Professor Manners is reprinting a column of hers below.  It is topical in this season of job seeking, but her primary motive this time is not to address those looking for employment.  Rather, she has been concerned about the extensive discussion on the web about why there are so few women in philosophy.   (See comments on posts here, here and here.)   Not only is much of it being done by philosophers indulging themselves in pretty unexamined speculations, but the elephant is not getting discussed, as Jender’s post today reminded her.   (There are a number of earlier descriptions of the elephant, but Jenny Saul’s post here has a great summary; as she points out, there have been a great deal of research done on the  problem in similar  fields.) 

What is the real problem?   That is that groups of philosophers are capable of engaging in discriminatory,  exclusionary behavior towards women and other outsiders time  and time again, in one context after another.  There is, by the way,  no reason to expect that the unconscious biases producing this behavior are exclus