*I wrote this post on October 26th*
I'm currently
sitting in a seminar room full of LDS and Catholic philosophers. They are
holding a conference titled "The Goods of the Family" and my
political philosophy professor, who is the host, asked us to attend a couple
sessions. When I sat down in the room, the first thing I noticed, after looking
at the clock to see how late I was, was the lack of any women professors.
Stats:
3 female students
5 male students
18 male professors
age 40+.
My first reaction
was: how could you have a conference on marriage and the family without any
women? That just seemed kind of… wrong. Were there really not any female
professors that could be invited? As I listened, I realized all of these
professors are specialists on the intersection of philosophy, politics, and
theology. I could believe that finding a Catholic or LDS female professor of this type of
specialty would be difficult.
This brings up a
question that has been simmering in my mind: At what point, under what
circumstances, does an organizer go out of their way to find women
participants? If women do not self-select to be a specialist of the type needed
for an event, what is there to do?
Most of the BYU
faculty likely have wives who are at home with children, fulfilling a sacred responsibility to nurture children and build righteous homes. But if women limit themselves to the home, then what is
the effect of a lack of female religious and conservative voices in the public
sphere?
Why would it be hard to find a women with this type of specialty? Aren't there quite a few women professors in most fields now? What's different about this one? Just curious why you thought that.
ReplyDeleteI think there are plenty of women "fulfilling a sacred responsibility to nurture children and build righteous homes." But I also think that plenty of them are amazing multi-taskers who make their voices heard in the public sphere. It shouldn't be hard to find them.
My reply to both comments is numbers - merely the fact that there are far fewer female LDS professors than there are male. Among the Political Science and Religion departments, the number drops even further. This makes the likelihood of finding a woman in a specific specialty difficult.
ReplyDeleteOn your second comment, I do agree that there are lots of women who are both mothers and active in their communities - but there are significantly less female Republican politicians than there are female Democratic politicians.