A report went round the philosophy faculty at Oxford University recently about the status and experience of women in philosophy. As a result, a group of keen, right minded philosophers, post-grad students and staff, almost half of them men, met in the crowded Ryle Room in the Philosophy Faculty at 10 Merton Street to discuss it and decide a strategy for action.
Reading the report has some aspects that cheer. For instance, there’s now a great deal of pretty systematic work that demonstrates some of the mechanisms, as well as the ubiquity, of bias. But the rest of it could have been a snap shot taken thirty years ago. In the 1980s I used to go to the Society for Women in Philosophy meetings where the same things would be discussed. The discussion went over the usual grounds – the aggression of questioning in philosophy seminars, the relative invisibility of women, the relatively greater stress on female students. One difference, perhaps, was that in the 80s everyone had read ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ and whether they agreed with the conclusions or not, the issue of how power gets played out in such meetings was at the forefront of people’s minds. These considerations didn’t seem to make their presence felt today, perhaps a sign of the general atrophy of such political concerns in universities as a whole over the last generation or so. To say ‘we were talking about all this thirty years ago’ sounded imperious, so I did not.
‘Thirty years’, I said afterwards to a friend, not five, not ten, not twenty, thirty years, in other words, before most of the people in the room were born, and what has changed? Not much, although it’s undoubted that universities as breeding grounds of ideas have changed very much for the worse. Not much seems to have changed for women. Oh yes, here’s one change: when I left to take a few years’ off to raise my small children, it was accepted that to prevent damage to women’s careers, when they returned from family leave, they should re-enter at the level they would have been at, had they not taken time out. By the time I returned, nobody could recall this idealistic notion. Drat!
Here’s another, personal change too. In the 1980s I was a lecturer at Bristol University philosophy department, the first women ever employed there, and teaching, amongst other things, feminist theory. In those days I was allowed to teach whatever I felt like. Now I work part time doing tutoring, mostly casual work or filling in for others on leave. When it was suggested at the Ryle Room meeting that a new structure in the BPhil postgrad degree could allow someone to put on a seminar on feminist philosophy and for students to submit work on this, I inwardly wailed to myself, ‘I was a feminist theory teacher’. No point in mentioning it, as a college lecturer I only give tutorials, I’m not allowed to lecture for the university, so could not offer to do this. But still, let’s not forget past glories: as I sat, GroundHog day like, at yet another meeting at how women fare in philosophy, I can proudly say to myself ‘I was a feminist theory teacher’.
What was that thing Karl Marx said about philosophy? Oh yes, ‘The point is to change it’.