Philosophy Curriculum Diversity Data: What the Numbers Show

Philosophy curriculum diversity data show that women averaged 10% of the authors listed on introductory philosophy syllabi in a 2012 review of course syllabi, reported in a 2016 study in Philosophers’ Imprint. That number gives educators a starting point, but it measures only one thing: whose names appear on the reading list. It does not tell you who enrolls, who finishes, or how students feel about staying.

The wider evidence is more layered. A qualitative study published in Learning and Instruction in August 2026 interviewed 18 university philosophy teachers about transformative education and philosophical diversity. Ten of the 18 answered positively when asked directly whether philosophy education should be transformative. The sample was small and weighted toward Dutch universities (12 of the 18 participants), and the authors caution that it cannot support broad generalizations. Separately, a Georgia State University intervention in fall 2013 raised women’s share of authors on introductory syllabi to roughly 20 to 30 percent, yet it did not find that this change alone increased students’ willingness to continue in philosophy. Taken together, the figures suggest that course review should examine both what you assign and how you prepare students to engage with unfamiliar traditions.

Key Takeaways

• Women averaged 10% of the authors on introductory philosophy syllabi in a 2012 review, but you should state whether you are reporting the per-course average or the pooled share, because the two can give very different answers for the same reading lists.
• Author counts show only whose names appear on reading lists, so you should not treat a higher share of women authors as proof that more students will stay in philosophy, since Georgia State University’s fall 2013 intervention, which raised women’s share of authors to roughly 20 to 30 percent, did not find that this change alone increased students’ willingness to continue.
• Before you compare philosophy department counts across years, you should check the American Academy of Arts & Sciences survey’s 49% response rate, because a shift in who responds can look like a change in the field.
• Your course review should examine both what you assign and how you prepare students to engage with unfamiliar traditions, since the introductory course is where many students decide whether to continue in philosophy.

How Many Syllabus Authors Are Women?

Women averaged 10% of the authors listed on introductory philosophy syllabi in a 2012 review of course syllabi. A 2016 study of introductory textbooks found women made up 6.94% of the authors represented, and Georgia State University’s fall 2013 syllabi averaged 20 to 30%, which shows how much the measure can vary depending on what is counted.

A syllabus is the document an instructor gives students at the start of a course, listing the readings, assignments, and schedule. A textbook is a book written to teach a subject, usually organized into chapters and often used as a course’s main reading. When researchers count “syllabus authors,” they count the names attached to the assigned readings on each syllabus. They do not count pages, how many times a text is assigned, or how much time students spend with it.

The 10% figure comes from the 2016 study introduced at the start of this article, which reviewed the 2012 introductory syllabi. Because it is an average across courses, it tells you what a typical syllabus looked like, not what any one course contained. A syllabus with one woman author out of ten could sit near the average, while a syllabus with none would pull it down.

Textbooks produce a different picture. In a 2016 study of 18 introductory philosophy textbooks, women made up 6.94% of the authors represented. A textbook’s author list is fixed by its publisher and edition, while an instructor chooses a syllabus term by term, so the two numbers reflect different decisions made by different people.

Georgia State University’s intervention in fall 2013 gives a more detailed view of what instructors can change. Its introductory syllabi averaged 20 to 30% women authors, but individual syllabi ranged from 5% to 39%. The spread matters as much as the average, because it shows that two courses taught in the same department can look very different on paper.

Measure	Period	Share of women authors
Introductory syllabi, average across courses (2012 review)	2012 review, reported 2016	10%
Introductory textbooks, authors represented (18 books)	2016 study	6.94%
Introductory syllabi, average (Georgia State University intervention)	Fall 2013	20 to 30%
Individual syllabi, range (Georgia State University intervention)	Fall 2013	5% to 39%

A syllabus-level average is not the same as the share of authors across a whole reading list. The average gives each course equal weight, while the pooled share counts every author slot across all courses and gives more weight to courses with longer reading lists. Consider a hypothetical example. Course A assigns ten readings, one by a woman, which is 10%. Course B assigns two readings, both by women, which is 100%. The average of the two course percentages is 55%, but the pooled share is 3 women out of 12 authors, or 25%. Neither number is wrong, but they answer different questions, so you should state which one you are reporting.

A single course can also look very different from a department’s total. A department’s overall reading list is the sum of many instructors’ choices, and a student who takes five courses may meet some with many women authors and others with few. The American Academy of Arts & Sciences estimated that 744 U.S. departments awarded philosophy degrees as of fall 2023, so no single syllabus or survey can stand in for the whole field.

It is also worth separating author counts from other kinds of representation. An author count tells you whose work students read. It does not tell you who enrolls in a course, who teaches it, or who completes a degree. A department can have many women students and few women authors on its syllabi, or the reverse, so each figure should be reported separately rather than treated as interchangeable.

If you want to review your own course, start by counting the authors on your current syllabus and recording both the per-course share and the pooled share across the whole reading list. Then compare your results with the ranges above, keeping in mind that the 2012 and 2013 data describe different courses at different institutions. If you are building a new reading list, the American Philosophical Association’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Syllabus Collection, last updated April 4, 2025, offers syllabi that instructors may reuse or adapt with credit to their authors.

How Many Philosophy Students and Faculty Are Women?

Women are present in substantial numbers when philosophy students first enroll, but their share shrinks at each later stage, from the bachelor’s degree to the PhD, then to faculty posts and professional membership. No single national count follows the whole pipeline, so the picture has to be assembled from separate series that measure different things.

The most direct count of departments comes from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which estimated that 744 U.S. departments awarded philosophy degrees as of fall 2023. That estimate is based on its 2023–24 Humanities Departmental Survey, which had a 49% response rate among philosophy departments. In other words, just under half of the departments the survey reached are reflected in its responses.

A low response rate limits how confidently you can compare counts across years. If the departments that answer change from one survey to the next, a shift in the numbers may reflect who responded rather than a change across the field. Departments that do not respond may also differ in size or in the kinds of programs they run, and a survey of this kind cannot tell you how they differ. Before comparing two years, check the response rate in each report and treat small movements with caution.

For bachelor’s degrees, the National Center for Education Statistics publishes federal data on degrees conferred by field and by sex, and you can search it yourself. Philosophy is usually reported together with religious studies in these tables, so you will need to read the category carefully. For doctorates, the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates records PhD recipients by field and sex. Both are national sources that you can consult directly.

The American Philosophical Association also publishes demographic information about its members, which measures the profession rather than the classroom. Membership is voluntary and requires dues, so it does not include every person who teaches or studies philosophy. It also includes people who entered the field years or decades ago, so it reflects earlier cohorts. Enrollment figures, by contrast, describe who is studying at a given moment.

The measures move at different speeds for that reason. Enrollment can change within a few years as students choose courses and majors. PhD counts follow bachelor’s cohorts with a delay equal to the length of graduate training. Faculty composition changes slowly, because it depends on hiring and tenure decisions made over many years. Membership changes slowest of all, because long-standing members stay counted for a long time.

Measure	What it counts	Why it moves at its own pace
Bachelor’s degrees (NCES)	Degrees conferred in a year	Reflects current students’ entry and completion
PhD recipients (NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates)	Doctorates awarded in a year	Reflects students who began graduate study several years earlier
Faculty positions	People holding academic posts	Reflects hiring and tenure decisions across many years
APA membership	Voluntary, dues-paying members	Reflects everyone who entered earlier and remains active
Departmental degree counts (AAAS survey)	Degree-granting departments	Depends on which departments respond

The gap is widest at advanced stages because each transition filters the group further. Some students leave after the bachelor’s degree, some do not enter doctoral programs, and some do not complete them. Later, not every PhD finds a permanent post, and not every faculty member reaches tenure. Each filter compounds the one before, so a group that is well represented at the start can be much less represented at the top.

Where Are the Racial and Ethnic Gaps in Philosophy?

Black students and American Indian and Alaska Native students are underrepresented in philosophy programs, and the shortfall shows up across degrees and faculty positions. The racial and ethnic figures are harder to read than the gender figures, partly because the groups are smaller and partly because data collections do not share one set of categories.

The general pattern is that Black students make up a smaller share of philosophy majors than of the wider student body, and that their share tends to shrink further at the doctoral level and among faculty, much as women’s share does at each later stage. To test this for a particular year, compare the philosophy share with the share of all bachelor’s degrees in the same federal series, then check whether the gap widens for PhD recipients. A gap at one stage does not prove a gap at the next, so each comparison needs its own numbers.

American Indian and Alaska Native students are a very small group within philosophy degree counts, and that smallness makes year-to-year comparisons unstable. When a department confers only a few degrees in a year, adding or losing one graduate can move the reported share sharply, even though nothing about the program has changed. Before you read a rise or fall as a trend, look at the underlying counts rather than the percentage alone, and compare several years together.

The most useful national view comes from the humanities indicator series that tracks philosophy degrees by race and ethnicity. It reports counts over time, which lets you see whether a change is sustained or a one-year fluctuation. Read the notes on each table, because they state which degree levels, years, and institutions are included.

It helps to separate two kinds of measures. A degree-level measure counts the people who earn philosophy degrees, so it answers the question of who students in your courses are likely to be. A faculty-level measure counts the people who teach, so it answers a different question: who chooses the readings, sets the assignments, and mentors students. A department can enroll a diverse group of majors while its faculty remain much less diverse, and the reverse can also occur. A curriculum review should report both, because a reading list reflects the choices of the people teaching it.

Race and ethnicity categories also differ across the data you will find, and no single category system covers every collection. Federal education surveys ask about ethnicity separately from race, while other surveys may allow respondents to choose several races or may group categories differently. Some categories have been revised over time, so a series that looks continuous may have changed definitions partway through. The table below summarizes the main differences you should check before comparing sources.

Data series	What it counts	Race and ethnicity categories
Bachelor’s degrees (NCES)	Degrees conferred in a year	Federal categories, with ethnicity asked separately from race
Doctorates (NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates)	PhD recipients in a year	Survey-defined categories, revised over time
Faculty surveys	People holding academic posts	Categories depend on each survey’s wording and options

When you cite a racial or ethnic figure, name the category exactly as the source defines it, and note whether the source counts people who report more than one race. Two figures labeled the same way may not describe the same group.

What Do Students Say About Studying Philosophy?

Students tell researchers a good deal about their early interest in philosophy, but the most common survey question measures what they plan to study, not what they finish. A stated intention is a useful signal of interest, yet it is different from a completed major. Reading the two as the same number can make a pipeline look healthier or leakier than it is.

The Higher Education Research Institute’s first-year survey, which asks incoming college students about their expected major, is one of the longest-running sources on this question. It records a student’s intention at the start of college, before that student has taken a single university course. Philosophy appears as one option among many, so a student who ticks it is reporting a plan, not a commitment. Students change direction often, some remain undeclared for a year or more, and others add philosophy later as a second major or minor, which an entry-year question cannot capture.

The gap between intention and completion is built into the measures. An intention is recorded once, at a single moment, while a completed major is recorded at graduation, after years of course choices, grades, advising conversations, and changes of plan. Survey wording also matters. A question about “possible” majors will produce a larger group than one about a “probable” major, and neither tells you how many students take the required courses in sequence.

Pipeline leakage describes the loss of students at each stage between early interest and degree completion. The pipeline has three recognizable points: students who express interest when they enter college, students who take an introductory philosophy course, and students who complete a philosophy degree. Each transition filters the group, and the largest losses are not always where people expect. A student may express interest on a survey and then never enroll in an introductory course because it does not fit the schedule, because it is offered only in certain terms, or because a general education requirement is met elsewhere. That drop reflects access as much as interest.

The introductory course is the point where many students decide whether to continue, because it is the first time they test their expectations against the actual subject. Students arrive with ideas about what philosophy is, and the first course either confirms those ideas or overturns them. A student who finds the readings remote from their own experience, or who feels that unfamiliar traditions are presented without context, may conclude that philosophy is not for them, even when their interest was real. Course content can therefore affect that decision in ways a reading list alone does not reveal. What matters is how the material is framed, how much preparation students receive before encountering an unfamiliar text, and whether they are invited into the discussion or left to decode it alone.

Disability and socioeconomic background are harder to measure in philosophy, and they are often underreported in philosophy-specific research. Across higher education generally, students with disabilities and students from lower-income or first-generation households are known to persist at different rates than their peers, which makes these categories important for any pipeline analysis. Philosophy-specific studies have seldom collected them, for several reasons. Disability disclosure is voluntary and sensitive, so response rates can be low. Family income and parental education are not standard items on departmental surveys. Small departmental samples make it hard to break results down further without reporting cells too small to interpret. As a result, a gap in these groups is often unknown rather than absent.

When you review a first-year survey or a departmental report, check whether it asks about disability and family background at all. If it does not, treat the omission as a limit of the data, not as evidence that these students are doing as well as everyone else.

Does Changing the Reading List Change Who Stays?

The evidence so far has not shown that changing the reading list, by itself, changes who stays in philosophy. The clearest test comes from Georgia State University, where an intervention in fall 2013 raised women’s share of authors on introductory syllabi to an average of 20 to 30 percent. When the results were reported in 2016, the study did not find that higher proportions of women authors increased students’ willingness to continue in philosophy, and it did not find an increase for women students either.

That result is narrow, and it is worth being exact about what was measured. The study compared the share of women authors on the syllabus with students’ stated willingness to keep studying philosophy. It did not measure how well students were prepared to read unfamiliar texts, how instructors framed them, or what discussion was like in class. If you are reviewing your own course, the Georgia State result suggests that the author count is one lever among several, not the whole mechanism.

The 2026 study in Learning and Instruction took a different route. Its researchers interviewed 18 university philosophy teachers using semi-structured interviews, a format in which the researcher works from a set of topics but can follow up on answers that seem important. The topics were pedagogical aims, transformative education, and philosophical diversity, meaning the idea that teaching should change the learner rather than only pass along information.

The sample is easiest to read at a glance. The table below shows where the participants were affiliated.

Country of university affiliation	Participants
Netherlands	12
Switzerland	1
Japan	1
Colombia	1
South Africa	1
France	1
Tunisia	1
Total	18

Interviews were conducted in English (9), Dutch (6), French (2), and German (1). Because the interviews were spread across four languages, a point made in one language may carry a different nuance in another, and the study’s reporting is the only reliable guide to how participants’ answers were compared.

Ten of the 18 participants answered positively when asked directly whether philosophy education should be transformative. The other eight did not give a positive answer to that direct question, which is different from rejecting the idea. The researchers reported saturation after the 15th interview, meaning that by that point new interviews were no longer producing new themes. Saturation tells you the interviews stopped adding material, not that the sample represents all philosophy teachers.

Instructors in the study saw engagement with differing perspectives as educationally valuable. They also warned that this kind of engagement needs thoughtful facilitation, and they described practical constraints on diversifying course content. The published findings do not give a full list of those constraints in the material reported here, so you should identify your own. Class time, the number of students, the texts available in the languages your students read, and how much preparation students already have are the constraints most likely to matter in a typical course.

A different kind of argument appears in a March 23, 2026 article in Dao, which distinguishes two strategies for diversifying philosophy. Contextualizing places a text within the tradition and conditions that produced it. Universalizing treats the ideas as raising questions that readers from any background can take up. The article argues that both strategies treat intercultural philosophy as a transformative practice, which makes it useful when you are deciding how to present an unfamiliar tradition.

Putting these sources together points to a practical question for course review: what happens between the moment a reading is assigned and the moment a student has to discuss it? A short framing note, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, or a question to consider before reading can change how a text lands, and none of these changes shows up in an author count. Pilot one change in a single section, record each student’s stated plan to continue in philosophy at the start and at the end of the term, and compare the results with a comparable section that did not receive the change. A small comparison of that kind will tell you more about your own students than a national average.

Why Do Disparities Persist, and What Is Being Proposed?

Disparities persist for several reasons that researchers take seriously, and the profession has responded with two main strategies: changing who enters philosophy, and changing what students read and how they are prepared to engage with it.

The first explanation is natural sorting. On this view, men and women, and people from different racial and ethnic groups, choose different fields because of differences in interests, prior preparation, or career goals. Philosophy’s share of women and minority students may reflect those choices rather than barriers inside the discipline. This position deserves a fair hearing, because it predicts that the gaps should be smaller where students have had more chances to discover the subject, and that prediction can be tested.

Several competing explanations focus on the conditions students face. The access explanation points to practical obstacles: an introductory course offered only once a year, a schedule that conflicts with a job, or a department too small to offer a sequence. Mentoring is a related argument. Students who get early research assistantships, support for graduate applications, and letters from faculty who know them tend to move forward, and those networks may be unevenly distributed. The climate explanation holds that students who find the field unwelcoming, or who feel that their own backgrounds are absent from it, may leave even when they are capable and interested. The early exposure explanation notes that many high school students never encounter philosophy at all, so they cannot choose it. Each of these accounts can be true at once, and each suggests a different place to intervene.

The profession’s responses follow from these diagnoses, and they rest on different theories of change.

Strategy	Main theory of change	Who acts	Main question it answers
Recruitment	Bringing more people from underrepresented groups into majors, graduate programs, and faculty posts changes the field and gives students visible role models.	Departments, graduate admissions committees, and outreach programs	Who enters and stays in the profession
Curriculum change	What students read and how it is framed determines whether they feel philosophy is for them, whoever is teaching.	Individual instructors, course designers, and departments reviewing reading lists	What students meet in the course, and whether they can engage with it

Recruitment works through people and assumes that a more varied profession will eventually produce a more varied classroom. Curriculum change works through content and assumes that students respond to what is put in front of them now. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, and many departments pursue both, but they require different evidence. Recruitment is measured through enrollment, degree, and faculty counts, while curriculum change is measured through reading lists and student engagement.

The American Philosophical Association offers a practical resource for the curriculum side. Its Diversity and Inclusiveness Syllabus Collection was last updated April 4, 2025, and permits instructors to reuse or adapt syllabi with credit to their authors. Because the collection exists to be adapted, you can borrow a structure, a set of readings, or a sequence of units and change it to fit your class, provided the original authors are credited.

A March 23, 2026 article in Dao adds a conceptual layer to that practical work. It distinguishes contextualizing, which places a text within the tradition and conditions that produced it, from universalizing, which treats its questions as open to readers from any background. The article argues that both strategies treat intercultural philosophy as a transformative practice, meaning that engaging other traditions should change the people doing the engaging, not simply add material to a syllabus. That argument helps explain why the choice between the two strategies matters less than whether the course gives students a real opportunity to be changed by what they read.

Non-Western traditions raise a separate question from gender and race, and the evidence base is different. The issue is not only who wrote a text but which traditions a course treats as philosophy and how it presents them. The most relevant evidence so far is qualitative, from the 2026 teacher interviews in Learning and Instruction, where instructors valued engagement with differing perspectives, and from conceptual work such as the Dao article. Counts of how many non-Western texts appear on syllabi would answer a different question, and they require a method the sources cited here do not provide.

Political diversity among philosophers is a third question, and it has its own evidence. It asks whether the range of political views held by philosophers, and represented in readings and classroom discussion, is narrow or broad, and whether that range affects students’ sense of which questions are open. It is measured through surveys of political orientation rather than through the counts of gender or ethnicity discussed earlier, so it cannot be read off the same tables. Keeping the three questions apart prevents a finding about one from being quietly applied to another.

How We Compiled These Figures and Their Limits

Every figure in this article comes from a named source with a stated date, and the sources fall into two groups. Some are primary, meaning they report the counts, interviews, or documents themselves. Others are secondary, meaning they report figures gathered earlier by someone else. The table sorts each source by type and notes its main limit.

Source	Date	Type	Main limit
Philosophers’ Imprint study, reporting a review of introductory syllabi	2016 (review of 2012 syllabi)	Secondary for the 2012 counts	Gives a per-course average, not a pooled share
Study of 18 introductory philosophy textbooks	2016	Primary for the textbook count	Covers 18 books, and author lists are fixed by publishers
Georgia State University intervention	Fall 2013, reported 2016	Primary	One institution, and only the author share was changed
APA Diversity and Inclusiveness Syllabus Collection	Last updated April 4, 2025	Primary	A collection of syllabi, not a count of authors
AAAS Humanities Departmental Survey	2023–24	Primary	49% response rate among philosophy departments
Learning and Instruction qualitative study	August 2026	Primary	18 interviews, mostly with Dutch university teachers
Dao article	March 23, 2026	Primary (conceptual argument)	Offers an argument, not counts

The 2026 Learning and Instruction study has the sharpest sample limit. Its authors caution that the 18 participants were disproportionately affiliated with Dutch universities (12 of the 18) and were partly recruited through the researchers’ own networks, so the study cannot support broad generalizations.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences estimate of 744 U.S. departments awarding philosophy degrees as of fall 2023 is drawn from its 2023–24 Humanities Departmental Survey, which had a 49% response rate among philosophy departments. Roughly half the departments did not answer. The estimate therefore reflects the responding departments, and it may not match the departments that stayed silent if those differ in size or program type. Check the response rate of each survey year before comparing years, and treat small changes with caution.

Figures from different sources use different categories and time periods, so they should not be added together or averaged into one number. The 10% syllabus average counts author names on course readings in a 2012 review. The 6.94% textbook share counts authors of 18 books in 2016. The Georgia State averages describe syllabi in fall 2013, and the AAAS count tallies departments in fall 2023. Each unit, date, and population differs, so every figure should be reported with its own label, year, and source.

Where the data are thin, three gaps stand out. The sources used here do not count how many texts from non-Western traditions appear on syllabi, so this article makes no claim about their share. Few philosophy-specific studies collect disability or family background, which means a missing group in a dataset may reflect a missing question. And the Georgia State result comes from a single institution, so it cannot be assumed to hold for other departments.

Philosopedia’s editors separate factual corrections from differences in philosophical interpretation. A factual correction, such as a wrong date, a miscopied figure, or a source that has changed, is checked against the original document and fixed when the source supports the change. A difference in interpretation, such as a disagreement about how to read an argument or whether a framing is fair, is not treated as an error. Readers can send either kind through the site’s contact form, and the most useful messages name the figure, the section, and the source you checked.

Using These Numbers to Review Your Own Course

Start with the syllabus you teach this term. Open it, count every author attached to an assigned reading, and record two figures: the share of women authors on that syllabus and, if you teach several courses, the pooled share across all of their readings. Label each number with the course title and term so that a colleague can later tell exactly what you measured.

Next, look at the weakest unit, the one where students first meet an unfamiliar tradition. Swapping a single reading is far easier to plan than rebuilding the whole term, so a one-unit change is a realistic first step, especially if your class time or the languages your students read limit what you can add.

Then add a short framing note before that reading. Name the tradition, give its context in a sentence or two, and pose one question for students to carry into the text. The 2026 Learning and Instruction interviews suggest that instructors value this kind of facilitation, so the note is a test of whether preparation changes how students engage.

Finally, run a small comparison. Ask students in your framed section, and in a parallel section without the note, whether they plan to keep studying philosophy at the start and at the end of term. Your own two sections will tell you more about your students than any national average.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How long would it take an instructor to audit a reading list for author diversity?

A single syllabus is usually a quick count, since you only need to list the author names attached to each assigned reading and note how many are women. The time grows with the number of readings and the number of courses you review, and it grows further if you also want to compare the per-course share with the pooled share across several syllabi. Recording the course title and term alongside each count keeps the audit reusable when you revisit it later.

2. Can changing one course meaningfully shift departmental statistics?

A single course can change its own author share, but it will have only a small effect on a department’s overall numbers. A department’s reading list is the combined result of many instructors’ choices, and a student may take five courses taught by five different people. Changes to one course become more significant when several instructors make similar revisions, or when the revisions are part of a shared departmental review.

3. Do I need specialist training to teach non-Western philosophical texts?

The practical steps described here, such as adding a short framing note, naming the tradition, giving its context in a sentence or two, and posing one question before the reading, are steps any instructor can take after reading the text carefully. Instructors who are unsure of a tradition can still draw on the APA’s adaptable syllabi, which offer structure and readings from colleagues who have already built the units.

4. What does contextualizing versus universalizing look like in an actual reading list?

Suppose a unit includes a short text from an Indian ethical tradition. A contextualizing approach would pair it with an introduction to the schools and debates that shaped it, and ask students to read it in terms of those debates before judging its claims. A universalizing approach would present the same text as raising a question about how a person should act, and ask students to test that question against their own experience and against other readings in the course. Many courses combine the two, starting with context and then moving to the question the text poses for readers today.

5. Are there national figures on how many philosophy majors are first-generation students?

Across higher education generally, students from first-generation households are known to persist at different rates than their peers, but philosophy-specific studies have seldom collected parental education. If you are examining your own department, check whether its surveys ask about family background, since a missing answer usually reflects a gap in the data rather than evidence about the students.