There are male and female areas of philosophy, too. Ethics and history of philosophy are female. Metaphysics, epistemology, logic are male. Interestingly, aesthetics is considered to be one of the female areas, but I have not found that to be the case. Philosophy of mind and language are thought to be male areas, but I see just as many women in those fields. Also, the fields with which they overlap, i.e., cog sci, psych, and linguistics, have more females than males.

I did also have a phil grad student say to me that women couldn’t do logic. Most wouldn’t dream of saying something like that directly. He was drunk. He also had a female logician on his dissertation committee, and seemed concerned with being able to meet her standards.

Yes, I think innate or cultivated difference in interests might be a real possibility.

When I was in junior college, I was able to understand mathematical concepts just by skimming the notes. I rarely did my homework and there was often a storybook secreted in between my textbook. Many of my friends who did their homework regularly and actually paid attention in class were not able to do as well as I did on tests.

i.e. there are things that I have done easily with less time and effort and there are things which I have needed more time and effort than my friends. It seems implausible that there is no such thing as innate talent. I only read the abstract of the paper, and it may be that talent may not make a significant difference wen it comes to elite performance, but being a proffessional philosopher is not exactly like becoming a proffessional sportsman. Given that everyone tries their hand at sports (PE anyone?) and few people try their hand at philosophy, professional sportsman represent a real outlier in performance in the field. Whereas professional academics do not really represent outliers so much as those in the upper range of performance. I’m willing to bet that within the normal range of performance, talent matters more than in the really elite stuff.

You can always see the delay here, for example when you look at political science departments. IIRC women now make up the majority of Poli-Sci MAJORS, but the faculty (particularly tenured) are still held largely by men, with a few notable high profile female exceptions. As the current crop of boomer professors start retiring, I’m betting we’ll start seeing more female department heads and deans, leading to more female professors etc. I wouldn’t be surprised say in 2050 if the majority of high profile poli-sci and policy studies faculty were women.

I think philosophy is also a bit of a sticky wicket, because women who practice philosophy might be more inclined to actually do a gender studies degree or something equivalent, under a different rubric, if only to be able to do studies that are closer to what they actually care about. (And avoid much of the ossification of some philosophy departments.)

As for the “hard” sciences, anyone making those arguments is a joke. In policy programs about 60-70% of the MPP/MPA graduates are women. And in terms of quantitative reasoning and argumentation, policy economics and modeling is as rigorous (and probably in some cases moreso) than comparable economic fields. It may be, however, that economics vs. policy debates make women more likely to pursue the latter, because of the obsessive overemphasis on market mechanisms to the exclusion of many other causal factors in the former.

Our first was delivered naturally but that was after pitocin induction following forty hours of intense labor. It just wasn’t going anywhere. My wife’s a tough lady.

Our second was going ok and then she started to bleed badly. Ultrasound revealed placental abrupta(?). It’s where the placenta is covering the cervical opening. Without emergency C-section I likely would have lost both of them.

As it is, thanks to modern medicine, we had two perfectly healthy (9.9 Apgar) girls. Home birth used to be the norm. Lots of dead mothers and babies was the norm too.