The token woman problem?
I was reading something the other day about the Women in Philosophy furore (gendered conferences?), and somebody claiming that they'd specifically tried to invite eminent women philosophers to some conference and none of them could manage it.
And I was, that's your problem, just there.
There's an article by Katharine Whitehorn about women who have made it onto the radar being asked to be The Woman all over the show, simply because someone has heard of them so they are the ones who get asked, and this is not a new thing -
I was reading a non-fiction work of Naomi Mitchison's written during the 1930s, for a paper I'm giving shortly, and in it she comments:
[I]f a woman is any good at all at any particular job, there are still sure to be so few other women doing it that she becomes 'news-value'. She has to put up with this annoying business of publicity, which has really very little cash value, but which means that she is constantly being bothered to speak, write, show off, and generally behave as if she were a public convenience.
These days there are surely far more women actually doing the particular jobs, but there are still relatively few who impinge on the public consciousness and therefore are likely to get asked to be a public face.
It's not really much of a gesture towards diversity if it's the same women who keep getting asked because they have passed some invisible barrier of recognition.
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