Where are all the female big thinkers?

[BogstandardBelle]

I've been reading / listening to podcasts by various "public intellectuals" and watching lots of TED talks / interviews recently etc (I happen to have a week alone at home while DH is away with our children). Some that I have really enjoyed are Sam Harris's Making Sense podcasts (recommended on here), TED interviews with him and others including Jared Diamond, George Monbiot, Yuval Harari, Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human Podcast. I've been reading a lot of history and geopolitics - George Friedman, Robert Kaplan (DH is a geography teacher, so we have a lot of these in the house anyway!). They are absolutely fascinating.

However, it has struck me just how white and male this whole group of thinkers / writers / academics is. I haven't specifically gone looking for female equivalents (that's where you can maybe help me out) but there certainly aren't any jumping off the screen at me. Sometimes the guests on the Podcasts are female - but not often. Maybe it's because the subject areas themselves to tend to be dominated by men - science, public perception of science, geopolitics, history, tech / AI etc.

Something I hate to admit, but I am trying to be honest about, is that maybe I don't find female equivalents because I don't expect them to be as clever, funny, challenging, well-informed. I am quite ashamed to admit this.

So help me out. Point me in the direction of female "public intellectuals" in these fields who will help me address my internalised academic misogyny ;-) . And if we are struggling to find them, maybe we could talk about why that is? It did strike me when Sam Harris was talking about the wonders of meditation, just when does he find the time to do this? Who's taking on his mental load while he's having all these "big ideas"?

I think the question of women having time is the main reason.

Even if they have the time though, the reaction often is to treat women as Cassandas anyway. So having no positive feedback nor reward and just being talked over and ignored until a man says the same thing is part of the dynamic too.

I'm not much into science or technology so can't comment...but:

Germaine Greer
Ayan Hirsi Ali
Camille Paglia ( even if you don't agree with much of what she says)

a few examples....

Maybe female academics tend not to be 'big personality 'showboaters' in the way that some male academics are?

I've always find that the best literary biographers are women.Claire Tomalin for example

And Diana Athill was a great intellectual too.

the reaction often is to treat women as Cassandas anyway

I don't know that I see this particularly. Of course sometimes it happens, but I've seen it happen to plenty of men as well. From my perspective it seems mostly to be a matter of how palatable people find what they are saying.

Being a Big Thinker often just means telling people what they want to hear.

Remember Francis Fukuyama and the ‘end of history’? How did it end? It looks like a shit-load of things have happened - and continue to happen - since history ended.

Rebecca Solnit is a pretty wide ranging and influential thinker.

Environmentally Elizabeth Kolbert is excellent, she wrote The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes From a Catastrophe but does talks.
Have I missed anyone saying Naomi Klein?
Dr. Vandana Shiva is a world renowned philosopher/environmentalist.
Ahrundhti Roy, Listening to Grasshoppers has some top ideas about democracy but has written on loads of other stuff.
Rebecca Solnit writes about activism and social change. This recent article is a feminist call to arms
lithub.com/in-patriarchy-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-rebecca-solnit-on-jeffrey-epstein-and-the-silencing-machine/

Earnshaw & Penrhyn Jones, 2014, Here We Stand. Honno Books. Compilation of 17 contemporary UK female campaigners including the inspirational Helen Steel and film-maker Franny Armstrong, McLibel and Age of Stupid.

Crikey took me over an hour to finish that post, must have been as the Solnit suggestion wasn't there when I started...all these interruptions! 😂

Carole Dweck
Naomi Klein
Mary Beard
Kelly McGonigal and Jane McGonigal are both worth listening to.

Depends what you're after.

Something I hate to admit, but I am trying to be honest about, is that maybe I don't find female equivalents because I don't expect them to be as clever, funny, challenging, well-informed. I am quite ashamed to admit this.

Watch Mary Beard's talk about women and muthos first.

Gerda Lerner - feminist historian. She wrote The Creation of Patriarchy

Jane Clare Jones - feminist philosopher. Her blog:

janeclarejones.com/

Something I hate to admit, but I am trying to be honest about, is that maybe I don't find female equivalents because I don't expect them to be as clever, funny, challenging, well-informed. I am quite ashamed to admit this.

That's something worth being ashamed about! Where on earth do you get this viewpoint from? I thought that sort of base level sexism didn't exist anymore in the minds of educated women. Unimaginative men, maybe, but for a woman to make this assumption is shocking.

Oh, on environmental things, Jane Goodall can be very good.

@growlingbear

I have recognised that this is an issue, and have been thinking about where this feeling has arisen from.

I’m certainly an «educated woman». I have a PhD. Through, what, 9 years of academic study I don’t think I had a single female lecturer of tutor. Maybe it was the subject area (ecology, forestry, agriculture in the 1990s). Plenty of female students, but all men up top. Plus the subject area didn’t feature gender studies in any way, shape or form so I am a real latecomer to feminism.

One of my PhD supervisors was a woman: she had the position purely because she’d followed her researcher husband to my institution and she was being given little jobs to fill her time with. Other than that, men all the way.

You know what prompted me to post this OP? I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast and during the q&a session at the end a young woman gets to ask a question of him and Yuval Harari. And what she said was «giggle I’m just such a huge fan of yours, Sam, so much that my husband is really jealous of you! giggle» . It was so cringe and out of place, and I had this flashback to my own student days with these leading academics (and they were often very charismatic, attractive men) talking away at lectures and conferences and young women like myself hanging on their every word, and vying for their attention. And thinking, nothing has changed.

Hence my belated attempt to redress the balance, in my own reading at least.

Cynthia Enloe - she writes really well on International Relatons

They all get buried, eventually, when they try and go agaisnt the TRA brigade

@BogstandardBelle
I can only thank you for starting this thread. I’m going through the responses for my own reading.

I had a look at @lunamoth581 suggestion of the Jane Clare Jones blog, which brought up the person I was thinking of and that is Luce Irigaray, has anyone else gotten into her work? I’m only just dropping back in after skimming for my studies, now it’s a personal mission

I thought that sort of base level sexism didn't exist anymore in the minds of educated women. Unimaginative men, maybe, but for a woman to make this assumption is shocking.

To be honest, I think this base level sexism exists in all our minds.

I've always been critical of gender stereotypes as I never fitted them. I felt I was impervious to thinking in terms of them. When I had my daughter we got her all sorts of toys - both 'girls' and 'boys'.

Then I had a son and when he was pointing out cars whilst in his buggy I had a thought that maybe he'll like cars because he's a boy. I was really annoyed at myself but if I, as someone who thought I was above all that, can have these unconscious initial thoughts it's no wonder others do. We have to recognise our biases.

I would also say that holding women to higher standards than men is an example of base level sexism.