selves have been edu­cat­ed. But the his­to­ry, and cur­rent prac­tice, of phi­los­o­phy needs the inclu­sion of these views. Learn more about many his­tor­i­cal­ly over­looked women in phi­los­o­phy at the Ency­clo­pe­dia here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Héloïse, the Medieval Woman Philoso­pher Who Turned a Doomed Love Affair into a Med­i­ta­tion on Ethics

The Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers Recov­ered by the New Project Vox Web­site

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

The Map of Phi­los­o­phy: See All of the Dis­ci­plines, Areas & Sub­di­vi­sions of Phi­los­o­phy Mapped in a Com­pre­hen­sive Video

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.