A riddle...

I heard this riddle as a kid (sorry that it is not a very happy riddle):

“A man and his son are in a terrible car accident. The father is killed instantly, and the boy is rushed to the hospital. When the boy arrives in the operating room, the surgeon looks at him and says ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son!’ Who is the surgeon?”

I’ll give you a few hints:

-the surgeon is not the boy’s step-father

-the surgeon is also not a ghost

-there is nothing unusual about the surgeon’s relationship with the boy

ANSWER: (stop reading if you want to figure it out yourself!)

The surgeon is the boy’s mother.

Why is this a riddle, and not just a sad story? We all know that women (moms, even) can be surgeons, but somehow we forget this important detail when confronted with a surgeon of unknown gender. The male pronouns for the son probably further bias us (would we be better able to remember that women can be surgeons if we had just heard “I can’t operate on this girl. She is my daughter!”?), but I can’t test it on myself now that I know the answer. However, there is another great (and repeatable!) way to test our implicit biases. By taking a short (approx 10 min total) test online, you can evaluate your own implicit bias regarding women in science.

Just go to: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Continue as a guest, click through the disclaimer, then select the “Gender – Science” test. (There are several other interesting bias tests you can take, so try a few of them!) The tests work by measuring your response time while categorizing a list of words, so you have to work as quickly as possible. The website will ask you to answer some questions about yourself (this is research, after all), then will finally display your score.

The first time I took the test, I felt fairly good about myself because I scored only “slight automatic association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.” However, I took it again in preparation for this blog post, and this time got “strong automatic association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.” I am nearly certain that I got the lists of items in different orders in the two times I took the test (this is hard to explain unless you took the test – go take the test if you don’t understand what I am talking about), so according to the FAQs, my true score is actually the category in between, “moderate automatic association” This puts me with the largest group of web respondents (28%).

As a woman in science, I would like to imagine that I am not biased against women as scientists, but that does not appear to be the case. My own experiences back this observation of my bias. I have found myself on several occasions using male pronouns for scientists, doctors, or professors of unknown gender (which is quite embarrassing when I have assumed wrong). It is easy to assume that scientists are males because the assumption is often correct. The gender gap is the subject of a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which is, by the way, where I heard about the implicit bias test.  The report is titled “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”

http://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/

I don’t have space here to fully explore the full set of issues surrounding the gender gap in the sciences, or even really of implicit bias against women in science, but I hope that taking the implicit bias test can be an opportunity to think about our own biases and how they shape our daily interactions.

Did you take the bias test? Were you surprised by your score? Tell me in the comments!