Ellen Miles

This chapter reports the results of several studies designed to explore the gender stereotypes that professional philosophers and philosophy students hold about philosophy. We found that both women and men explicitly associate philosophy with maleness. However, the implicit picture was more complicated and surprising. Men tend to implicitly associate philosophy with maleness, but women tend to implicitly associate it with femaleness. We explore the implications of these findings for explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy that turn on implicit bias and stereotype threat. We argue that our findings are compatible with these explanations, and that they suggest a hopeful picture for the prospects of combating stereotype threat among women in philosophy.