Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

Engages and extends the feminist philosopher Lorraine Code's groundbreaking work on epistemology and ethics.

This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care-knowing” and “care-based epistemology” emerge from construing caring as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.

In this paper, I focus on the postmodern feminist criticism of reason. I argue that postmodern feminism is in part a response to political concerns over valuing womens' differences but that the philosophical ideas it propounds cannot fully address these political concerns. Moreover, postmodern feminism branches into two directions, partly in the face of criticisms directed at it. The one becomes a form of intellectual play, the other becomes imbued with ethic of care assumptions. I recommend that feminism of sameness (...) may provide a better vehicle than either postmodern or ethic of care feminism for addressing the `masculinist biases' of Western reason. (shrink)