The sixth-century-BCE Pythagorean communities included both male and female members. This thesis focuses on the Pythagorean women and aims to explore what reasons lie behind the prominence of women in Pythagoreanism and what roles women played in early Pythagorean societies and thought. In the first chapter, I analyse the social conditions of women in Southern Italy, where the first Pythagorean communities were founded. In the second chapter, I compare Pythagorean societies with ancient Greek political clubs and religious sects. Compared to mainland Greece, South Italian women enjoyed higher legal and socio-political status. Similarly, religious groups included female initiates, assigning them authoritative roles. Consequently, the fact that the Pythagoreans founded their communities in Croton and further afield, and that in some respects these communities resembled ancient sects helps to explain why they opened their doors to the female gender to begin with. The third chapter discusses Pythagoras’ teachings to and about women. Pythagorean doctrines did not exclusively affect the followers’ way of thinking and public activities, but also their private way of living. Thus, they also regulated key aspects of the female everyday life, such as marriage and motherhood. I argue that the Pythagorean women entered the communities as wives, mothers and daughters. Nonetheless, some of them were able to gain authority over their fellow Pythagoreans and engage in intellectual activities, thus overcoming the female traditional domestic roles. The fourth chapter argues that another contributing factor to the status of the Pythagorean women is the doctrine of metempsychosis. This belief led the Pythagoreans to adopt similar behaviours towards other ensouled beings. Therefore, since men and women were believed to have the same souls, they were treated with the same respect and received the same education. Finally, the fifth chapter explores how the Pythagorean views on women are taken up and developed in Plato’s Republic. I argue that, although the Pythagoreans never went as far as to have philosopher-queens and abolish private families, they took the first step towards Plato’s ‘gender equality’ theory. Overall, that of women in Pythagoreanism is the first documented case of female engagement with ancient philosophy: Pythagorean men and women lived together according to the same lifestyle, were educated on the same doctrines and played equally integral roles in the intellectual community.

Stereotype threat is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals become aware that their behavior could potentially confirm a negative stereotype. Though stereotype threat is a widely studied phenomenon in social psychology, there has been relatively little scholarship on it in philosophy, despite its relevance to issues such as implicit cognition, epistemic injustice, and diversity in philosophy. However, most psychological research on stereotype threat discusses the phenomenon by using an overly narrow picture of it, which focuses on one of its effects: the ability to hinder performance. As a result, almost all philosophical work on stereotype threat is solely focused on issues of performance too. Social psychologists know that stereotype threat has additional effects, such as negatively impacting individuals’ motivation, interests, long-term health, and even their sense of self, but these other effects are often downplayed, or even forgotten about. Therefore, the “standard picture” of stereotype threat needs to be expanded, in order to better understand the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon, and to develop broader, more effective interventions. This dissertation develops such an “expanded picture” of stereotype threat, which emphasizes how the phenomenon can negatively impact both self-identity and epistemic agency. In doing so, I explore the nature of stereotypes more generally and argue that they undermine groups’ moral status and contribute to what is called “ontic injustice.” I also show how stereotype threat harms members of socially subordinated groups by way of coercing their self-identity and undermining their epistemic agency, which I argue is a form of epistemic injustice. Lastly, I analyze the expanded picture’s implications for addressing the low proportion of women in professional philosophy. I critically engage recent arguments that these low numbers simply reflect different interests women have, which if innate or benign, would require no intervention. My expanded picture shows the mistakes in this sort of reasoning, which is also present in discussions on the underrepresentation of women in science. The expanded picture of stereotype threat that this dissertation develops is not only practically important, but also advances key philosophical debates in social epistemology, applied ethics, and social metaphysics.

This thesis contributes to the study of occupational sex segregation, a major source of societal inequality. A dramatic shift toward desegregation of the coaching profession in women's basketball has occurred since the early 1970s. The major research question is whether or not the structural shift from female domination to male domination is associated with the adoption of a coaching philosophy that follows a "corporate" model, representative of traditional men's basketball, rather than a "relational" model, indicative of traditional women's basketball. Content analyses were undertaken of media articles which discussed male and female coaches of women's basketball teams. Four key dimensions of coaching philosophy were operationalized: technical values, hierarchical relations, democratic relations, and personal-social development ethos. Comparisons were made between the coaching philosophies of female and male coaches, as well as differences between NCAA Division I, II and III coaches. / Master of Science

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