The whole can-a-woman-be-president issue came up during this week’s debate. Warren had one of her best moments when she pointed out that the male candidates with whom she shared the stage had collectively lost 10 elections, while the women hadn’t lost a single one.

And besides, she added, she was the only person onstage who had defeated an incumbent Republican in the last 30 years. Bernie Sanders — who contributed seven of those losses — quickly volunteered that he had beaten a Republican incumbent in 1990. Which Warren, despite her career as a primary-school teacher, claimed was not within the last 30 years.

Joe Biden didn’t point out that he beat a Republican incumbent to win his Senate seat in 1972. This is worth mentioning since some people worry that one of the Democrats’ leading candidates seems to kind of be living in the past.

About Joe Biden. This is his third run for president. Who among us could forget 2008, when he came in fifth in Iowa and dropped out? Or 1988, when he — O.K., you did forget 1988. Totally understand.

Biden hasn’t had any super disasters in the debates. Well, there was the time in October when he said: “I would eliminate the capital gains tax — I would raise the capital gains tax to the highest rate, of 39.5 percent.” And that time in November when he spoke out against violence against women, adding that “we have to just change the culture … and keep punching at it and punching at it.” Details, details.

This last performance was pretty clean and Biden got fairly good reviews, many of which boiled down to how he’d gotten through the evening “without taking major damage.”

Can we all agree that no female candidate could ever get away with stuff like that and then win praise for not saying anything stranger?