women's intuition

According to a recent study, there may really be such a thing as women's intuition, but it isn't what we might have thought. Instead, it could help explain why there are so few women in academic philosophy.

The study (via Leiter) is by Wesley Buckwalter (CUNY) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers).

The paper presents a series of gender-differentiated intuitions from common philosophical thought experiments. Not every thought experiment produces a statistically significant gender difference, but in those that do, the effect is marked.

The authors argue for the strong conclusion that this gender difference in intuitions about thought experiments is implicated in the gender difference in academic philosophy. (They are clear that this is not the only cause.)

Consider the predicament of a young woman in a philosophy class, who (like 71% - 75% of women in the Starmans & Friedman study) does not find it obvious that the characters in Gettier vignettes do not have knowledge of the relevant proposition. Rather, her intuitions tell her that the Gettier characters do have knowledge, though her instructor, whether male or female, as well as a high percentage of her male classmates, clearly think she is mistaken. Different women will, of course, react to a situation like this in different ways. But it is plausible to suppose that some women facing this predicament will be puzzled or confused or uncomfortable or angry or just plain bored. Some women may become convinced that they aren’t any good at philosophy, since they do not have the intuitions that their professors and their male classmates insist are correct. If the experience engenders one or more of these alienating effects, a female student may be less likely to take another philosophy course than a male classmate who (like 59% - 64% of the men in the Starmans & Friedman study) has the “standard” intuitions that their instructor shares. That male student, unlike the majority of his female classmates, can actively participate in, and perhaps enjoy, the project of hunting for a theory that captures “our” intuitions.

It is enough to convince me that I should be careful in presenting thought experiments as evidence, since my intuitions won't predict those of other people. (It's likely that gender isn't the only bias in the "received" interpretation of thought experiments. See this post.)

on sorting algorithms

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

(this is how mergesort really works)

am I a man who explains things?

Two months ago, the LA Times ran a piece on men who explain things. Specifically, men who explain things patronisingly. To women.

Solnit describes an experience she had at a party some years ago.

"So? I hear you've written a couple of books," [says the host of the party.]

I replied, "Several, actually."

He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

The book, of course, was Solnit's own. But this would never have occurred to the patron. When that fact finally sank in,

as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.

I have been worrying over this anecdote for some time, but so far have avoided writing about it, because to do so would seem to implicate me in precisely the sort of crime described. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am certainly guilty of the crime of holding forth on subjects about which I know little. But am I patronising about it? Or at least, am I equally patronising to men and women?

I like to think so. The trouble seems to be that women are more sensitive to patronising behavior. For good reason: women really are subject to it more. But given 'equal' treatment, is a different response an overreaction? Or is it justified? It's not an empty question. Patronising behavior has consequences for our basic assumptions about what goes on in the world:

One Christmas, [a nuclear physicist] was telling -- as though it were a light and amusing subject -- how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked the physicist, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. Therefore, her-husband-trying-to-kill-her was simply not a credible explanation for why she was fleeing the house yelling that her husband was trying to kill her. That she was crazy, on the other hand....

Ha ha! Those crazy women!

Combating the lasting foolishness of patronisers is what feminism is all about. It's just too bad that the lessons grate so on those who (think they) have learned the lesson. Being combative, unfortunately, is part of the problem. Solnit describes the aftermath of making a point in dinner conversation:

His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.

Ouch.

Ironically, in the course of discussions of feminism, I have gained firsthand knowledge of this feeling (with the genders reversed). I make an observation questioning what I take to be a dogma, and receive a withering, emasculating glare--for, in virtue of being male, I have no authority in this arena. (This reaction is by no means universal, but it does happen.) Solnit complains that

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.

Of this, I am surely guilty. I'm not sure I've ever apologized for being wrong. But that's the wrong thing to be up in arms about. For to me, an explanation is a hypothesis--a reasoned inference from what I do know. Sometimes I am quite sure of things before I open my mouth, and my task is to recall the relevant supporting details. Other times, I am posing something quite tentative, in the hopes of gathering alternative views and further information. I don't think the difference is always (or even usually) entirely clear to anyone but me (that provides me deniability when I turn out to be wrong). My preference is to make declarative statements about states of affairs rather than about my beliefs. I rarely use phrases like "I think" or "I believe" except in clarification. This distinction--between states of affairs and beliefs--is at root of the ongoing dispute about the cause for the gender disparity in science and engineering.

Jake Young asks the question: does the machismo of scientific culture exclude women from scientific or technical careers, or do women's preferences for working with others (rather than tools) explain the difference? According to one of the studies, another traditional explanation, fertility decisions, is a factor in delayed acheivement, but not career choice. After quickly rejecting a fourth hypothesis (that there is gender disparity in innate ability), Jake notes that

A group populated largely by men is more likely to be chauvinistic because there is no one there to call them on their bullshit. Thus, the situation can become self-perpetuating.

Over on Cosmic Variance, Sean relays a story about Richard Feynman, a charming sexist if ever there was one. When it came time for lunch, he would turn to any woman who was about and ask her to fetch his sandwich. But he would also explain quantum physics to the same woman without any fuss about whether she would understand.

Once caught in the cycle, how do we get out?

I'm going to just take a page out of the Cosmic Variance book and just quote this other blog:

Discussion at a faculty meeting:

Department Chair: Some of you may be interested in an upcoming visit to the university by a group from University A to share information about their program to increase the participation of women in science, engineering, and math. [hands around an informational memo, including the list of names of the visitors]

Young Male Colleague: Hey, I know X! [mentions name of one of the visitors]. What is HE doing going around talking about women’s issues? He’s a real scientist! And a guy!

Me: Men can be involved in helping solve the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, engineering, and math.

Young Male Colleague: No, I mean, this guy isn’t effeminate or anything. He’s really a.. a.. a.. a guy!

Senior Female Colleague: Perhaps he is transgendered.

Young Male Colleague, missing the obvious sarcasm, and offended on behalf of the Real Guy: I can assure you that he is nothing of the sort.

Me: He must be a eunuch then.

[Chair steps in and changes the subject]

I've mentioned gender before, in the context of the history of science, and although I should know better, I must admit that I am always surprised when I hear of occurrences like this. Without reminders like this, I tend to assume that whatever remaining gender iniquities we have are hidden, systemic, and slowly being squeezed out. This despite my undergraduate experience as an electrical and computer engineer with about 50 other men and 3 women in my cohort. I assume that much of my naiveté is due to my, well, being a man.

After a recent philosophy of science colloquium at my department, several of us found ourselves sitting around a table wondering why there were no women among us. Could it be that we were all secretly misogynists? That we were androphiles? Our collective impression was that roughly half the students in our department are women (the other half are men, for those slow at math or unwilling to make assumptions about the entrance requirements of my institution). A majority of the women are historians, we thought, while more men must be philosophers. For this reason, then, along with a flu that struck low two of our outstanding philosophical women, and not for some hidden misogyny, were we all male sans fe-.

For numeroholics, it turns out that our department actually has 27 women and 18 men. Many of us describe ourselves as both historians and philosophers. Philosophy is the primary interest of just 12 of the 45. Proportionally, about 1/3 of men are philosophers while 1/5 of the women are. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to draw conclusions from this.

As for me, I will continue to insist that "women's issues" are generally "human issues"--although not always. After overhearing my central role in a conversation about women's jeans sizes, Sex and the City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and exfoliation, a friend told me I ought to hang out with guys more. He may be right. But then, I was the one sitting around the table with six women.

gender history

Gender history is activist history (cf. those activist judges who have the gall to interpret the constitution). Received history is about men. White men. White, land-owning men. Rich, white, land-owning men. A few centuries ago, a Whig named MacCauley wrote a history of the world. This history began in Greece, presently moved to Italy for a millennium, headed a bit north, fuddled around for another millennium, and then arrived in Britain, culminating with the recent decisive political victory of the Whig Party. History pursued in this manner is now known as Whig history. To some extent impossible to avoid (for reasons of reader interest--not to mention researcher interest), such history clearly lacks objectivity. Howard Zinn is famous for providing, if not objectivity, then a certain gestalt anti-Whig history. Gender historians have the agenda of providing the female perspective on history, often with the method of examining the social roles of men and women, with especial attention paid those women (and sometimes men) who break from those roles in various ways. Gender is the (or a) lens through which the historian peers in the endeavor to explain or describe the events of the past. Sarah, being female, socialist, and feminist, is a strong proponent of gender history, though not to exclusion; she also favors material culture as contrasted with intellectual history--things versus ideas. History of science, a relatively new field previously occupied by books written by scientists with a fascination for things past--invariably men, rarely trained in historical methodology. Their works are invariably Whiggish and invariably fascinated by genius and revolutions in science (indeed, many such works are autobiographical). The past several decades have done much to update the field; one might suggest that a revolution has occurred in the history of science (that is, if one wished to endure the academic equivalent of a schoolyard beating). Nevertheless, the actors on the stage are predominantly men. The historian with sympathy for the gender agender, er, agenda, has five possible responses to the history of science: 1) impugn the field as a fundamentally gender-biased endeavor, 2) take solace in the fact that at least some of the historians are women, 3) artificially inflate the roles of the women who are actors in the standard history (there are many, and they are important. A history of Lavoisier would be incomplete without attention to his wife, who was an assistant in his lab and served as the public relations arm of his self-described Chemical Revolution by hosting extremely popular parties, present at which were other chemists as well as the political elite. But it would be misleading to make her the key figure in the Chemical Revolution), 4) find and highlight previously neglected women in science and remain generally dissatisfied [this is, by the way, the standard approach], 5) attempt to recast the enterprise of history of science in such a way as to include the activities of women.

I suspect that Sarah would favor the first approach, and perhaps rightly so. (5) is an approach that has worked well in the history of technology, but works less well in the history of science. A study of cheese manufacture, for example, can go beyond the industrial history of the Kraft company and discuss artisanal cheese-making, an activity pursued by women in many cultures, and with many interesting ties to gender roles. Indeed, any time the gender lens gives context to the activities under investigation, it is worth employing. I fear that in the history of science, especially prior to the 18th century, women will forever appear as ancillary characters purely because those activities we presently identify as having a connection to the development of those activities we term science were pursued by men and were not pursued by women. To recast the enterprise of history of science so that it includes the activities pursued by women is to recast history of science as history general. Just as gender is a lens, the Whiggish pursuit on the trail of activities related to present-day science is a lens. What is the historian to do? Turn to philosophy. That's what I do! But I do feel compelled to use the gender lens whenever possible. It is, after all, useful in providing one more perspective to complement that fractured form of objectivity now so very fashionable.