There’s a discussion going on at Brian Leiter’s about the role of race and gender. There are a lot of anecdotes, which is fine, but little in the way of good data. Just for some context, here’s a figure showing the number women in full-time positions, as a percentage of all full-time positions, at U.S. philosophy departments surveyed in the Philosophical Gourmet Report.

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Click on the image for a larger version. A higher quality PDF version is also available. These data were tabulated from the faculty lists used in the 2004—2006 round of the PGR.

This is not, of course, a full sample of U.S. philosophy departments. Some things to notice: Penn State has the highest percentage of full-time women, at 43.75 percent. Princeton has the lowest, at about 5.9 percent. The median score is just shy of 18 percent. But while the maximum score is up in the mid-forties, only five departments (of sixty six) have a third or more full time women. Three quarters of all departments have 22 percent women or less.

Again, these figures are not for a representative sample of U.S. philosophy departments, but for the 66 departments surveyed in the 04/06 PGR report.