Gender differences, intuitions, and your comments in the news

The Boston Globe has now reported on the study by Buckwalter which showed a difference between men’s and women’s philosophical intuitions, which prompted him to suggest (in the Globe’s words) that:

Perhaps one reason for the dearth of professional female philosophers is that, from freshman seminars on, their intuitions are dismissed as flatly wrong by men. They are told that they just don’t “get it.”

Buckwalter sent us a link to his blog, wanting to know what we thought, and some of you went off and commented on it. Those comments made the news story too.

Women’s attitudes toward rape victims

NR sends us this disturbing story, which includes statistics like the following:

Almost three-quarters of women said if a rape victim got into bed with the assailant before an attack they should accept some responsibility.
One-third blamed victims who had dressed provocatively or gone back to the attacker’s house for a drink….The study found that women were less forgiving of the victim than men.
Some 71% of women thought a person should accept responsibility when getting into bed with someone, compared with 57% of men.

Alabama shootings: Why aren’t we talking about race?

Until Rob told us in comments, I hadn’t come across anything at all about race and the Alabama shootings that initially appeared to be about tenure. But apparently all three of the faculty members killed were people of colour, one Indian and two African-American. Given the standard composition of science departments, it would seem very surprising if this were coincidental. This really should be getting reported.