How did this get published?

There is a minor uproar over a recent Washington Post editorial that wonders if some women's swooning over Obama can be explained by the fact that women are, in fact, inferior to men. Written by one Charlotte Allen, it is difficult to tell if it's trying to be a politically-correct-defying lambasting of female culture or a tongue-in-cheek parody of the typical chauvinist view of women, or what. But either way, nothing excuses passages like this:

A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. [Emphasis mine]

If you're comparing rates of accidents between two groups, it hardly matters how many miles either group has driven. I mean, this is a pretty basic mistake, right?

Also, there is this egregiously ill-informed paragraph comparing the male and female brain:

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

Ahhhhhh!!!

• The theory "that women are the dumber sex" is not "amply" supported by any kind of empirical evidence--in fact, there is no widely accepted criteria for what makes a person "intelligent" in the general sense that Allen is talking about here.
• Uh, not since phrenology was in vogue have people thought that brain-size tracked with intelligence.
• Ummmmm, since when is there a proven link between mental object rotation and "abstract thinking and reasoning"--and what on earth does it mean to say that this is "the grounding for mathematics, science, and philosophy"?
• IQ is by no means a widely accepted measure of general intelligence! See bullet one!

Holy crap--this thing never would have been published if it had come within five feet of anyone who knew what Science Magazine was. But maybe she's being ignorant like a fox, in order to bolster her own case:

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?).

If she removed the word "female" from that sentence, I think she'd just about have it right.