{"id":22426,"date":"2014-11-20T16:17:23","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T21:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/?p=22426"},"modified":"2014-11-25T18:38:47","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T23:38:47","slug":"breaking-bias-and-other-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/2014\/11\/20\/breaking-bias-and-other-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"BREAKING BIAS: Women in Philosophy and Other Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo
\"I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS DOWN IMPLICIT BIASES\". I've been waiting to make a Breaking Bad joke for a while, and I'm not sorry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

On Monday of last week, the Philosophy Course Union<\/a> held its first Women in Philosophy<\/a> (WiP) conference. The goal of the conference was to celebrate and advocate for women <\/a>in the field of philosophy, through a series of talks by female philosophers (faculty, grads, undergrads) and talks about women in philosophy. Philosophy has one of the worst reputations for gender representation<\/a>, both because most of its corpus and undergrad syllabi are focused on dead white guys, but also because of the stereotypes and discrimination<\/a> which happens behind the scenes. The conference was meant to shed light on these affairs, and take steps toward increasing female representation. (And it totally did).<\/p>\r\n

Almost every department and area of study\u2014and shucks, most of the workforce and social world\u2014discriminates against women and other minorities. As the next generation of scholars, workers, employers, and People, I think it\u2019s worth reflecting on our practices a little bit. But this blog is about our experiences, so let me start by sharing some of mine.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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That's Hypatia of Alexandria<\/a>, in case you're guessing.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

In my first year (way back when), I was in a tutorial and asked what I thought of the argument we were studying. I started: \u201cI have to say, I find his argument utterly compelling, because\u2014\u201c but was cut short. \u201cYou mean her<\/em><\/span>\u00a0<\/em>argument\u201d, my TA interjected. And he was right. We had been studying all and only men up to that point in time, so I had implicitly assumed the next would be too. But you know what they say happens when you assu<\/em>me...<\/p>\r\n

Of course, I felt like a fool. And I should have. Shame on me. (And if you don\u2019t think I deserved shame, consider: what if it was the work of a woman in the room? What message was I sending: that this work is so good that it must have been done by a male?) But it was a sobering moment, allowing me to reflect on my implicit biases: patterns of thought which are programmed into us. And, in being able to recognize those biases, I was able to start watching my behaviours more closely. But it wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\r\n

Updating our beliefs<\/a> is hard. Consider the following. Say I believe that all leaves are green, but stumble across some orange leaves on front campus. I compare my belief (or be-leaf) that all leaves are green against this new evidence to form new beliefs. But there are two things that could happen. First, I could say \u201cOh no! An orange leaf? I guess I was wrong about all leaves being green!\u201d and go about believing, instead, that most leaves are green. Or, I could say \u201cThis leaf appears to be orange, but I\u2019m quite certain that all leaves are green, so I guess this is a hoax or not a real leaf\u201d.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

\"Photo
My own paper argued that feminist positions on the morality of conception means you are required to start being more green. It got a little weird, but I got the other authors' pronouns right. (Photo via Mariela Libedinsky).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

The problem is, when it comes to implicit bias, we often go the second route, because we aren\u2019t consciously aware of what we\u2019re doing. Just as I wasn\u2019t aware that I was assuming the female author was a male author, until I got called out on it.<\/p>\r\n

This is what the Women in Philosophy conference sought to do: to call out implicit biases and challenge the ways in which we think about our peers in the classroom and in the world. And while this is but a brief blog post, the hope is maybe it will make you uncomfortable about the injurious things you might be unknowingly performing, enough to do the same.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\nOn Monday of last week, the Philosophy Course Union held its first Women in Philosophy (WiP) conference. The goal of the conference was to celebrate and advocate for women in the field of philosophy, through a series of talks by…\n<\/div>
Continue reading “BREAKING BIAS: Women in Philosophy and Other Stories”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>
Continue reading “BREAKING BIAS: Women in Philosophy and Other Stories”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6669,1,70,66,67,68],"tags":[12841,176,12840,279,286,6670,25506],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/241"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22426"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22513,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22426\/revisions\/22513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}