Males and Females and Philosophical Puzzles

I was startled to discover the findings I present today, both because
the results are meaningful, and because I’d never heard of them before.
Perhaps it's only because I'm a philosophically inclined cognitive
science major that these findings seem so significant, but this study
seems to suggest that males and females approach large
philosophical questions differently.

There is a persistently slow growth rate for the number of women in the
profession of philosophy. Whereas traditional forms of sex
discrimination might have prevented women historically from entering
previously male dominated field, philosophy remains in a subclass of
professions that is particularly resistant to the reaching of equal
representation. Though the growth rate is steady, over the past forty
years we have seen only a modest increase in the representation of women in professional philosophy, where currently there is a 16.2% representation of females nationally, according to a 2006 survey.

Christina Starman, while a psychology graduate student here at Yale,
investigated how people approach the most major philosophical thought
experiments. Philosophers use intuitions as evidence for philosophical
theories or explanations. The way that people react to what they call
“thought experiments” provides insight into how people think about such
issues as personal identity or tricky moral dilemmas, hopefully
elucidating the underlying principles that guide our notions about the
topic.

Starman's study is unique in that it tracked answers to this question
along the dimension of gender. The outcome of her work would become a
hypothesis as to why we are seeing this relatively uniquely persistent
gender disparity in professional philosophy.

The most famous thought experiments were proposed by a philosopher named
Gettier, and have since then become known as Gettier cases. Here’s an
example:

"Farmer Franco is concerned about his prize cow, Daisy. In fact, he is
so concerned that when his dairyman tells him that Daisy is in the
field, happily grazing, he says he needs to know for certain. He doesn't
want merely to have a 99 percent probability that Daisy is safe, he
wants to be able to say that he knows Daisy is safe.

Farmer Franco goes out to the field and, standing by the gate, sees in the
distance, behind some trees, a white and black shape that he recognizes
as his favorite cow. He goes back to the dairy and tells his friend that
he knows Daisy is in the field.

The dairyman says he will check too, and goes to the field. There he
finds Daisy, having a nap in a hollow, behind a bush, well out of sight
of the gate. He also spots a large piece of black and white paper that
had become caught in a tree, which Farmer Franco mistook for Daisy.

Daisy is in the field, as Farmer Franco thought.

But was he right to say that he knew she was?"

This example is a powerful thought experiment in that it is designed to
tease out what it means to "know" a fact.

Starman, like academics for years, distributed this thought experiment
and surveyed people for their intuitions as to whether the answer was yes or no. She analyzed the results along the dimension of gender and arrived at some startling results.

Women are much more likely to answer this question with “yes” than men.
Women say that farmer franco had knowledge, where men say that he had only a belief. Women and men provide different intuitions on other famous thought experiments as well.

This is important for what it says about female and male brains in that
there appears a distinct gender divide between men and women in terms of how they approach the larger questions of the ordering of and purpose in the universe. It is more tangibly important, as well, for what it may suggest about the lag in the number of female professional philosophers. Steven Stich of Rutgers suggests that the philosophical intuitions of an individual match, in successful cases, the intuitions of the field or department that you enter. He claims that even atthe earliest stages, if professional male philosophers are propounding theories that do not align with the way that females approach these questions, women will become uninterested.