Sexist? Bigoted? Aren’t we all? | Oliver Burkeman

Before we point the finger at others, maybe it's time to take a closer look at our own behaviour

You'll recall, I assume, the ancient riddle about the father and son rushed to casualty after a car crash, where the surgeon, taking one look at the boy, declares, "I can't operate on him, he's my son!" As a way of making a point about sexism, this doesn't really work any more: the twist or "solution" to the riddle (how is this possible?) is meant to be that the surgeon is his mother - but as many a smart aleck has noted, why not his other father?

Still, there are echoes of that puzzle in a new study from researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involving scenarios in which people were asked to guess the sex of someone described as a surgeon. The upshot: when participants heard about some third party, "Person X", jumping to the conclusion that a surgeon must be male, they judged them to be a sexist bigot. But when presented with a similar question themselves, they did exactly the same.