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In April 2016, my colleague Liz Goodnick and I hosted our first Undergraduate Women in Philosophy conference at MSU Denver. It was a tremendous success. We thought that this would be a great way to help positively change the climate for women in philosophy. Before discussing our fantastic conference, here’s a brief accounting of the climate for those who might not be aware.

Those of us who are in philosophy, and especially those of us who are women philosophers, know firsthand about the often-hostile climate for women. Most female-identified philosophers have either been subjected to some form of sexual harassment or know someone who has. Yet, as one of my mentors from graduate school, Linda Martín Alcoff, notes, many instances go unreported: “Women in our profession are, as a group, afraid to complain, loathe to complain, absolutely committed to not complaining.”

A gently crumpled conference program

Many of us are aware of the high-profile sexual harassment cases in philosophy departments in recent years. And all it takes is a few minutes of reading the blog, “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?”  to get a good sense of the discouraging climate. Alcoff recalled reading the blog in a coffee shop near NYU and “tearing up” (see “A Call for Climate Change for Women in Philosophy”). As she puts it, the blog is “over-full with stories of disrespect, harassment, sexual objectification, even an attempted rape at an APA conference.”

In September 2013, New York Times’ “The Stone” presented a five-day series written by women philosophers on the appalling climate for women. Sally Haslanger, who was a contributor to the series, blames “bad actors” in positions of power. Alcoff, who was also a contributor, suggests that the principal issue “is not about harassment or come-ons but the thousand daily cuts that collectively dissuade women from staying in, the aggressive and peremptory dismissals in seminars, the a priori rejections and derision of feminist philosophy…” and on and on.

I recommend reading the March 15, 2016 report “Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change” by Eric Schwitzgebel and Carolyn Dicey Jennings: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/WomenInPhil-160315b.pdf. Most disturbing is not just the small percentage of full-time female philosophy faculty, but also the percentage of women philosophy faculty by rank, which reflects “the higher attrition rates, lower promotion rates, and lower rates of senior recruitment for women.”

There are very few women full professors in philosophy. Equally disturbing is the appalling lack of women philosophers of color. Haslanger notes that, “change needs to happen on multiple fronts for us to make progress.”

This brings me to MSU Denver’s First Undergraduate Women’s Philosophy Conference. Since graduate school, I have been trying to find ways to improve the climate for women in philosophy. While I had a wonderful, supportive dissertation advisor, Sam Gorovitz, our department certainly was no stranger to the above-mentioned problems. One of my earliest efforts was helping to found, with my mentor Linda Alcoff, a women’s “support” group. At a recent visit to my alma mater, I was delighted to see that the group is still thriving. Some female graduate students told me that the women’s group has made a tremendously positive impact on their time in graduate school, noting that they wouldn’t survive without it.

In this spirit, my colleague Liz and I founded MSU Denver’s Women’s Philosophy Group a couple of years ago to help recruit and mentor female-identified students. Our first ambitious project (all the more so that I was on sabbatical) was to organize and host our First Undergraduate Women’s Philosophy Conference on April 22-23, 2016. We knew that this had the potential to be an important event. It was just a matter of pulling it off. The conference, the only one of its kind so far as we are aware, would provide a supportive space for undergraduate female-identified students to present and comment on philosophy papers and build community. We received financial support from our philosophy department, our Institute for Women’s Studies and Services, our women’s philosophy group, our philosophy club, and from our wonderful provost, Vicki Golich.

Our keynote speaker, Elizabeth Brake, Arizona State University, gives a talk entitled “Love and the Law.”

We didn’t expect such a tremendous response. We received fifty submissions from across the United States and Canada. Several students, both female and male, helped serve as blind reviewers. Two students in particular did an exceptional job in helping us pull off such a fantastic conference, Haley Burke and Alexa Brown.

Our budget only allowed for eight presenters and commentators, and a small honorarium for our keynote speaker, Elizabeth Brake (Arizona State University), who gave a terrific talk entitled “Love and the Law,” arguing for state support of personal relationships, including friendship, polyamory, and companionship for the elderly.

There are lots of male around the world who cannot satisfy their partners in the bed due to weak mouthsofthesouth.com generic cialis professional erection. This among many cost of cialis mouthsofthesouth.com other reasons is why more individuals are opting for it. It is the best viagra properien solution of the disease. Relationship problems: When happiness of a relation gets turned into purchase levitra online why not try here humiliation and disappointment for several men. The conference was well attended with fifty-plus in the audience. Male-identified allies served as chairs and commentators. We hosted a banquet the night before. We started the conference with a workshop on the climate for women in philosophy, at which we distributed a list of online resources. University of Northern Colorado’s Nancy Machett gave a particularly inspiring talk at the workshop about “The unplanned and unexpected yet in my view utterly marvelous experiment that occurred at Oxford between 1937-1945. This was long before anyone was worried about the lack of women in philosophy.” As Machett explained, five remarkable women philosophers turned up at Oxford at that time: Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe (arriving in 1937), followed by Iris Murdoch (1938), Philippa Foot (1939), and Mary Warnock (1942).

Student speaker, Caroline Blaney, Hunter College, presents her paper “Platonic Pedagogy in the Meno: Virtue is not a Divine Gift.”

The feedback from the conference was amazingly positive. For example, one respondent noted that, “It was really powerful to be in a room of women philosophers and feel like part of a community.” And: “Exceptionally beneficial to hear from and engage with a group of fellow women who share a passion for philosophy.”

There were three main concerns about the conference, as indicated by the evaluations, which we would like to correct before our Second Annual Women’s Philosophy Conference. First, the conference should be longer, to allow for more participants. Second, the conference should be more affordable to allow more students to participate, and finally, there should be more people of color participating.

Liz and I recently applied for a small grant with the APA to help remedy the first two concerns. With APA funds, we can extend the conference to two full days and offer small stipends to student participants and a larger award to the student with the best paper. The third concern (including more female-identified students of color) will be addressed by encouraging women of color to submit papers in our next Call for Papers, to invite a woman philosopher of color to be the keynote speaker, and to advertise to historically black schools, Hispanic-serving institutions, and departments such as African American Studies, Chicano/a Studies, and Native American Studies.

We are looking forward to hosting our next conference in April 2017. I hope that some of you will encourage your female-identified students to participate. As one conference attendee noted, this conference matters.

A few members of the audience engage with the presentations

Participating in conferences of this sort, having more female-identified philosophy faculty (especially senior faculty) serving as positive role models, mentors and advocates, and actively recruiting female-identified philosophy students, including female students of color, will help make a positive difference for women in philosophy. That, and (to quote Alcoff) waiting for the “recalcitrant members of the old guard” to retire.

Editor’s Note: This blog entry is based on a paper presented by Prof. Reiheld at FAB Congress 2016 in Edinburgh.

Philosopher Sandra Bartky persuasively argued for a Foucauldian framework conceptualizing femininity as a disciplinary regime that creates docile bodies through dieting, exercise, and comportment. Women, to be feminine, should take up as little space as possible. The very notion of appetite is highly regulated in femininity as evidenced by women’s constant attention not only to what they eat but also to how they are judged by others for the signs of appetite which they display.  Women who eat non-normatively still conform to norms insofar as they socially excuse their eating: “I have been hitting the gym hard, so I can afford a little cake” or “I didn’t have lunch today, so I think I will indulge a bit.”  These attitudes and social interactions underpin disordered eating by those seeking to conform to norms of femininity, with all the negative health consequences that implies for the person who disciplines themselves in this way.

This image is a word cloud (word association) for “masculinity” as found on the internet. The words most commonly found with “masculinity” are larger: stronger, confident, tough, provider, aggressive, independent, violence, strength, and athletic… these are a few of the most prominent. They are also non-coincidentally the components of RW Connell’s analysis of hegemonic masculinity.

While feminist bioethics have long been concerned with how femininity norms lead to disordered eating and body image in women and girls, similar pressures from masculinity norms are increasingly brought to bear on men and boys. The burgeoning field of masculinity studies has, in parallel, analyzed norms of masculinity which govern masculine behavior.  Sociologist R.W. Connell popularized the concept of hegemonic masculinity, a notion that not only promotes dominance by men and the subordination of women, but does so in part by enforcing very clear norms of masculinity which justify dominance, norms which often involve strength and aggression.

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Last week, during the distraction of FAB Congress and World Congress of Bioethics, you would be forgiven for not taking note that the American Medical Association–also having its annual meeting at the time–voted to accept a new version of its Code of Ethics. You can find more about it from Morning Consult and Healio.  As Healio notes, the first AMA code of ethics was approved in 1847.

The measure was one of many adopted at the AMA meeting, including–but not limited to–a call for more resources to combat Zika virus, a call for school start times no earlier than 8:30 am based on adolescent sleep research, policy recommendations on gun safety and background checks which explicitly mention the shooting in Orlando, equal health care access for eating disorders, and a measure calling for the elimination of sales tax on feminine hygeine products such as tampons. “Feminine hygiene products are essential for women’s health, and taxes on them are a regressive penalty,” said AMA President-Elect David O. Apart from these, men who are taking medicines for blood pressure drugs, antihistamines, antidepressants, and tranquilizers. generic cialis opacc.cv Sometimes everything 5mg cialis online would be fine and other times I would find it incredibly difficult to get or maintain an erection. It is important for individuals levitra online australia to know about these drugs to ensure safety in your health. You can even ask your doctor for alternative options if you are buy levitra no prescription not able to afford oral medicines. Barbe, M.D. “We applaud the states that have already eliminated sales taxes on these products, and we urge every state to follow suit.”

Kate Hunt stands at the podium at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre with the first slide of her presentation on gender and health, which was the opening plenary session of FAB Congress 2016.

FAB Congress kicked off this morning with an excellent talk by Prof. Kate Hunt at University of Glasgow in Scotland. Hunt is the Associate Director at the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit.

Hunt’s paper described gender differences in health between men and women, busting some myths about the effect of masculinity on health behaviors and confirming others about the effects of gender on how seriously health was taken.  For instance, men who had symptoms of breast cancer had to wait much longer for referral to a specialist than did women who had symptoms of breast cancer, while women who had symptoms of bladder cancer waited quite a bit longer than men for referral to a specialist. Hunt also described a public health initiative she was involved in to get older obese men interested in improving their health (which may or may not mean weight/size) to engage in better health behaviors. This program worked in cooperation with Scottish Premier League football (soccer) teams to bring men in to take insider tours of the facilities, train in the facilities, walk up and down the stadium steps, engage in support groups with each other, and more. 12 month follow up showed that the results were almost entirely sustained for nearly all participants, rare with such initiatives. Hunt points out that this worked by harnessing masculinity to good health behaviors. Masculinity should not be conceived of as a simple obstacle to wellness.

Sarah Ssaali delivering her talk at the 2016 FAB Congress in Edinburgh Scotland on June 13, 2016

Many papers followed including a cornucopia of ideas in the new Rapid Pitch format in which multiple participants deliver their arguments in very short papers, leaving time for the audience to have a discussion knitting the ideas together.

Several afternoon paper panels also took place including one by members of the RinGs working group from Ghana and Rachel Tolhurst, who spoke about her work in India with the ASHA program, India’s community health worker (CHW) program. When discussing approaches to gender and health care systems, Tolhurst stressed that “Intersectionality… is critical in not creating a hierarchy of suffering.” Other panelists involved with RinGs, which looks at how gender plays a role in research into health systems, included Sarah Ssaali, Senior Lecturer in the School of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Ssaali asked, what if the health system you create endangers those you intend to serve?  She discussed how difficult it can be to convince people that systems appearing to be gender neutral are in fact not gender neutral at all, noting that men–who are the majority of policy makers in Uganda as in European and North American nations–can become defensive when one makes gendered power analyses of health systems. Ssaali also discussed other aspects of research in her nation, including attempting to interview female participants who needed the permission of their custodial male relative in order to participate, and older women who cannot bear to discuss reproductive health matters with young male researchers.  While feminist values might lead us to judge male custodial permission for adult females perfectly capable of making their own decisions to be oppressive, Ssaali points out that disrupting this patriarchal hierarchy can leave a household in disarray and put women at risk. And yet going along with these traditional social structures seems to validate them.  “We try to be culturally sensitive to not harm participants, but this is at the risk of entrenching patriarchy,” said Ssaali.

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Ssaali’s colleague David Musoke also prevented his research on gendered division of labor within community health workers in Uganda, as determined by analysis of photos of their work that 10 workers (5 male and 5 female) took over a 5 month period. It revealed that even though the CHWs had similar job descriptions, women tended to do more childcare, were seen as or thought of as being more available in the community, and were far more likely to support female patients regarding reproductive health. By contrast, males were able to cover large areas during community mobilization due to their ability to drive motor vehicles in ways that women were generally not trained in or allowed to do. This also enabled them to serve as a motorcycle ambulance service.  Male CHWs were also much more likely to be involved in manual activities related to maintaining safe water and so forth. Thus, gender affected the actual performance of ostensibly gender neutral CHW duties. Musoke notes that those hoping to do research in these communities and use CHWs as intermediaries should be aware of the ways that gender affects their work.

These are just a few of the excellent papers delivered on the first day of FAB.  I very much look forward to the second and third!

If you are not able to attend FAB Congress, or are just not able to attend all sessions simultaneously due to being merely human, you can follow a lot of us (including myself: @AlisonReiheld) who are live tweeting the conference at #FAB2016.  Just go to twitter.com and search for the hashtag, or go here.

And now, from Edinburgh, where it remains this light until well after 10 pm, good night!

Edinburgh Castle from Castle Terrace at 10 pm, June 13, 2016.

Many folks who even casually attend to advertising and inspirational messages about fitness–“fitspo”–will notice that messages divide into the categories of push messages (disincentives to being less active) or pull messages (incentives to being more active).

This message shows a slim, well-muscled young woman running across a beach in revealing exercise clothing (sport bra and tight short shorts). While this may seem like practical exercise clothing, the text makes it apparent that revealing her body to the gaze of others is a major goal. The text says “It takes 4 weeks for you to see your body changing. It takes 8 weeks for friends and family. And it takes 12 weeks for the rest of the world. KEEP GOING.” The emphasis here is on external appearance and feedback from external sources. Imagine this same image with the text “Do you ever wonder how fast you can run?”  The identical clothing will then send a very different message.

Push messages often rely heavily on shaming for being less active and all too often focus on attractiveness of body size/shape, factors which are not actually relevant to health in the way that fitness, nutrition, and physical activity are, and which are conveyed in ways which can actually encourage people to damage their bodies in the quest for health: “You will never become your sexy self sitting on the couch” or “Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”  These messages feature visuals of idealized slim, fit bodies with visibly defined muscles and without any visible indicators of disability.  They are almost always Caucasian bodies. They are sometimes posed in very sexualized ways that emphasize receptivity to the male gaze and/or sexual availability, lips parted and back arched.  Such images are photos not of exercise, but of the results of exercising.  They lure you in large part by making you ashamed of how you are now, thus their classification as push messages.

Upon viewing a message with the bold words “THERE IS NO ROOM FOR THE WEAK” dominating the image of a slim headless woman running through the countryside, one can practically here the shaming voice in one’s head “and you don’t want to be weak, do you?”

Pull messages are rarer.  These tend to involve body positivity and reminders about how good exercise and movement can feel for a variety of body types and ability levels. These are internal rewards that involve very little or no shame.  Buzzfeed recently ran a listicle (an article that is a list) gathering 13 such messages. I present it for your consideration as a non-shaming, healthier way to, well, promote health. Here are some examples for contrast with the push messages provided above. Note how they may still inspire and motivate, but use very different messages to draw people toward exercise for reasons that promote internal sources of motivation and welfare: “Moving around feels good”; “Aren’t you kind curious how long you can actually hold a plank for?” If you  view the listicle, you will notice that the bodies also show a broadly different variety of shapes and sizes and visible disability.
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In a similar vein, consider the British campaign “This Girl Can” which this Editor would consider another example of a Pull message rather than a Push message.  It seems to say “come on over here and sweat and jiggle and move your fleshy meatsack of a mostly-water self… doesn’t it look like fun?”

Over at the American Journal of Bioethics blog, bioethicist and new IJFAB blogger Keisha Ray has published an excellent piece on racial disparities in pain management titled INEFFICIENT PAIN MANAGEMENT FOR BLACK PATIENTS SHOWS THAT THERE IS A FINE LINE BETWEEN ‘INHUMANE’ AND ‘SUPERHUMAN’. Ray takes note of recent research on this topic:

Black people are less likely to receive adequate pain management and are less likely to be prescribed pain medication, including after experiencing injuries typically thought of as very painful, such as bone fractures. In a study conducted at University of Virginia, in which researchers studied white medical students’ views of black patients, they found that many students held false beliefs about the biology of black people, which could explain disparities in pain management. For example, researchers found that some white medical students believed that black people have thicker skin than white people, black people’s blood coagulated quicker than white people, black people have stronger immune systems than white people, and that black people’s nerve endings were less sensitive than white people’s nerve endings. Other than these views being troublesome simply because of their false nature and not being grounded in science, many of the medical students who held these beliefs also had false beliefs about black people’s ability to feel pain, believing that they feel less pain than white people. The worry is that these unscientific views could be used to develop treatment recommendations by future physicians and are currently used by some practicing physicians to treat their black patients.

Over at the Washington Post, this information was helpfully tabulated for readers as follows. The alert reader will note odd variations in frequency of beliefs, such as an increase in the 2nd year of medical school in the belief that blacks age more slowly than whites (from 21 the first year to 28 the 2nd year) followed by a decrease to well below that (3rd year: 12; Residents: 14). The claim that “Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites” similarly increases from 1st to 2nd year before dropping back. Several of the beliefs about biological differences between black and white patients actually spike between 3rd year and residency. This editor wonders if there may be some connection to the well-documented jading that occurs during medical school.

While undertreatment of pain in black patients of course raises issues of cruelty, non-maleficence, and justice, Ray makes an additional and important point about the seeming permissibility of inhumane treatment for those seen as superhuman:
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