In their paper titled “Gender and philosophical intuition,” Buckwalter and Stich (forthcoming) argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men’s intuitions, so the authors claim, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument goes, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the paper is to appear in the second edition of Experimental Philosophy edited by Knobe and Nichols (2013), which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter and Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using several different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures). Given our results, we do not believe the outcomes from Buckwalter and Stich (forthcoming) that we examined for this paper to be robust. That is, men and women do not seem to differ significantly in their intuitive responses to these philosophical scenarios.
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