Women Earned 37% of U.S. Philosophy Doctorates in 2024, Up from 28% Ten Years Ago

... but what explains the change?

For about 25 years, from the 1990s to the mid 2010s, the percentage of women earning PhDs in philosophy in the U.S. hovered around 27%. In the late 2010s, the percentage began to rise. Newly released data from the National Science Foundation show women earning 37% of philosophy doctorates in 2024.

Here are the data since 1973. The red line is the year-by-year data; the black line is the five-year floating average. (For more details about the data see this note [1].)

[chart showing an increase from about 17% in the 1970s, to about 27% in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s, rising to 37% in 2024; click to enlarge and clarify]

Due to the noisiness of the data, it's hard to tell when the change started exactly, but around 2016-2019 is a good guess.

The increase is not just chance variation. From 2020-2024, the NSF reports 2144 PhD recipients in philosophy, classifying 704 (33%) as female. For 2015-2019, they report 727/2424 (30%; p = .04 by the two-proportion z test). For 2010-2014, it's 686/2419 (28%, p = .001, comparing 2020-2024 with 2010-2014).

Bachelor's degrees show a strikingly similar pattern. From the late 1980s to the early 2010s, with stunning consistency, women earned about 32% of bachelor's degrees in philosophy. Starting around 2017, the percentage of women philosophy Bachelor's recipients began to increase, rising to over 40% by 2023.

Here's the chart for Bachelor's recipients from my analysis last year:

[chart showing an increase starting around 2017; click to enlarge and clarify]

Across the university as a whole, the percentage of Bachelor's degrees and PhDs earned by women has not dramatically increased since the late 2010s. These recent increases are a philosophy-specific phenomenon, as far as I can tell.

If the increase in women PhDs were mostly a pipeline effect, we should expect the increase in percentage of women earning philosophy PhDs to occur about seven years after the increase in percentage of women earning Bachelor's degrees. That would reflect approximately seven years on average between receipt of Bachelor's degree and receipt of PhD, with the students of the late 2010s receiving their PhDs about now. But that's not what we see. Instead, Bachelor's and PhDs increase simultaneously.

This leaves me a little puzzled about the cause. If it were that women were increasingly attracted to philosophy, for some cultural reason or some reason internal to philosophy, that would probably show up as a pipeline effect, with a delay between the undergraduate bump and the graduate bump.

One possibility is a decrease in attrition rates for women (relative to men) starting in the late 2010s, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Although I don't have systematic data on this, I've seen various patchwork pieces of evidence suggesting that attrition rates out of philosophy may be, or may have been, typically higher for women than for men.

If attrition rates have decreased specially for women, why? One possibility that could explain the synchrony in decreasing attrition rates for women would be a general improvement in the climate for women in philosophy departments, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. Anecdotally, it strikes me that it was in the 2010s that the climate problem for women in the discipline began to receive broad attention. If so, perhaps this led to some effective positive changes (of course not everywhere and not perfectly).

However, this is to string one conjecture atop another atop another, in total leaving me with a confidence significantly less than 50% that this an adequate explanation (though it might be one factor among several). I'd be curious to hear alternative conjectures.

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[1] Methodological note: The SED attempts to collect information on all PhDs awarded in accredited U.S. universities, generally receiving over 90% response rates. Gender information is classified exhaustively as "male" or "female" with no nonbinary option. The classification of "Philosophy" has shifted over the years. From 2012-2020, a separate subfield of "ethics" was introduced, which has been merged with "philosophy" for analysis. (It was always relatively few degrees.) Starting in 2021, two new categories were introduced: "History/ philosophy of science, technology, and society" (formerly "History, science and technology and society") and "Philosophy and Religion, not elsewhere classified". I have excluded both of the latter categories from my analysis. Both are relatively small: 58 and 67 degrees total in 2024, respectively.