In case any of you missed the link in sophia_mt's tweet the other day, it was to this video (sorry, I can't figure out how to embed here) where Good Morning America posed this age-old riddle to children:
Q: “A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies instantly. The boy, in critical condition, is rushed to the nearest hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon looks at the child aghast and says, "I can't operate on him! He's my own son!" Who is the surgeon?”
A: His Mother.
Generally, the children that were surveyed were stumped by this riddle. Good Morning America did not give the exact percentage of kids that got it right/wrong but they did point out that the youngsters created a “new answer” - they proposed that the child had two gay fathers.
This is remarkable, as sophia_mt tweeted, because this riddle has never been answered this way before.
I also find it remarkable that so many people cannot fathom a female surgeon. (probably partly because the word “surgeon” has a male connotation. Maybe if the riddle used the word “doctor”, people would not have such sexist assumptions?)
I was curious as to just how many people were stumped by this riddle (..admittedly, I was). Online, I could not find immediate statistics, so I took some of my own J. Conveniently I was in the library where I found 10 different people, about half female and half male, who had not heard the riddle before. I read each of them the riddle and got the following responses:
Correct response “mother”: 1 person
New category of responses “other father”: 3 people
Could not answer the riddle: 6 people
My results seemed to mirror Good Morning America’s observations. No one seemed to be able to immediately associate “surgeon” with the female (even the person who answered “mother” took time and a couple of incorrect guesses)
So, since more people found “other father” as a faster solution to the riddle than “mother”, is the assignment of gender roles harder to overcome than the possibility of gay marriage?
This is a very interesting result. The original riddle depended on the embedded nature of gender scripts (how could anyone but the child's father be the surgeon in the family?)
ReplyDeleteWhat the change to presuming that maybe the child could have two fathers does not fundamentally shift the gender scripts operative in society (It still presumes that surgeons are more likely to be male) while at the same time it shows that scripts about marriage and family is shifting where the notion of having two fathers of a child can be one that occurs to kids at a young age.
I thought I commented on this! I guess I didn't, but I will now. Haha, but yeah, I thought this was really interesting. Someone told me this joke, and I admit it took me a while to figure it out. When I finally got it, the girl who told me the joke said it was because she kept using the "he" pronoun so my brain kept thinking of male figures, but, unfortunately, it was probably because I'm used to the idea that surgeons are typically male.
ReplyDelete