Women Constitute 12% and People of Color 3% of the Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Last week, I posted a list of the 376 most-cited contemporary authors (born 1900 or later) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Citation in the SEP is, I think, a better measure of influence in what I call "mainstream Anglophone philosophy" than more standard bibliometric measures, like Google Scholar and Web of Science.

In previous work, my collaborators and I have generally found that within U.S. academic philosophy, the higher in rank or prestige the target group, the less racial and gender diversity. Accordingly, one might expect people at very highest levels of prestige in mainstream Anglophone philosophy overwhelmingly to be non-Hispanic White men.

I attempted to code the gender (woman, man, nonbinary) of every philosopher in the SEP most-cited 376, based on a combination of personal and professional knowledge, information from the web, and gender-typicality of their name and photos. On similar grounds, I attempted to code every author on this list as either Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic/Latino and, among the non-Hispanic authors, White or non-White (using race/ethnicity categories as standardly defined in the U.S.). This is an imperfect exercise, and it wouldn't surprise me if I've made some mistakes. I hope you'll correct me if you notice any errors (raw data here), and please accept my apologies in advance![1]

I also guessed birth year. In the majority of cases, I found birthyear information on Wikipedia or another easily available source. Otherwise, I estimated based on year of Bachelor's degree (estimating 22 years old), year of PhD (estimating 29 years old), or year of first solo-authored publication (also estimating 29 years old). This enables some generational comparisons. Again, I welcome corrections.

Overall, among the 376 philosophers, I count 44 women (12%) and one non-binary person (#223, Judith Butler). I count only eleven (3%) who are Hispanic and/or non-White. Only one of the 376 is a woman of color (#260, Linda Martín Alcoff), and 321 (85%) are non-Hispanic White men.

Here it is as a pie chart:

[click to enlarge and clarify]

The gender skew is even more extreme if we consider the top 100 (actually the top 102, accounting for ties): six women (6%) and 97% non-Hispanic White. The highest ranked person of color is Jaegwon Kim at #59.

As you might expect, the skew is larger in the older generations (born before 1946) than in the younger generations. Over the past several decades, there has tended to be a slow reduction in gender and racial disparity in U.S. academic philosophy (see, e.g., here and here). However, the generational disparity reduction in the SEP is fairly small.

I analyzed generational trends in two ways: First, I binned philosophers by estimated birthyear into one of four generations: "Greatest" (1900-1924), "Silent" (1925-1945), "Boomer" (1946-1964), and "Generation X" (1965-1979). (One "Millenial" was [update Aug 14] Two older Millennials were binned with the Gen-Xers.) Second, I looked at correlations between the demographic categories and birthyear.

Gender analysis by generation:
Greatest: 40/44 men (91%)
Silent: 133/145 (92%)
Boomer: 116/136 (85%)
Gen X: 42/51 (82%)

Expressed as a correlation of gender (man = 1, woman or nonbinary = 0) with birthyear: r = -.10, p = .046. This negative correlation indicates that as birthyear increases (i.e., the philosopher is younger), the philosopher is less likely to be a man. However, the size of the effect is small and barely crosses the conventional p < .05 threshold of statistical significance. The nine highest-ranked Gen-Xers are all White men. No Gen X women rank among the top 200.

Among the eleven philosophers who are Hispanic/Latino or non-White, none are Greatest, five are Silent, four are Boomers, and two are Gen X. Statistical analysis is of limited value with such small numbers, but for what it's worth, status in this category does directionally correlate with birthyear, with a very small effect size and no statistical significance (r = -.06, p = .25).

ETA 10:46 a.m.:

To see if there's a relationship between gender and rank on the list, I took the natural log of the ranks (since the difference between rank 1 and rank 11 is much more meaningful than between rank 301 and 311) and calculated its correlation with gender (1 = man, 0 = woman or nonbinary): r = -.12, p = .016. The negative relationship of course indicates that men are likely to be higher ranked (i.e., closer to rank 1). As before, race/ethnicity numbers are probably too small for meaningful statistical analysis, but for completeness the result is a virtually flat r = -.02, p = .77.

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In an independent analysis, Liam Kofi Bright counts nine non-White philosophers on this list, exactly matching my analysis except omitting two (not non-White?) Latino philosophers (Sosa and Bueno). This supports my sense of how the philosophers on this list are racially perceived by others in the field. (One complication: Bueno identifies as Brazilian, and there's a lot of confusion about whether Brazilian counts as "Hispanic" in the U.S. context.)