BU Research: A Riddle Reveals Depth of Gender Bias

What'southward your answer to this question?

Here's an old riddle. If you haven't heard it, give yourself time to answer before reading past this paragraph: a begetter and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just equally he'south near to go under the knife, the surgeon says, "I can't operate—that male child is my son!" Explain. (Cue the final Jeopardy! music.)

If you guessed that the surgeon is the male child's gay, 2nd father, you get a signal for enlightenment, at least outside the Bible Belt. But did yous also approximate the surgeon could be the boy's mother? If not, you're role of a surprising majority.

In enquiry conducted by Mikaela Wapman (CAS'14) and Deborah Belle, a College of Arts & Sciences psychology professor, fifty-fifty immature people and self-described feminists tended to overlook the possibility that the surgeon in the riddle was a she. The researchers ran the riddle past two groups: 197 BU psychology students and 103 children, ages 7 to 17, from Brookline summer camps. (They did the latter study through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).)

In both groups, only a pocket-sized minority of subjects—15 percent of the children and fourteen percent of the BU students—came upwardly with the mom's-the-surgeon answer. Curiously, life experiences that might propose the mom answer "had no association with how one performed on the riddle," Wapman says. For example, the BU student accomplice, where women outnumbered men two-to-one, typically had mothers who were employed or were doctors—"and all the same they had so much difficulty with this riddle," says Belle. Cocky-described feminists did better, she says, only even so, 78 percent did not say the surgeon was the mother. (The results were no unlike for an alternate version of the riddle: a mother is killed, her daughter sent to the hospital, and a nurse declines to attend to the patient considering "that girl is my daughter"; few people guessed that the nurse might be the child's male parent.)

The genesis of the research was Belle'south 10-year-former granddaughter, who was given the riddle by her mom. "She thought for a moment," Belle says, "and she said, 'How could this be? Well, he could have two fathers.'" The child couldn't muster any other explanation. Nor could several of her friends. "This piqued our interest," Belle says. When she and Wapman posed the riddle to kids in the UROP written report, some of the answers stretched the bounds of inventiveness: the surgeon was a robot, or a ghost, or "the dad laid downward and officials thought he was dead, simply he was alive."

The results are all the more than surprising considering that higher students and participants in tony Brookline's summertime programs likely hail from college income and educational backgrounds than the general population. "These are two populations that we would look, if anything, would be in the advanced," Belle says. Yet, for instance, BU students theorized the "male parent" in the car referred to a priest, or the surgeon was "horribly confused," or, à la the old Dallas Tv set show, the whole scenario was a dream.

What made imagining a surgeon mom so difficult? Gender schemas—generalizations that help u.s.a. explicate our complex globe and "don't reverberate personal values or life experience," says Wapman. (So having a surgeon female parent doesn't necessarily mean you'll advise that equally the riddle'due south solution.) "Schemas are very, very powerful," Belle says, calculation that the studies' results and the endurance of gender stereotypes would non surprise Virginia Valian, a Hunter College psychologist who has noted how people presented with the same CV for a man and a adult female typically assume the human is more competent.

Valian "argues that schemas are formed very early in life," says Belle, "and that when it comes to gender, we fixate on women's reproductive functioning, and nosotros sort of allot competence to men. Experience can have some event in our schemas, but much less than we might anticipate." Valian has also noted that schemas are identical in our culture for men and for women—which is exactly what the BU survey constitute.

That bias confronting women, Wapman believes, shows the significance of schemas, "this light-headed riddle" notwithstanding. Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family unit studies at Evergreen State College in Washington state, cited the BU duo's work in a New York Times column on the problems facing mothers in the workplace.

The solution? "Having people empathise that they hold this bias," says Wapman, "and when you look at job applicants, keep that in heed."

"Eternal vigilance, I think, is the only solution," says Belle. "These schemas do change over time"—she points to other countries with greater gender equity—"just the pace is glacial."

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  • Rich Barlow

    Senior Author

    Rich Barlow

    is a senior writer at BU Today andBostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent xx years every bit a pocket-sized-town newspaper reporter, and is a formerBoston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile