16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women

In some ways, the gender situation has been improving in philosophy. Women now constitute about 40% of graduating majors in philosophy in the U.S., up from about 32% in the 1980s-2010s. There is, I think, substantially more awareness of gender issues and the desirability of gender diversity than there was fifteen years ago. And yet, at the highest levels of impact and prestige, philosophy remains overwhelmingly male.

One measure of this is authorship in elite philosophy journals. For this post, I examined the past two years' tables of contents of Philosophical Review, Mind, Journal of Philosophy, and Nous -- widely considered to be the most elite general philosophy journals in mainstream Anglophone philosophy. (Some rankings put Philosophy & Phenomenological Research alongside these four.) I estimated the gender of each author of each article, commentary, or response (excluding book reviews and editorial prefaces), based gender-typical name, gender-typical photo, pronoun use, and/or personal knowledge, generally using at least two criteria. Of 291 included authors, there were only two who were either non-binary or defied classification -- in both cases, based on an expressed preference for they/them pronouns. There's always a risk of mistake, but for the most part I expect that my gender classifications accurately reflect how the authors identify and are perceived, with at most a 1-2% error rate.

Overall, I found:

Authorship Rates In Four
Elite Philosophy Journals
(Past Two Years):
Women: 46 authorships
Men: 243 authorships
Nonbinary/unclassified: 2 authorships

Percent women: 16%

Women now earn about 30% of PhDs in the U.S. and constitute almost 30% of American Philosophical Association members who report their gender -- so authorship in these journals is substantially more skewed than faculty in the United States. Of course, many authors are neither located nor received their PhD in the U.S., so these percentages aren't strictly comparable. However, PhD and faculty percentages are broadly similar in the U.K. and, impressionistically, in other high-income Anglophone countries. (I'm less sure outside the English-speaking world, but researchers in non-Anglophone countries author only a small percentage of articles in elite Anglophone journals; see here for an analysis of the insularity of Anglophone philosophy.)

Now, one possible explanation of this skew is that women are more likely to specialize in ethics than in other areas of philosophy (see these ten-year-old data), and these four journals publish relatively little ethics. To explore this possibility, I did two things:

First, I coded each article in the big four journals as either "ethics" or "non-ethics", based on the title or the abstract if the title was ambiguous. I included political philosophy, social philosophy, metaethics, and history of ethics as ethics. (Of course, there were some gray-area cases and judgment calls.)

Second, I added two journals to my list: Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs, generally considered the two most elite ethics journals (though after the editorial turmoil at PPA last year, it's not clear whether this will remain true of PPA).

In the big four, I classifed 60/291 (21%) authorships as ethics. (Perhaps this is a slight underrepresentation of ethics in these journals, relative to the proportion of research faculty in the Anglophone world who specialize in ethics?) In these journals, I found that indeed women have a higher percentage of ethics authorships than non-ethics authorships:

Authorship by Gender
in Big 4 Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 17/60 (28%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p = .005]

If we juice up the sample size by adding in Ethics and PPA, we get the following:

Authorship by Gender
in 6 Elite Philosophy Journals
Ethics vs. Non-Ethics
Ethics: 40/142 (29%)
Non-ethics: 29/231 (13%)
[Fisher's exact 2-tail, p < .001]

[corrected Apr 27]

Strikingly, women appear to be more than twice as likely to author ethics articles than non-ethics articles.

Ten years ago, I did some similar analyses, comparing ethics vs. non-ethics authorships in two-year bins every 20 years from 1955 to 2015. In those samples, too, I found women to author only a small percentage of articles in elite journals overall (13% in 2014-2015) and to be more likely to author in ethics, so the trends are historically consistent.

ETA April 28: To be clear, all four journals normally use double-anonymous refereeing.