It takes a village to raise a baby and it takes willing mentors to turn you into a good philosopher. I know it is true because I never had one. And then I briefly had one (nod to you, Martin), and now I have a new one ( 👋 Sander). When discussing mentoring with my colleagues, it often seems that the reason so many of us did not manage to clock in over the total of sixty minutes with our assigned academic supervisors/mentors during our one or two year-long master program was the skewed balance between the research, teaching and the administration duties. Argument went that, at the end of the day, our mentors/supervisors simply had no time or desire to meet with us.

But what if we could argue, even better, give some evidence that mentoring presents an important factor in helping underrepresented groups, such as women, to continue their studies on the graduate level?

Although mentoring, widely construed, is by no means a sufficient condition to secure transition of more women from the undergraduate to graduate programs[1], it is my contention that ultimately external conditions, such as mentorship, peer review, access to work spaces and the relevant literature are necessary if a student is to develop her philosophical contributions to a satisfactory level. For the purposes of this short note, I will only focus on mentoring and how the absence of it helps uphold the status quo in philosophy.

It is my contention that to stop being sexist in academic philosophy is to stop being selfish: with (1) the attention and (2) the resources.

One thing that all of us struggled with asking for and receiving attention were the unclear boundaries and vaguely described and understood rights and duties on both sides. Is one’s mentor supposed to take on a parental role? Or that of a therapist? Or that of a shoulder to cry on after Joris never texted back? The attention that so many of us wanted was never expected to be a one-sided effort. Regardless, most of the times, we would end up talking to whomever would listen about our minors, essay ideas and career plans.

To succeed in academic philosophy, women need not only mentors but also promoters. What does a promoter do? One example of promotion is to use resources at hand in a form of the access to information on relevant venues for the development of her research interests (read: summer schools).

In conclusion, to tackle the continued perpetuation of institutionalized sexism in academic philosophy, we ought to help develop more both capable and selfless male and female philosophers. In order to do that, I believe that we need to set up a more concrete mentor-mentee code of conduct which will outline rights and duties on both sides of the table.

[1] In their own take on quantification of the gender gap in the philosophy departments, Paxton, Figdor and Tiberius (2012) argue that the presence of female faculty members positively impacts the number of students transitioning to philosophy majors.