At Brandeis and other universities, there are stark demographic differences in gender within certain sections of the humanities. In an interview with the Justice, Prof. Susan Lanser (ENG), the head of the division of humanities and member of the Provost's Committee on Diversity, explained her belief that "associations of men with scientific inquiry and philosophical reasoning are centuries old. These fields have been slower than some others to shed long-standing gender biases." Such a theory can explain a slower move nationally to gender equality in humanities disciplines such as philosophy and religion, which regularly engage with "philosophical reasoning."

Kieran Healy, an associate professor of sociology at Duke University, has published data on his academic blog that indicates the percentage of doctorates granted to women nationally in each academic field in 2009. The results, which are based on the Survey of Earned Doctorates from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, found that slightly under 30 percent of doctorates in religious studies and philosophy were granted to women; only doctorates in engineering, physics and computer science, fields which are widely recognized to have a gender disparity, had a lower percentage of women recipients.

Prof. Wendy Cadge (SOC), the chair of the Women's and Gender Studies program, explained the importance of faculty diversity in an email to the Justice, writing that "[i]t is important that students see a diverse set of faculty in the classroom to teach and advise them and act as role models." To explore this idea, the Justice interviewed professors from the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Philosophy faculty to learn about the presence of gender within those departments.

Faculty demographics
Both the NEJS and Philosophy departments have a history of tenured women on their faculty.

Sissela Bok, wife of former Harvard University President Derek Bok, was the first tenured woman in the Philosophy department in 1985, according to data from that department. She left the University in 1992. Bok could not be reached for comment by press time.

In 2002, Prof. Marion Smiley (PHIL) was hired with tenure and remains at the University. Smiley declined to comment for this article. Following her, Marion Hourdequin and Sarah McGrath were hired on the tenure track in 2005. Hourdequin and McGrath left after one year for Colorado College and two years for Princeton University, respectively.

Hourdequin explained her departure in an email to the Justice. "[A] key source of stress was the financial challenge of living in Boston, where the cost of housing was almost twice as high as anywhere else I had lived. I also had a 6 month old baby when I began at Brandeis, and child care in the area was extremely expensive," she wrote.

McGrath explained in an email to the Justice that she left Brandeis when she was offered a tenure-track position at Princeton, where her husband was teaching, at the time that she was expecting her first child.

Both Hourdequin and McGrath conveyed their appreciation that the department allowed them to organize the colloquium series for the 2005 to 2006 academic year, and McGrath expressed gratitude toward Smiley for making the department "a good place for junior women" and extended appreciation to Smiley, Prof. Jerry Samet (PHIL) and Prof. Eli Hirsch (PHIL), who were "important in their mentoring roles" to her as a junior woman in the department. 

In 2008 and 2009, respectively, Prof. Kate Moran (PHIL) and Prof. Jennifer Marusic (PHIL) were hired on the tenure track and still remain at the University, with Moran now serving as the director of the department's graduate program.

The Philosophy department also has had two visiting female faculty members. According to data provided by that department, Amelie Rorty was hired outside the tenure structure in 1995 as a professor and director of the History of Ideas program until leaving the University in 2003 to pursue research interests, and Linda Hirshman served as the Allen-Berenson Distinguished Visiting Professor in Philosophy and Women's Studies from 1998 to 2002.

Out of the five tenure-track hires made since 2005, four have been female. Chair of the Philosophy department Samet expressed satisfaction with that statistic, explaining that he is "proud of our record over the past five or 10 years to shift the [gender] balance a bit." Today, three of the 10 philosophy professors are women, and two of them are still on the tenure track, a demographic that Lanser described as slightly better than the national average and a significant change from 2001, when there were no tenured or tenure-track female faculty in the University's Philosophy department. An Aug. 2 article in the New York Times reported that female philosophers make up "less than 20 percent" of faculty in university philosophy departments.

Within the NEJS department, all of the past female professors hired within the tenure structure still remain on the faculty. In 1993, Prof. Bernadette Brooten (NEJS) was hired with tenure from the Harvard Divinity School and Prof. Sylvia Barack Fishman (NEJS) was hired as the first woman on the tenure-track. Brooten and Fishman were the first women in the NEJS department aside from Hebrew language instructors. Since then, three other women have been hired in the tenure structure in NEJS: Profs. ChaeRan Yoo Freeze, Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Ilana Szobel. In the fall of 2009, Fishman was appointed as the first female chair of the NEJS department. In NEJS, five of the 19 faculty members in the tenure structure are women, and one of the five is still on the tenure track.
NEJS is not a religion department in the traditional sense, which can complicate a direct comparison with religion departments at other universities. According to Brooten, NEJS is "an interdisciplinary department because we have people who can think of themselves more as people in the study of religion, we have people who think of themselves as more as historians, people who are literary scholars [and] Sylvia Barack Fishman does sociology." On its website, the department describes itself as "home to one of the world's largest programs in Jewish and Hebrew Studies," which emphasizes its Jewish focus. Fishman said in an interview with the Justice that in Jewish religious studies in particular, she does not "see that kind of lack of female presence" that is reflected in Healy's statistics on religion faculty. Additionally, Brooten expressed surprise at the finding that so few women were earning doctoral degrees in religious studies.

Diversity initiatives
Improving diversity among a university faculty is a unique challenge. Job openings in many academic disciplines are scarce, the humanities especially so, leaving few opportunities to make new hires. A Feb. 18 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that "the overall job system in the humanities has been in a state of permanent distress for over 40 years." According to Lanser, however, the University has come very close to achieving demographic gender equality among its assistant professors as a whole, who are the newest hires in their respective departments. Furthermore, the University has engaged in a number of different initiatives to help diversify its faculty.

One of the most noticeable developments is the inclusion of a diversity representative on new faculty search committees. According to the dean of arts and sciences website, the diversity representative serves as a non-voting member of the committee and must pay specific attention to the diversity of the applicant pool. At the end of the search, the diversity representative must sign a Fair Search Report, which indicates that he or she was "familiar with the search criteria and [endorsed] the rationale that led to the committee's recommended candidate."

Members of both the NEJS and Philosophy departments said they have found these representatives to be useful in searches. Diversity representatives are "very articulate about the necessity for seriously evaluating candidates in terms of gender and in terms of ethnic and religious background," said Fishman, while also being "respectful of the process."

Samet agreed, commenting that the diversity representative "took it upon themselves to make sure that, procedurally, the search created every opportunity for women to apply and treated all the applicants fairly. ... They can make sure that we [are] not sloppy."

In addition to promoting diversity with the presence of diversity representatives, the University engages in specialized hiring practices called cluster hires and target-of-opportunity hires in order to increase its faculty diversity, said Lanser in a phone interview with the Justice.  Cluster hires involve the hiring of a group of junior faculty "perhaps [from] different departments, but whose work focuses in a general area," and target-of-opportunity hires focus on "the hiring of persons in fields where they are historically underrepresented or underrepresented [specifically] at Brandeis," Lanser explained.  

There is also unofficial mentoring between female faculty members. "Informally, core faculty in WGS provide support and mentor female faculty across campus," said Cadge, referring to the role that faculty in Women's and Gender Studies play in supporting their female colleagues outside of the program. Moran referenced a similar informal support, mentioning that she has befriended many female faculty with whom she discusses topics both personal and professional.

Research and teaching
Fishman emphasized that "the feminist transformation of the academy is not just 'add women and stir,'" but also understanding women's experience in the context of the academic discipline. Brooten highlighted this distinction by explaining how, during her interview to join the Brandeis faculty, Prof. Marc Brettler (NEJS) reviewed with her his syllabus for a course on women in the Bible. A professor, such as Brettler, who develops courses of that sort will "appreciate the work of colleagues who work in those areas, [and] understand what we're doing," explained Brooten.

The NEJS department offers approximately nine different courses that focus on women or gender as the central lens, ranging from "Gender and the Bible," offered by Brettler, to "Israeli Women Writers on War and Peace," taught by Szobel. Furthermore, many male NEJS faculty members, including Brettler, Profs. Jonathan Sarna, Yehudah Mirsky and David Wright have published articles, book chapters or edited volumes that employ women or gender as a central lens for analysis.

When asked whether she had any goals for women and gender in the NEJS department, Fishman responded by saying, "I think that by my being chair [as a woman], there have already been changes, and it wasn't like something was broken and it needed fixing, but ... people's understanding of what leadership is changes."

The field of philosophy internationally has understood the importance of this integration of women's publications and experiences into the discipline. Moran directed the Justice to an online Google Doc, created by a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford, on which academics from around the world have submitted published papers by female philosophers that can be incorporated into introductory-level classes.

When Samet was asked about any potential upcoming Philosophy courses related to women and gender, he explained that "we have a certain number of courses we feel we need to run the major, and we don't have a big enough faculty. So everyone is scrambling to teach the courses that we need to teach." Philosophy professors also placed emphasis on the role that Smiley plays in raising gender as a research and teaching subject in the department. Samet estimated that "Marion [Smiley]'s the only one who teaches classes in that area," and McGrath recognized Smiley for being "extremely good at getting students interested in philosophical problems and issues concerning gender." According to the University's Faculty Guide, the Philosophy department has offered two recent courses with women or gender as a central focus: Smiley currently teaches a course on the philosophy of gender, and Prof. Palle Yourgrau (PHIL) has taught a course on Simone Weil, the 20th-century French intellectual, about whom he recently published a biography.

Joint Graduate degree in WMGS
The Women's and Gender Studies program has encouraged scholarship related to women and gender with the development of joint graduate degree programs between WMGS and other academic departments. The NEJS department, for instance, has contributed to a joint Master of Arts degree with Women's and Gender Studies, and is one of the only programs of its type in the country.

According to Prof. Shulamit Reinharz (SOC), the joint degree program between NEJS and Women's and Gender Studies was created in 1992, a time when the Women's and Gender Studies program (then called only "Women's Studies") did not have a large enough faculty to support its own graduate program. As a result, several joint programs were created to supplement the existing Women's Studies faculty with professors and classes from other departments. The programs used the existing graduate admissions process in each department and encouraged faculty to select two or three students for their department's joint degree.

The joint degree between Women's Studies and NEJS has flourished, according to Fishman. "[The program] attracts very strong graduate students: people who do very creative, original work," she said. Lanser added that "many of [the graduates] have gone on to Ph.D.s here and elsewhere."

The Philosophy department did not have an M.A. program in 1992, which disqualified it from creating a joint degree program with Women's Studies. Starting in fall 2009, however, it began to offer a stand-alone M.A. degree, which Lanser described as "a very successful new program."

When asked whether there has been discussion of a joint degree between Women's and Gender Studies and Philosophy, Cadge said that although there were no current plans, the creation of such a program was plausible in the future. Samet expressed hesitancy about creating a joint degree program with Women's and Gender Studies, but said that "if Marion [Smiley] said there's someone who wants to apply for a degree in Women's Studies and Philosophy, we could probably make ad-hoc arrangements."

As faculty positions open, search committees will have to ask, as Brooten encourages, "how seriously do these candidates take gender in their analysis?" The importance of that question to faculty search committees will determine the future of women and gender in Philosophy and NEJS.