… but is anyone doing grad admissions right now? We have 16% female applicants – this is lower than I would’ve expected, but I don’t have data from past years.
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Just a random though, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to be collecting _this_ data, but I do wonder whether women tend to be a higher proportion of the _serious_ applicants, in most people’s applicant pools? Or, to put it the other way around: if one looks at the chunk of one’s applications that one can pretty quickly eliminate from closer consideration, is it overwhelmingly a matter of way-overconfident-in-their-philosophical-ability guys? This wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be so, and if it did, then this higher proportion of at-least-potentially-qualified female applicants would be the more appropriate one to consider when judging things like whether or not female applicants are being admitted at a proportionate rate.
I am not on the committee this year, but last year 6% of our applications were from women (our faculty is 35% women fwiw). My limited experience doesn’t support JW’s hypothesis about the relative quality of applications from women.
My experience doesn’t really support Jonathan’s hypothesis either – although maybe we have different conceptions of seriousness – I don’t think there are enough non-serious applicants to change the stats all that much.
I’m sure most major Universities collect such data and have for years–by gender, citizenship, race/ethnicity and broken down by every program or department. They have to submit it to Peterson’s, the Council of Grad Schools, US News & World Reports, every accreditation agency, every big federal grant. Call up the Dean of the Graduate School and ask if it’s published in a fact book or how to get the data. It’s public information, at least for public institutions.
Bringing this thread into Mod-land: I wonder whether people could comment on how many applicants characterize themselves as primarily interested in early modern phil? In my many years of tracking admissions at UCLA, UCI, and UNC, I’d say the average is about two per year. There were also two or three per year focused on Kant’s theoretical phil (and sometimes a bunch on Kant’s ethics)
Alan – two a year for early modern sounds right – so does two or three for Kant, even though we don’t have any faculty who work on Kant. Probably 5-10 for ancient.
[…] both US and UK, about a recent (last few years) drop in women applying to do PhDs in philosophy. This blog post is attempting to collect data on the […]
My UK department had a 50-50 PhD student ratio for years. The last two years our female applicant percentage plummeted, reaching 10% last year.
When I was applying to graduate school, I found this data from the University of Minnesota: http://www.grad.umn.edu/data/stats/ad/1065200.html
I wish every school kept that kind of data and made it public!
UNC also publishes such data: http://gradschool.unc.edu/admissions/stats.html
Here is a breakdown of the male/female admission statistics for UNC 2003-2010:
In 2003 135 males applied 58 females (30%)
In 2004 158 males applied 62 females (28%)
In 2005 194 males applied 62 females (24%)
In 2006 180 males applied 52 females (22%)
In 2007 211 males applied 56 females (21%)
In 2008 171 males applied 44 females (20%)
In 2009 197 males applied 62 females (24%)
In 2010 216 males applied 52 females (19%)
I wonder if this is entirely a function of the economic slow down, or if the greater attention being paid to the treatment of women in our profession may be having an impact on how undergrads consider their options (i.e. the creation of the “What It’s Like…” blog and other articles around the blogosphere).