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What Is the Harm in Gendered Citation Practices?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Darcy McCusker
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Abstract

Women are cited less frequently than men in a variety of scientific fields. Drawing theoretical resources from Fricker and Hookway, I argue that these gendered citation practices constitute a form of participatory epistemic injustice insofar as they prevent female scientists from fully engaging in the epistemic practices of science. Furthermore, Longino’s notion of “uptake” gives us a way of understanding gendered citation practices as an epistemic harm accrued not simply by individuals but by scientific communities as a whole. Finally, I discuss the cumulative harms of this kind of participatory epistemic injustice for individuals and for marginalized groups.

Type
Ethics, Values, and Social Epistemology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 1041 - 1051
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

*

To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 378 Savery Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195; e-mail: [email protected].

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