Good morning everyone,
Today we’re here to ask if Philosophy has a gender bias.
This question is important not just because it is a question of fairness, inclusivity, and equality, but because of how it reflects the larger purpose of our series this week.
Regardless of who is being excluded, it’s more than just immoral or oppressive (though it is those things and more) it’s malpractice.
Historically, throughout every society certain people have been given a platform to share their experience, while others are barred from the conversation.
This leads to a selection bias. A selection bias of the people who hold the power, the privilege, and often economic and military control. And if they don’t have those things directly, they represent the class or ideology of people that do.
We have to look the truth in the face that those voices survive the test of time more easily than the others.
In many ways this means that we have inherited a body of philosophical discourse that is missing the perspective of great chunks of civilizations past. There are perspectives which would have made our philosophy more robust, helpful, and developed which we will never hear or know about.
Because it’t not just about checking a box of inclusion, it’s about integrating the experiences of depth and sacred traditions into the larger narrative.
Philosophy is the study of wisdom, but what happens when entire portions of our collective wisdom goes unheard?
I think Dante Stewart explained this best in a recent New York Times Article when he wrote,
I saw why they insisted on saying Jesus is Black. They were not talking about his skin color during his earthly ministry, though it definitely wasn’t white. They were talking about his experience, about how Jesus knows what it means to live in an occupied territory, knows what it means to be from an oppressed people.
What does it mean that the vast majority of our philosophy comes from a certain type of experience? That is our real question.
So to return to our initial premise, today we’re considering the bias of philosophy as it relates to gender.
Specifically, the bias of contemporary philosophy toward men who are cisgendered and heterosexual.
This is important because it omits a vast array of experiences.
For example, here is a list of women philosophers who have left a mark on the discipline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_philosophers
There are hundreds!
And yet, when we organize, review, and integrate the narratives at scale, almost all of them are left out in any substantial way. In the ancient world, there was an espoused gender bias based largely upon patriarchal norms.
This means that the societies from which we glean most of our content held an espoused ethic which promoted the experiences and voices of free men, and squashed the rest.
This is especially true of ancient Rome, Greece, China, and America.
These empires serve as funnels whittling down the voices of history based upon the class not the merit of the ones who said it.
Beyond that, what of the experience of LGBTQ+ writers? Anyone who was not heterosexual or cisgendered? In most cases, folks in these communities (though not all) would need to hide their identities in order to participate in public life.
This funnel is especially accentuated in the halls of American universities until recently—which harbored a strong Protestant, straight, male, and white perspective. Again, it was less about making sure that people who looked this had the stage, and more about insuring that ideas which affirmed this perspective survived.
In many ways, this funnel explains and highlights the rise of feminist philosophy in the last 60 years which did more than almost another movement to successfully push back this obstacle and create space for voices which has not yet been heard.
Carol Gilligan, Angela Davis, Maria Monetssori and so many other represent a strategic initiative to break open the gate which prohibited the experiences of so many from entering into public life.
This is a wonderful note on which to end this week’s series, as we prepare to pivot to next week. Starting Monday, we will be doing a deep dive into a few of the change agents which carved out new space for their experiences to be heard and integrated—in the world of philosophy and beyond.
Until then, I hope you enjoy an organized weekend roundup tomorrow where we’ll review the highpoints and make room for questions and feedback.
And don’t forget, next Thursday, October 21 we want to hear from you! Your experience needs to be heard and integrated into our body of philosophy—because we’re all philosophers after all.
Matt
Experiencing the Other