Gender bias (including hiring and teaching)
Download the Good Practice Scheme recommendations on gender bias [pdf / word]
Biases related to gender can affect an enormous number of decisions — about how to invite to speak, who to hire, who to call on, what to hang on the walls, whose work to teach, and so on.
Most of the gender bias recommendations cover hiring, promotions and teaching. Below we link to some further resources that are relevant to these issues, as well as to some more general resources. Some of the gender bias recommendations touch on issues covered elsewhere in the GPS; in particular, issues around seminars and unwelcome behaviour. Please see the Sexual harassment and Conferences & seminar series pages for further resources relevant to those.
Although we don’t discuss this in the Good Practice Guide, departments should give careful thought to the idea of reducing the role of letters of reference, which are known to display systematic gender biases (see Madera 2009, Dutt et al. 2016), as well as national variations than may create unfairness (see Dutt et al. 2016).
Sample policies, reflections and other resources
- Great article on why Philosophy should diversify, by Simon Fokt
- Virginia Valian’s ‘Tutorials for Change’
- The Diversity Reading List collects high-quality philosophy texts suitable for use in teaching written by authors from under-represented groups.
- UPDirectory: The APA’s directory of philosophers from under-represented groups.
- Minorities and Philosophy resources site
- Women-in-philosophy.org, run by Nicole Hassoun and others, has a huge amount of data on the representation of women in philosophy in the US and in philosophy publishing, as well as links to a lot of relevant resources.
- The Philosophy Exception: a website run by members of the Philosophy Department at the University of British Columbia with an extensive bibliography of research on equality, diversity and inclusion in academic philosophy.
- Blog post describing Sheffield’s efforts to minimise implicit bias in hiring
