Gender and Sexual Orientation of First-Year Philosophy Students in the U.S.

Gender and Sexual Orientation of First-Year Philosophy Students in the U.S. Eric Schwitzgebel, Morgan Thompson, and Eric Winsberg. The Splintered Mind Blog, May 13 2020. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/05/gender-and-sexual-orientation-of-first.html

Among these 373,333 students, 0.36% (1132/315158 students, excluding undecided and unanswered) expressed an intention to major in Philosophy. This compares with Philosophy being either the first or second major of 0.39% of students receiving graduate degrees in the most recent available year (2018) in the NCES IPEDS database.[Note 1]

Two gender identity questions are included in the survey:

* Your sex (male, female)
* Are you transgender? (no, yes)

Although men were more likely than women to express an intention to major in philosophy, the ratio was closer to parity than we see among graduates in philosophy: 43% (485/1132) of intended philosophy majors were women (1%, or 7 total, declined to state), compared to 58% of first-year students overall.

Since the latest data from NCES show that among Bachelor's degree recipients, 36% are women, the HERI data are consistent with the "leaky pipeline" hypothesis about women in philosophy. (The leaky pipeline hypothesis holds that over the course of their education, women are more likely than men to leave philosophy.) We plan a more careful time course analysis of these data in the near future, with a close eye on potential non-response bias in the HERI dataset.[Note 2]

Nine percent (105/1132) of the philosophy majors declined to state whether they were transgender. Among philosophy major respondents, 8/1027 (0.8%) identified as transgender. Among students with other majors, 8% did not respond and 0.4% (1172/288989) identified as transgender. Note, however, that with such small proportions, a disproportionate representation of transgender students among those who decline to state (perhaps because they are not sufficiently "out" to want to reveal their transgender status on a questionnaire of this sort), could dramatically affect the results. Similar considerations apply to transgender students who might falsely state that they are not transgender. Given the small number of self-reported transgender students and these resulting interpretative difficulties, we are hesitant to draw conclusions about the proportion of students who are transgender or about whether philosophy students were more likely than other students to be transgender.