Women in philosophy
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Although men have generally dominated philosophical discourse, women philosophers have engaged in the discipline throughout history. Ancient examples include Hipparchia of Maroneia (active c. 325 BCE) and Arete of Cyrene (active 5th–4th centuries BCE). Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.
In Asia, women were vital in philosophy in ancient times. In the oldest text of the Upanishads, c. 700 BCE, the female philosophers Gargi and Maitreyi are part of the philosophical dialogues with the sage Yajnavalkya. Ubhaya Bharati (c. 800 AD) and Akka Mahadevi (1130–1160) are other known female thinkers in the Indian philosophical tradition. In China, Confucius hailed the female Jing Jiang of Lu (5th c. BCE) as being wise and an example for his students, while Ban Zhao (45–116) wrote several vital historical and philosophical texts. In Korea, Im Yunjidang (1721–93) were among the most notable women philosophers during the enlightened mid-Chosŏn era. Among notable female Muslim philosophers are Rabia of Basra (714–801), A’ishah al-Ba’uniyyah of Damascus (d. 1517), and Nana Asma'u (1793–1864) from the Sokoto Caliphate of today's Nigeria. In early colonial Latin-America, the philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95) was known as "The Phoenix of America".
In ancient philosophy in the West, while academic philosophy was typically the domain of male philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, female philosophers such as Hipparchia of Maroneia (active ca. 325 BC), Arete of Cyrene (active 5th–4th century BC) and Aspasia of Miletus (470–400 BC) were active during this period. Notable medieval philosophers include Hypatia (5th century), St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and St. Catherine of Sienna (1347-1380). Notable modern philosophers included Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). Influential contemporary philosophers include Edith Stein (1891-1942), Susanne Langer (1895–1985), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001), Mary Midgley (1919–2018), Philippa Foot (1920–2010), Mary Warnock (1924–2019), Julia Kristeva (born 1941), Patricia Churchland (born 1943) and Susan Haack (born 1945).
In the early 1800s, some colleges and universities in the UK and US began admitting women, producing more female academics. Nevertheless, U.S. Department of Education reports from the 1990s indicate that few women ended up in philosophy, and that philosophy is one of the least gender-proportionate fields in the humanities. Women make up as little as 17% of philosophy faculty in some studies.
In 2014, Inside Higher Education described the philosophy "...discipline’s own long history of misogyny and sexual harassment" of women students and professors. Jennifer Saul, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, stated in 2015 that women are "...leaving philosophy after being harassed, assaulted, or retaliated against."
In the early 1990s, the Canadian Philosophical Association claimed that there is gender imbalance and gender bias in the academic field of philosophy. In June 2013, a US sociology professor stated that "out of all recent citations in four prestigious philosophy journals, female authors comprise just 3.6 percent of the total." The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy have raised concerns about the underrepresentation of women philosophers, and they require editors and writers to ensure they represent the contributions of women philosophers. According to Eugene Sun Park, "[p]hilosophy is predominantly white and predominantly male. This homogeneity exists in almost all aspects and at all levels of the discipline." According to Saul, "[p]hilosophy, the oldest of the humanities, is also the malest (and the whitest). While other areas of the humanities are at or near gender parity, philosophy is actually more overwhelmingly male than even mathematics."
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