Logik und Geschlecht? Empirische Daten zu Logikeinführungen im Philosophiestudium an deutschen Universitäten1

Abstract

Although the underrepresentation of women in academic philosophy is well-known and hard to overlook, philosophers started to pay more attention to the actual data on and potential explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy only in the last decade and predominately in anglophone countries. The data I present in this paper deal with introductory logic courses at German universities (gender of textbook authors, gender of logic course instructors, student grades by gender at one university). Two results are particularly noteworthy: For one, logic teaching in Germany is currently predominantly male and even more male than philosophy teaching as a whole. For another, there is no evidence for any differences between grades of female and male students. The student grade data, however, illustrate how statistical phenomena like Simpson's paradox can explain how male students can appear to achieve better grades than female students even if there is no underlying difference: When correcting for students’ major (philosophy vs. STEM), logic grades of male and female students are remarkably similar. Although the scope of the data presented here is limited, they allow to add further details to an emerging map of the profession. I close with some suggestions for avoiding stereotyping logic as “male”.