Just on the basis of my own experience, it does indeed seem to be the case that a disproportionate number of undergraduate philosophy majors in coed institutions of higher education are male. (The same disproportion is to be found in the profession itself.) I'm not sure whether the data has been collected, although you might just do a simple Google search to see if anything comes up. I can only speculate why such a disproportion exists. It may in part have to do with the fact, noted above, that the overwhelming majority of faculty members in philosophy departments are male; it may have something to do with the nature of philosophy itself, which, on account of its focus on arguments, can often be seen as combative--although, of course, it need not be, and at its best, probably should not be--and such intellectual combat seems to be coded male. Philosophy courses may be seen as part of an 'argument culture' that puts off certain female students while attracting male students, therefore accounting for...

The idea that there is a distinctively 'feminine' approach to ethics was articulated forcefully in the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice : Gilligan argued that there are certain distinctive virtues and traits--such as care, empathy, forgiveness, etc.--that are coded 'feminine' that had gone underemphasized in more traditional, 'masculine', approaches to ethics and character development, which stressed the primacy of the development of an impartial, more 'rational' standpoint in ethics. The basic idea, that there are differences in the way that men and women make moral judgments, that reflect the way that they are socialized, makes good sense to me, and has been championed by a number of philosophers and developed in various ways, particularly by those interested in the 'ethics of care'. However, it seems to me to be incorrect to think that these differences are somehow 'fixed', or that men cannot come to look at the world from a more 'feminine' perspective (and vice versa ,...