From The Guardian:
To get an A rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.
Thanks, E!
Day: November 6, 2013
Gender segregation for Turkish students.
The Turkish PM Erdogan is in touch with what his people want. Worried about mothers and fathers’ feeling, and what the neighbours might think, he is pushing for separate dorms for male and female university students.
But what about male and female students who live together in private housing without being married? If neighbours complain, then the police should look into it.
Answering a journalist’s complaint that this wouldn’t be legal, especially if the students in question are over 18, the PM replied that
his government would, if necessary, push for legal changes to allow the inspection of houses where male and female students live together.
Read the rest of this debacle here.
Campaigning for gender balance in textbooks
If like me, you teach first year intro courses in a department that makes a big deal out of being analytic, you know that it’s not very easy to find a textbook that works from the point of view of gender balance. Two that were recently advertised here and here didn’t quite make the cut as far as mainstream analytic philosophy was concerned for us. So what can we do ? Well, textbooks that sell tend to be revised regularly. This is the case with the one I’m using : Perry, Bratman and Fischer’s Introduction to Philosophy. Although they have been adding work by women over the last few editions, there is still a great imbalance. So I wrote to the authors, directing them to this report.
They all three responded very positively, saying they agreed that this was an important matter and that they would strive to include more women in future editions. Let’s see how that works out (watch this space !)
But here’s a thought : ‘mainstream’ textbooks do tend to be edited regularly. So why not get in touch whenever we’re not happy with the gender balance ? Sounds like campaign to me.
13 Invited Speakers, All Men
Logical Consequence and Paradox, Bochum. (h/t NewAPPS.)
Highly illogical.
(Obviously, the lyrics need some tweaking.)
To forestall the standard questions, here’s why we’re doing this. And here are quite a lot of women who work on logic and philosophy of logic.
Feminist Philosophers 