Philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines. Instead, it is among the least diverse.
Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial souls that might continue to exist after we have died, about ethical issues such as war and human rights, about what’s worth pursuing in life, about when and how far we should trust scientific authority, about the best forms of government, about the origin and structure of the world? Nothing about these issues – and nothing about philosophy as a discipline devoted to the fundamental questions of human existence – should make it of more interest to one gender rather than another, one cultural group rather than another, or to the able-bodied more than to the disabled.
Yet study after study and testimonial after testimonial show that the culturally privileged are overrepresented in academic philosophy.
For example, the self-reported gender of regular members of the American Philosophical Association in 2025 was 70% male, 29% female, and 1% nonbinary/something else. Gender balance has been improving, though slowly: In 2015, the corresponding percentages were 75%, 25%, and 0%. The pipeline into philosophy suggests that change will continue: According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, 37% of philosophy PhD recipients in 2024 were female. Despite this qualifiedly encouraging trend, philosophy PhDs remain more male than any of the other humanities besides theology and Bible studies and more male than every social science besides economics and finance.
Black people and American Indians are especially underrepresented in U.S. philosophy, and that situation doesn’t appear to be changing at all. In 2025, 4% of regular APA members reported being Black or African American, compared with 14% of the U.S. population. The NSF data suggest no surge of new Black philosophers in the pipeline: the percentage among recent PhD recipients is also 4%. The NSF data show no American Indian or Alaskan Native philosophy PhD recipients in 2024 (though people reporting both American Indian and Hispanic or Latino identities would not appear in this category) and only one in past four years (among 1692 doctorates awarded), although Native Americans constitute nearly 2% of the U.S. population.
Another concern that has recently drawn attention is the linguistic insularity of mainstream Anglophone philosophy – that is, the neglect of work written in other languages. In 2018, three collaborators and I examined citation practices in leading Anglophone journals and found that 97% of citations referred to work originally written in English. Journals published in other languages were much less insular. We also found that 96% of the editorial board members of journals perceived as elite were housed in majority-Anglophone countries. More recently, Uwe Peters and collaborators reported that non-native English speakers face substantial difficulties publishing in English, as is now practically required for gaining an international readership.
The forthcoming book Structural Injustice in Philosophy, edited by Maeve McKeown, Seunghyun Song and Milana Kostić, further documents, and aims to explain, the exclusionary structures of philosophy, not only concerning race, gender, and language, but also class, disability, culture, mobility, sexuality, place of origin, and more.
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Could a structurally just academic system nonetheless happen to produce such skewed results, always in favor of the already powerful? Let’s not join the long string of bigots who have held that some races, languages, genders, nationalities, classes, or physical types are more intrinsically suited for philosophy than others.
It’s sometimes suggested that academic philosophy is – or is not unreasonably perceived as – a useless luxury, rightly scorned by people lacking cultural privilege. Students from less privileged backgrounds might see studying philosophy, instead of a more financially or practically rewarding discipline, as wasting a precious opportunity to achieve financial security or practical success. But even if this perception were entirely accurate – and I would argue it’s oversimplified – it wouldn’t constitute a genuine alternative to structural injustice. A society in which less privileged students feel less free to study philosophy than business or nursing is already a society with substantial injustice in higher education. The perceived impracticality of the philosophy major is a symptom and mechanism of structural injustice rather than a neutral fact. In a fair society, students who love philosophy wouldn’t be disproportionately deterred by class background.
Even in a completely just society, students and professors will not always populate each discipline in exact proportion to their background rate in the general population. Women might be drawn more to developmental psychology and men to architecture, White people to European history and Black people to African history, or whatever, for innocent reasons. It might be suggested that similarly, philosophical issues just happen to be of more interest to people from culturally powerful groups. I’ve already articulated the flaw in this argument: It strains credulity to suppose that men more than women, or White people more than Black people, or people from the United States more than people from Brazil or China, or sighted people more than blind people, would or should, in a just society, care more about truth, justice, ethics, knowledge, and the fundamental nature of reality. If anything, the opposite might be expected: Those who suffer under existing institutions should be especially motivated to think hard about the reform of those institutions and the cultural presuppositions that undergird them.
Might people from less privileged backgrounds reasonably be expected, even in a just society, to be less interested than others in academia in general, and could this explain the pattern in philosophy? Again, I see no good reason to think so and reason to think the opposite: Professorships offer good salaries (for those who escape the cycle of adjuncting) and offer unusual freedom to explore one’s interests and advocate change. People from less privileged backgrounds might be especially drawn to such opportunities – at least if the career seems genuinely open to them – more so than people from elite backgrounds with many other attractive options. In any case, if the problem were academia as such, and not philosophy in particular, we should see similar disparities across all fields. And while many historically disadvantaged groups continue to be underrepresented in many disciplines, philosophy is more imbalanced than most across a wide range of measures.
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In a just society, historically underrepresented groups and minority perspectives would be overrepresented rather than underrepresented in philosophy. Academic philosophy should celebrate diversity of opinion, encourage challenges to orthodoxy, and reward fresh perspectives from cultures and life experiences outside the mainstream. We should be eager, not reluctant, to hear from a wide range of voices. We should especially welcome, not create a chilly environment for, people with unusual or culturally atypical or historically neglected ideas, practices, and worldviews. The productive engine of philosophy depends on novelty and difference.
Philosophy is a dialectical discipline that thrives in the clash, reconciliation, and creative synthesis of diverse views; and our views are profoundly shaped by our cultural backgrounds and life experiences. Uniformity dulls our collective philosophical thinking. A fair and flourishing discipline would treasure rather than repel those who have historically been excluded. Consequently, even if every social group were proportionally represented in philosophy, we would still have reason to suspect systemic injustice. The injustices of our discipline will not be overcome until we are collectively eager to hear proportionally more from previously excluded groups than from the privileged and powerful.
