Jennifer Saul is increasingly well-known for her recent work on gender issues in philosophy, including her work on implicit bias as an explanation of gender imbalances in the discipline, and in particular for her blog ‘What it’s like to be a woman in philosophy’ which contains many entries including many accounts of sexual harassment within philosophy departments.
Of course, from such evidence we don’t know how prevalent sexual harassment is within philosophy compared to other academic disciplines and compared to other workplaces. Saul naturally acknowledges this. But from the widespread publicity around Saul’s blog – such as the item on BBC Radio 4’s programme Woman’s Hour on Monday Sept 2nd – the impression that comes across is that philosophy really does have a particular problem with sexual harassment. Indeed, Saul recently published a piece with the very title ‘Philosophy has a sexual harassment problem’ (www.salon.com August 13 2013). Well, she’s entitled to use this strap line, as even one instance of sexual harassment is a problem. But as a philosopher of language, she should realise that the clear implication of such a line is that philosophy has an especially bad problem with sexual harassment, that it’s worse in philosophy than elsewhere. There are other accounts which seem to verify that it is. Peg O’Connor recently described graduate school in philosophy as ‘treacherous and lecherous’ and others have claimed that ‘every woman they know’ has been the subject of sexual harassment in philosophy departments. But is it really worse in philosophy than elsewhere?
The reality is we just don’t have the properly collected and analysed empirical evidence to back this up; and I for one have not been shown any convincing a priori reason to think that there’s anything about philosophy that attracts sexual harassers. Why is this important? I must stress it’s not at all that I am trying to minimise this issue. But if we are to deal with an issue we must see it clearly and accurately. Furthermore, if startling but poorly founded stories go around that philosophy departments are jam-packed with sexual predators, this is hardly likely to improve the wellbeing of any women in philosophy, or any women considering studying it. It may not do much for the wellbeing of men in philosophy either, come to think of it. The interviewer on Woman’s Hour indeed asked Saul what a female student just about to go up to study philosophy should think about this. I know what I would be thinking – I’d be rather anxious.
And of course any empirical evidence needs to be collected and analysed in effective and reasonable ways. Social scientists devote considerable attention to devising methodologies which try to address epistemological difficuilties which thwart the study of human beings and of society, including problems of bias in collecting and assessing evidence. I hardly know where to begin in pointing out the dangers of allowing evidence collected from an online anonymous blog to dominate discussion. But my training in intellectual rigour forces me limply to continue to type. The internet is notorious for eliciting views which paint an extreme, vivid picture of a situation; and for eliciting views expressed and sent at the touch of a button. Online surveys can have a place in properly conducted social research. Different data collection methods might be used to discover what views and events are out there – so a blog might do this – but then, properly systematic research must be carried out to get an accurate picture. There must be unbiased sampling. Any questions asked must be carefully chosen. If I were to put up a post saying, ‘Hey guys, I reckon David Cameron is putting on a few pounds, what do you all lot reckon?’ we know perfectly well that lots of other people would post comments that agree.
And another problem is the nature of an online blogging forum. People are likely to come forward with accounts of their experience which form good, interesting stories or cautionary tales for others. But ‘actually, I wasn’t sexually harassed’ or ‘my colleagues/ supervisors all seemed perfectly fine and decent to me’ or ‘my supervisor did ask me out to lunch once but then I think he asks all his students to lunch when they are nearly at the end of their thesis so it seemed a fine sort of thing to do to me’ or ‘an older colleague once asked me if I wanted to go for a beer after the seminar but I said no thanks and he was alright with that’ aren’t stories. Virtually nobody is going to bother to spend time typing them up and submitting them to a blog. Besides anything, nobody wants to sound as if they are detracting from the very real distress that those with accounts of sexual harassment have experienced.
It’s a bit like what happened after I met up with the women from my prenatal class after we’d given birth, (and I know lots of others have had a similar experience to me). One woman from my class had almost given birth in the car park. One woman had been in labour for four days and three nights. One woman had had a spectacularly easy ten minute labour. One woman’s husband had fainted, hit his head and needed medical treatment. One woman’s baby had been in fetal distress and she’d had to be whisked away for an emergency caesarean. One baby was three weeks early. One baby was two and a half weeks late. I tiptoed out of the room and made the tea, too embarrassed to tell them that I’d had a moderately long but totally uneventful full term labour with moderate pain which I’d managed just fine with breathing techniques, and with absolutely no medical distress or complications in either me or the baby. I was actually a bit embarrassed, and in any case, they weren’t interested in hearing my non-tale. I was too boring, and too lucky. I had no war wounds to show, and I didn’t want my tedious tale to eclipse their dramatic accounts of near-misses with disaster.
And in line with our confessional culture, there is a race to the bottom in telling stories of horrible things that have happened to you. So, start a blog that quickly becomes known as the ‘sexual harassment in philosophy’ blog and you’ll of course collect lots of stories which confirm the prevalence of sexual harassment. There is then, a priori, a bias to be expected against accounts from women who have not suffered from sexual harassment in philosophy. And is it worse in philosophy than in other disciplines? Well, you’d have to check the ‘Sexual harassment in Earth Sciences/ Geography/ Anthropology/ Economic History/ etc’ blogs. Oh, hang on, there aren’t any. Someone start some up and then we’ll see.
Furthermore, I have often noticed a particular kind of epistemic bias operating in accounts of people who try to say that they have not personally experienced a particular sort of problem that other members of a group are trying to highlight. I call it the ‘Oh Paula, you don’t know what you’re talking about’ bias. One spectacular example I treasure from many years ago came from a discussion about menstrual problems. Foolish me, foolish me, I happened to let slip that I luckily did not suffer from these. ‘Oh Paula,’ came the reply in unison – from a group of women, I might add, none of whom knew me very well, if at all. ‘Oh Paula, you must suffer from pre-menstrual tension. It’s just that you are so cut off from your own feelings that you don’t know that you are suffering.’ I quickly saw that it would be unwise in this situation to comment that if being cut off from my feelings meant that I did not know I was suffering, and did not realise that actually, unbeknownst to myself, I was doubled up in agony from menstrual cramps, I’d be quite pleased to be cut off from those feelings. I learned to shut the fuck up, a lesson I brought many years later to my prenatal class.
Human psychology being the complex thing it is, I’m sure that a lot of things are going on here, many of them to do with group identity and who’s in the in-group and who’s in the out-group. But there are also issues of epistemological privilege here too, I strongly suspect. Those who have experienced something considered to be a typical experience of a group – especially a disadvantaged group, and especially something which is key to that group’s continued disadvantage – are positioned to have gained an especially strong insight into what it’s like to be a member of that group. Their eyes are opened by this experience, they are no longer naïve, they know what it’s like. They have spotted something which escapes the dominant group. There is of course some salience to such a consideration. But then look - someone who has not experienced this – or who claims not to have experienced it – has not gone through this initiation into group identity. They are naïve. So, ipso facto, their testimony is less reliable; they have reduced epistemic privilege. This again produces a bias against testimony from those who have not experienced sexual harassment in philosophy. Indeed, I have had responses along the lines of ‘you’re just protected from all this because of your position’ or ‘you just can’t see what’s really going on’. So far nobody has been rude enough to look me up and down with a stare that implies that ‘I’m not surprised that nobody has tried to sexually harass you, my dear,’ but in having this thought it may just be that I am haunted by dim memories of the misery of adolescence. (It’s interesting that there is often a sudden cross-over from considering the question of whether one individual has experienced a situation to discussion of whether that individual knows what the situation is like in general; the allegation that someone has not experienced something is seen as evidence that she is not aware of how things are for others and in turn this can sometimes actually be twisted back to cast doubt on whether or not she actually even understands what her own experience has been. If I am starting to sound tetchy it’s because I am sick to death of being told I don’t understand the life I have been actually living and the world that I have been actually inhabiting for the last several decades. Of course I don’t understand all of it. But I do think I have some grasp of some of it.)
So, sexual harassment obviously occurs in philosophy departments, because it occurs widely in the world. But is it more prevalent there than elsewhere? And is it an especially pertinent reason for the gender imbalances in philosophy? Collecting ‘evidence’ through blogs and hearsay is just not going to tell us; there are a host of reasons why this will selectively encourage the accounts of those who have been unfortunate to suffer the worst experiences, and selectively silence those who have had better luck.
And a few months ago, just drifting off to sleep, I sat up in bed bolt upright with a Sudden Thought. Many years ago I was the only woman in a department; the first ever, in fact. The department wasn’t perfect, but basically I thought the men who were my colleagues were on the whole alright. (There was one who was a terrible pain, but he was awful to everybody – he was an outrageous old fashioned sexist, but he had outrageous views in general, and I am certain he did not damage my standing in the department.) All these decades later, I still think it was a pretty good place to work. I was allowed to teach whatever I wanted. I was encouraged to teach feminist philosophy, when this was virtually unheard of in Britain. But try telling people that it was okay working there! ‘Oh Paula’ would come the cries from other women philosophers. You don’t know how awful that department really is. Everybody knows it’s terrible for women there.
I felt distressed and confused. I couldn’t understand how everybody else had access to this knowledge about what my day to day working life was really like, when none of them had worked there. How did they know? How did I not know? And then, after decades, it clicked. Perhaps this was an instance of a particular variety of epistemic privilege at work.
One member of the group of women who kept telling me that I didn’t realise how bad it was in my own department had previously been in a relationship with one of my colleagues. My guess was this: she had access to knowledge about what he was like through her sexual relationship with him, and through him, knowledge about what the rest of the department was ‘really’ like, and she passed this on to her closer acquaintances (which didn’t include me). Is it that this carnal knowledge puts someone in a position of epistemic privilege then, and that my knowledge of the situation gained from simply working there – day after day, year after year – was a sickly pale shadow in comparison?
This is just a hunch, but my thought was this: knowledge gained through sexual intimacy of one sort or another has a particular trumping quality – it’s taken to mean that you know what someone is ‘really’ like. If someone has knowledge then through experience of sexual harassment by a particular person or in a particular workplace or university department then they know what that department is ‘really’ like in the way that a sexual-harassment-innocent does not. It’s certainly true that it means they have had revealed to them a particular side of a person or an institution. But in terms of collecting data about the prevalence of sexual harassment in philosophy departments, this is a warning to be careful how you collect it. Don’t only count positives, or you’ll end up with a skewed picture, and be careful how you count instances. After all, if philosophy really does have a particular problem with sexual harassment compared to other disciplines, we really need watertight, accurate data that tells us the truth; not what amounts to a collection of internet enhanced rumour, no matter how much that rumour is of course based on a core of real experiences of real people. And as philosophers, lovers of wisdom, one would hope that this would include a love of the truth.