Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Jennifer Mather Saul

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series. For this edition, Davide Pala spoke to Professor Jennifer Saul, Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo, and Honorary Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Jennifer’s interests are in Philosophy of Language, Feminism, Philosophy of Race, and Philosophy of Psychology. From 2009-2019, she was Director of the Society for Women UK. With Helen Beebee, she published two reports, ten years apart, on the state of women in philosophy in the UK. Also with Helen Beebee, she authored guidelines for good practice on gender issues in philosophy. Jennifer also runs What is Like to be a Woman in Philosophy and founded the Feminist Philosophers blog. Jennifer is interested in helping institutions find methods to combat implicit biases, and she often advises on this topic. She completed an 18 month project with the UK Cabinet Office, helping them to improve the diversity of the UK government’s security workforce. She is currently advising the UK Statistics Authority, to develop a framework for understanding and classifying misleading uses of statistics.  

D: Hi Jennifer, thanks again for accepting my invitation to get interviewed for the Beyond the Ivory Tower series of Justice Everywhere. As you might know, this series focuses on philosophers’ public engagement broadly understood. The idea is to shed light on the interplay between philosophical reflection and ones’ public activities — i.e., how do they influence each other?; is there any tension?; and so on. Today, I would like to discuss with you your philosophical career and interests; your work to improve academia; and then your public engagement, as well as the interplay I was mentioning. So, Jennifer, why did you decide to pursue a philosophical career? What factors led you to address the topics you have addressed (philosophy of language, feminism, and philosophy of race, among others) and not others? 

J: I was lucky enough to have a high school teacher who had almost completed a PhD in philosophy. He was allowed to teach a philosophy class every year. And so I had a great first exposure to philosophy from somebody who actually knew what he was doing, and I just fell in love with the discipline. It was partly the topic and partly that he had that kind of philosophers’ sense of humour that really appeals to me, which led me to philosophy. To be honest, however, I didn’t decide to do what I am doing now. To be sure, I have always been a very political person and my grandmother was a very active 1970s feminist — after retiring, she devoted herself entirely to feminism in Florida, founding women’s health clinics and attending several marches for women’s rights and equality, and she took me to consciousness raising meetings when I was four years old. So I was always very interested in feminism. Yet, throughout my time as an undergraduate, I never took a feminist philosophy class. I think they actually had one, which is surprising, because most places didn’t at that time, but I had the stunningly false belief that feminism is all completely obvious. In terms of philosophy, I was interested in puzzling and difficult things. I wanted to do mainstream philosophy of language. I wrote my PhD dissertation at Princeton on the reference of names with Scott Soames. What drew me to that was my interest in pragmatics, because it was a place where people were using the semantic/pragmatic distinction in interesting ways. Then I started trying to do some feminism in graduate school. The interdisciplinary reading group I managed to find there was very continental and hostile to the kind of questions that analytical philosophers like to ask. So, that didn’t go well for me — which is not to say that all continental philosophers are like this; just this reading group didn’t go well. I did one unit on feminist philosophy, but I had to be supervised by somebody outside the department from Politics. Then, a group of us started going to a seminar that Sally Haslanger was running at Penn. That seminar was really formative for me in terms of analytic feminist philosophy, and so was also a lecture given by Lisa Lloyd at Rutgers. Lisa Lloyd is a wonderful feminist philosopher of biology who has worked, among other things, on the evolutionary explanations for female orgasm. Her lecture was an absolute revelation to me because I not only saw someone doing feminist philosophy, but being funny as hell while doing feminist philosophy. I thought this is what I want to do, I want to find a way to be a funny feminist philosopher, and it had never occurred to me before that I could combine things in that way. Afterwards, however, I just carried on with my research on reference of names, and I got my first job at the University of Sheffield. When I applied I had said that I could teach feminist philosophy — I was told that something is an Area of Competence if you think that, with a summer to prepare, you could teach an undergraduate class. So they called my bluff, and I was teaching feminist philosophy!  In fact, I really enjoyed teaching it, and it was an incredibly supportive environment to do feminist philosophy there. As a result of that, I started getting more and more into feminist philosophy. In the end, however, it took me a very long time to figure out how to combine the philosophy of language and feminist philosophy! 

D: Thanks for sharing this, Jennifer. Let me ask you a second question, which is about you being a woman in philosophy. So, how was it to be a woman doing philosophy in academia then, and how is it to do it now? I am asking this not only because you have direct experience of this, but also because you worked on this question, and published with Helen Beebee two important reports, ten years apart, for the British Philosophical Association and SWIP UK on the state of women in philosophy in the UK.  

J: I had very different experiences, as a graduate student at Princeton first, and then at Sheffield, where I got my first job. Princeton was a very unpleasant place to be a graduate student, and not just for women. There was a very aggressive atmosphere where the goal of discussion was often just to destroy your opponent. That is a bad way to do philosophy for everyone. At that time and place, people were just at the beginning of figuring out how to think about women in philosophy as an issue. I tried to go hang out with the feminists outside philosophy, but, as I said, they didn’t like me because I was an analytical philosopher. On the other side, the analytical philosophers didn’t really think that feminism could possibly be philosophy — there were some exceptions, of course, but nobody currently at Princeton was actually doing it. There was not a lot of writing —that I could find — about the issue of what it is like to be a woman in philosophy and how gender discrimination works in academia. Partly because of this, once I got to graduate school I was just terrified to speak all the time — and this even though I had been a very talkative undergraduate who loved discussion! —, and so in graduate school I didn’t speak. I thought this was just something about me. You end up being so focused on the thought that there is a problem with you, and you just don’t notice that there are other people facing the same problem. But then, I had a conversation — it was this classic consciousness raising — on the train with other women PhD students. We talked about how terrified we all felt to speak and realised that maybe there was something in common there. There was one graduate student, Fiona Cowie, who was very confident at speaking. She said that she trained herself to do this, that she forced herself to ask a question at every talk and every seminar, even if it was just a spelling question, and that, after that, she got used to the sound of her own voice. I thought: “Wow, Fiona does ask a lot of spelling questions, along with her other fabulous questions!”. And I came to understand how important those spelling questions were for building confidence. Yet, we were working this out for ourselves, whereas now I think people can go and find many articles to read on the topic, and blogs, and organisations to join. There were societies for women in philosophy in the US at that point, but I had no knowledge of them. Then I went to Sheffield, and for some time I was the only woman, and much of the time one of only two. Yet, it was the friendliest, most wonderful place to be, and incredibly supportive of women, as well as feminist philosophy. So it was a very different experience being a woman in Sheffield, and I was extremely lucky to have that experience. 

Now, as to how it is for everyone else, I think I have had a very easy time. I know quite a lot about the experiences of other women of philosophy, in part from work like the report that you mentioned, but also from running the What Is It Like to be a Woman in Philosophy blog. I know that there were lots of people who had even worse experiences than the ones described on the blog, because they wanted some advice and wrote to me. There’s a lot of really terrible things out there, and it’s still happening. There is still harassment. However, there are also big positive changes. One is that there is much more awareness of these issues, both amongst women and amongst others. Now people who are facing these problems have places where they can go to find out more information, and organisations they can contact, and ways to get support. And people who want to do something to improve the status quo, whether or not it affects them personally, have resources they can find on how we can create a better environment. There’s an acknowledgement that these problems exist and that they are real. I think that before the blog, many people thought that there might have been some isolated instances of harassment, but that surely it was not a big deal. That was long before the Me Too movement. Philosophers, I think, surprisingly, are ahead of the game in becoming aware of sexual harassment as a widespread problem. I remember talking to a physicist who had a widely read blog about women in physics. She put out an appeal to her readers and nobody sent her anything. She thought that maybe the physicists don’t commit as much harassment. Yet, a few years later, when Me Too happened, the physicists started talking about harassment, and so it turned out that the other fields have these issues, too. So I have become very skeptical whenever anyone says “oh, that’s not really an issue in my field” — because you don’t know. You honestly don’t know. I mean, I knew there were problems; I just didn’t know the extent of the problems until I became the repository for that. So I know the problems haven’t been fixed, but I think there are many more people working on fixing them. This gives me hope for the future. There also are significantly larger numbers of women of philosophy. There is also more feminist philosophy. So I think those things have changed for the better. But it’s not all solved yet, obviously.

D: I would like to ask you something about the blog, since you mentioned it. I read some posts there, and I was not expecting anything like that. Perhaps naively, I didn’t know that it was so bad. What about yourself? When you started the blog, were you expecting anything closer to what we can now read? Or did that come somehow as a — bad— surprise?

J: I was not expecting it at all. I had already started the Feminist Philosophers blog. So I got used to blogging. And then, while talking to some other senior-ish women in philosophy, I thought that it would have been good to find out what other people’s experiences are like. Sure, we have our own experiences and what our friends have told us, but I wanted to gather more information. That is when I decided to start a blog where people could anonymously send messages about their experiences. It’s not a systematic way to study the phenomenon, obviously, but it gives us some indication of the kind of things that people find good and bad. So there wasn’t any intention that it was going to be a sexual harassment blog. Very quickly, though, it turned out that women had an enormous quantity of horrific experiences they needed to share. I was getting so many posts that I was planning four posts a day and planning them two weeks in advance. That’s a lot of posts. That’s a lot of experiences. And they were just coming in constantly. And then, once people found out who I was and figured out that they could contact me, they would contact me separately sometimes because they were afraid of posting online.

D: I am wondering whether this experience with the blog had an impact on your successive work — maybe it pushed you to explore new paths of research, or something else. And I am also wondering — and that is another question — whether you think that there is something in particular about philosophy departments, which makes it more likely that certain distorted gender dynamics take place.

J: Well, if we just focus on sexual harassment, I have no reason to think that philosophy has higher rates than other fields with similar demographics. There is good evidence that the fields that are more male-dominated have more sexual harassment. I want to be very careful here, because of course people who are not men can commit sexual harassment and they do; and men can be victims of sexual harassment, and they are. But there seems to be some gendered influence. That is, it seems more commonly to be men harassing women, especially when men significantly outnumber women. So if there is something distinctive about philosophy, it concerns another aspect. One possibility is that philosophy has, traditionally, particularly poisonous discussion dynamics that I don’t think are conducive to finding out the truth. These discussion dynamics are very unhealthy for human beings, and they also create an  environment where it is harder to do good work. But harassment is another issue, not related to this. 

Back to the question of whether this connected up with my research, well, it has to a certain extent, because this has led me to a certain kind of work on women in philosophy, and also to work on sexual harassment.

D: OK, good, let’s then stick to your work on women in philosophy, and the ways you have been trying to improve the status quo. You have authored, with Helen Beebee, the guidelines for good practice on gender issues in philosophy, which can be found at the BPA website, as the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Scheme. I have a couple of questions on the matter. The first one is about how you developed those guidelines. I guess it was not just a top-down approach but a kind of back and forth between the theory and what actual women report. Is that correct? How did this work? The second question is about how academia received such practices. How did academics react to them?   

J: It was Helen’s idea to do this. Helen worked more on the data gathering, and I worked on writing up the recommendations. There’s a lot of great empirical literature on how to improve gender dynamics in academia by people like Virginia Valian and Abby Stewart. I drew on their work and my knowledge of philosophy to write the recommendations. I also had many conversations with Helen. The report would never have happened without her. I think the Good Practice Guide was very well received. This is partly because Helen is an incredibly savvy human being. At the time we started doing it, I was director of SWIP, and she was in charge of the BPA. The plan was to make a joint project of the two organisations and get the BPA to sign off on it. And Helen got them to sign off on it. Another reason departments received them well is that the programme was not one of criticism. It was rather a little gold medallion to put on their website. “If you do this, we’ll say that you signed up to our good practices”. And it was at a time when, after the blog took off, people got horrified by the situation of women in philosophy. There was a lot of talk about how to improve the situation in the field. A lot of this was sincere. Some of it was probably insincere, but even those people wanted to look like they were doing something. And we were giving genuine things that people could do. It also helped the way we wrote it: it was very flexible so that people just needed to focus on the issues raised, discuss them, and then come up with a plan for dealing with them. And people could also choose to reject some of our recommendations and still count as adopting the scheme. Probably, the most valuable part of the whole thing is departments having big meetings where they discuss these issues and think about them and take them seriously. All in all, it was not something that inspired hostility. 

D: This comes a bit as a surprise to me — but I am happy to hear that. I was expecting some initial hostility, or at least some skepticism.

J: Well, no, the good practices were received well, as said. I have had some hostility for the What is it Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy blog. And I had a lot of hostility for the Gendered Conference Campaign. Do you know about that? We ran a campaign at Feminist Philosophers to call attention to all-male conferences. There were and sometimes there still are conferences with all-male speaker lineups. We were very explicit: we weren’t placing blame. We weren’t saying what the cause of it was in any particular instance, because they might just come out that way, despite all the huge efforts to make it not all-male. But we wanted to call attention to this pattern and have people think about it. Yet, we we have got a lot of hostility for that. It seemed that people didn’t read those caveats, and felt they were being told they were sexist, even though we never said that. 

D: A campaign that was needed, and is still needed, anyway. Thanks for that. Let’s leave academia now, and let’s look at what happens outside of it. One general question here is the following. You have worked and keep working a lot outside academia, with a variety of institutional actors. Why do you feel that this is important? And how did this influence your academic work, and vice versa? 

J: The way in which I got interested in implicit bias was through the desire to do things about gender inequalities in philosophy. While I was trying to do this, I thought that implicit bias was actually a philosophically really interesting topic. And because of that, I started organising some workshops on this topic, and started getting contacted to give talks about it. And I started being contacted not just by philosophy departments, but by non-academics, too. I was quite excited to be asked to give a talk on implicit bias for the UK Cabinet Office. And then the UK Cabinet Office kept inviting me down to do things. Eventually, that led somebody who worked in the security division of the UK government to contact me because they wanted to diversify the security workforce. So I got together with some psychologists at Sheffield, and we started doing work on helping them figure out how to diversify the security workforce. But let me talk about another project in which I got involved — I am really excited about it! So, I wrote a book on lying and misleading (Lying, Misleading and What is Said: An Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics, OUP, 2012). A few years later, I was contacted by the person who runs the Office for Statistics Regulation in the UK. This is an organisation funded by the government. Their job is to monitor the use of statistics by governmental agencies and individuals. They comment on whether they’re misleading, inaccurate, or problematic in any way. They do this through their own observations, and in response to complaints from the public. The person who contacted me had read my book and had some questions. I was surprised and incredibly excited: somebody outside academia read my book and wanted to talk to me about it! We had an amazing conversation. They wanted to think about what the word “misleading” means with respect to statistics. (They are not allowed to use the word “lying”. So they have to use “misleading” in a broad way). But they could draw distinctions between different kinds of misleading. It turns out he had a whole team of people who like nothing better than to talk to philosophers about this kind of thing. They brought a group of them up to Sheffield. We had a great discussion, frankly one of the best seminars I ever ran. They gave me the definitions they used, and I showed them problems and offered adjustments. They came up with interesting real-life examples and we adjusted some more, and so on. We are still going back and forth years later on their definitions, and they’re enjoying it as much as I am.  I’ve been working with them for years, and they keep wanting to bring in more philosophers. So we have had workshops that helped them find other philosophers to talk to. Just this year, I have a PhD student here, whose undergraduate degree was in maths. He’s studying ways in which you can do deceptive things with statistics and trying to draw a line between lying and misleading, as applied to things like graphs. He worked with them for four months. One of the things he is working on is the sharp distinction they draw between the production and use of statistics. He’s arguing that you actually can’t draw such a sharp distinction. His work is having a great impact: they said that it made them better prepared for the general election. This piece of work is turning out to be a really important part of his dissertation. And so that is a really nice example of how those two things, i.e. work in academia and outside, can work together well, and influence each other. 

D: That is extremely interesting. The way you talk about this gives the impression that academic work and work outside academia can interact in a very productive way. I was wondering, though, whether things are not always so smooth, and whether sometimes there may be some problems, and tensions. I have in mind scenarios in which, say, philosophers have some ideas which are rejected by non-academics (for ideological reasons, or feasibility, or something else), and others in which non-academics say and do things which diverge significantly from what philosophers say and do. Did you ever experience problems of this kind? If so, how did you address them?          

J: The only problem I have with the statistics people is that I have to discipline myself not to say “lie”. And that is very hard when we are talking about the UK government! But I do think that there can be problems in other areas. For example, I have been asked many times to give talks on women in philosophy and sexual harassment in philosophy. I always assume that there is goodwill and that people only want to learn and improve things. Unfortunately, not everyone has the genuine intention to do that. Some people want to just make it look like they are making efforts in this regard. But I think that, even if that is the reason I get invited, I still have the chance to give a talk there. And I still find ways to reach people, and can do some good. In my talks, I explain the nature of the problems in general. Then I clarify that this is not something that you can just do as an individual, but that you rather have to think about your processes and the ways things are structured; I then I give my contact information. They can easily get in touch with me and we can talk about how things work and try to fix them. Since I started doing that, I get a significant number of people contacting me to work on improving their processes. So in the end I think that, even if you contact me just to go through the motions, I can still make myself available to do useful things.

D: That is really good. Thanks. I have another question related to that. When I was looking at the many things you do outside academia, I thought that that was a further commitment, on top of the academic work you already do. I now see that the picture is different. In fact, it seems that the two domains may be tightly intertwined, and that, ultimately, there is not academic work plus non-academic work, but rather a sort of “compound” work — I cannot find a better term; I hope I am conveying what I have in mind —, in which the two domains have come to merge. Does this describe your view of the matter? 

J: Yes, it does. But of course it would not work that way if I was still working on the reference of names. And let me add something. My research work now is on racist and conspiracist language. Everything I write is very accessible. I can present roughly the same talk for a philosophy department as for a public audience, because I am writing it in a way that I think has something to contribute to both. Sure, I might go into more depth about certain issues for the philosophy department, and then change the talk a bit for non-academic audiences. But they are not huge changes. Moreover, I learn a lot from the public engagement. This has certainly occurred with the issues related to implicit bias and women in philosophy. I might say that it is the work in the world that led to me doing the philosophy, rather than the other way around.

D: Well, it seems really good to proceed in that way. Now, since you mentioned your work on racism, let me ask you something about it. In your book on the topic (Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, OUP, 2024), you discuss racism, falsehoods, and dogwhistles, as well as figleaves. You say that dogwhistles and figleaves are manipulative instruments that help the spread of racism and falsehoods. And you also say that what you call “inoculation” is a good strategy to respond to them. Could you clarify for the readers what these manipulative strategies are, and what role philosophers can play when it comes to promoting inoculation?     

J: Sure. So, one thing that I talked about a lot lately is what I call a figleaf, which is when you take some utterance that would normally be seen as obviously racist or conspiracist, and add on something that raises a doubt, thus making some of your audience feel better about it. Here an example: “Is Bill Gates putting microchips in the vaccines? I’m just asking questions”. Most people will say that that no one should even ask questions like this. Yet, there will be some people for which this figleaf — the claim that I’m just asking questions — will be effective. By this, I do not mean that it will convince them that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines. However, it will make them think that they should maybe think about this. And they might share this on Facebook or other social media, saying that it’s an interesting question to explore. And that helps spread the idea that Bill Gates is putting microchips in the vaccines. And others might start thinking likewise that that question is worth considering, and they will maybe share it again. The additional utterance “I’m just asking questions” is what I call a figleaf. I call it a figleaf because it barely covers a thing that you are not supposed to show in public. This is an important mechanism for changing norms around what is an acceptable part of political discourse. I have given the example of a conspiracist figleaf, but figleaves work for racist speech, too. It’s the same mechanism, and it’s an important way racism and misinformation are spread. One of the things that has been shown to be quite effective in combating the spread of misinformation is what is called an inoculation or pre-bunking. This is when you expose people to small samples of misinformation, or ways of spreading misinformation that they might encounter, so that in the future they will be able to recognise it, giving them a bit of immunity from it, by understanding how to respond to it without getting sucked in. It is a kind of information literacy training that you do not do after somebody has been pulled into the conspiracy theory, but before. The point is rather to keep people from getting pulled into it. This could be especially useful with figleaves. For the way figleaves work is that they provide a bit of reassurance, so that people can relax. People, in other words, let their guard down and feel more comfortable. And I think what we need to teach people is that figleaves like “I’m just asking questions” are very effective for spreading misinformation. If you see one, therefore, you should become more wary and careful rather than less wary and careful. You should look more closely and think what’s really going on?, and ask whether you really want to share it. To be clear, it is not that every time you see a figleaf, you should dismiss what the person is saying. Sometimes people really are just asking questions. Sometimes people just report what other people are saying. These are fine things to do. So the idea is not that you should be dismissive of what other people are saying, but that you should look more closely. I gave a talk a couple weeks ago to the Ontario Librarians Association, which was a new group of non-academics for me. They asked me to come talk about misinformation. I was really excited to get the feedback that several of them had decided to add figleaves to the information literacy classes that they teach in their libraries, which are in effect inoculation classes. It had not occurred to me until I did this, but I think librarians are actually a great group to work with if you want to do something about information literacy. It’s an exciting way of getting a bit of impact outside academia.

D: Thanks a lot for this wonderful conversation, Jenny. I really enjoyed talking with you. 

J: It was amazing for me, too!