Wednesday, October 3, 2012

A riddle to exercise the brain muscles: 

A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The man dies on the spot, and the son is rushed to the hospital. Upon entering the operating room, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy; he's my son."

Who is the surgeon?


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..................the surgeon is the boy's mother.



I was reading Meg Urry's "Why bias holds women back" when I've stumbled on this riddle. In her own words, she said:


I was utterly unable to figure out how the boy's father could both be dead and about to perform surgery. Of course, the answer is that the boy's mother was the surgeon. That possibility never crossed my young mind because, until I was in my 20s, I had never had a female doctor. So it's not surprising that I developed an unconscious expectation that doctors would be men.
The social science research made all kinds of sense to me. Our experiences of life are turned into unconscious expectations that affect how we see others. When scholars reviewed a psychology research paper, for example, they scored it higher if the author's name were male than if female. A male applicant for a job as police chief was rated higher than a woman, even though she had important qualifications for the job that he lacked. Similarly, a male applicant for a job as nursing supervisor was rated lower than the female applicant, even when he had the qualifications she lacked.
This means most of us can't be gender-blind or color-blind or unaware of difference. That's not the goal right now. What we must do is acknowledge our inner biases and make sure we try our best to avoid them.





I've asked this question to my coworkers and posted it on my Facebook. Some got it right, most didn't get the answer right and there were some that just took forever to answer. Afterwards, I got curious what made them answer that way  and I was able to compile such good reasoning. One, we never really had an image of a doctor as a woman. Two, our society is still patriarchal. Three, in relation to one and two, we are still technically sexist. And Finally, our world is becoming liberated. One respond I've read on Facebook is that it might still be the father if the parents are a same sex-couple.

This is similar to racism. We say that racism is wrong but people still generalize people according to their race. So what do you call that? Racial bias or racial generalization? To end this all, let us just STOP TALKING about "it" just like what Morgan Freeman said below. 



Credits to the owner





















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