Despite its place in the humanities, the career prospects and numbers of women in philosophy much more closely resemble those found in the sciences and engineering. This book collects a series of critical essays by female philosophers pursuing the question of why philosophy continues to be inhospitable to women and what can be done to change it. By examining the social and institutional conditions of contemporary academic philosophy in the Anglophone world as well as its methods, culture, and characteristic commitments, the volume provides a case study in interpretation of one academic discipline in which women's progress seems to have stalled since initial gains made in the 1980s. Some contributors make use of concepts developed in other contexts to explain women's under-representation, including the effects of unconscious biases, stereotype threat, and micro-inequities. Other chapters draw on the resources of feminist philosophy to challenge everyday understandings of time, communication, authority and merit, as these shape effective but often unrecognized forms of discrimination and exclusion. Often it is assumed that women need to change to fit existing institutions. This book instead offers concrete reflections on the way in which philosophy needs to change, in order to accommodate and benefit from the important contribution women's full participation makes to the discipline.

Katrina Hutchison joined the Department as a postdoctoral researcher in early 2012. Her current research focus is on the ethics of innovative surgery and surgica research. Previously she completed a PhD on free will, and retains a research interest in issues of human agency and moral responsibility. She has an interest in feminist philosophy and has co-edited a book on women in philosophy which is due to come out with OUP in 2013. She is also interested in questions about the goals of philosophy and the role of philosophy outside of academia. She maintains an interest in higher education teaching although her current position is research only.

Fiona Jenkins is a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy, RSSS, ANU. She teaches on contemporary French philosophy, on Nietzsche, on film, and on aspects of democratic theory. Following a DPhil at Oxford (with a thesis on Nietzsche, 'Becoming What We Are: On Realism, Revaluation and Self-Representation in Nietzsche's Philosophy') she spent two years teaching at Essex University, taking up a post-doc. at Sydney University in 1997 and moving to ANU in 2002. She has two children and is rediscovering the reasons for feminism.