BU Research: A Riddle Reveals Depth of Gender Bias

What's your answer to this question?

Here's an old riddle. If you haven't heard it, give yourself fourth dimension to answer before reading past this paragraph: a begetter and son are in a horrible machine crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the infirmary; simply equally he'southward nigh to get under the knife, the surgeon says, "I can't operate—that male child is my son!" Explain. (Cue the terminal Jeopardy! music.)

If you guessed that the surgeon is the boy'due south gay, 2d begetter, you go a point for enlightenment, at least exterior the Bible Belt. Simply did yous as well guess the surgeon could be the boy's mother? If not, you lot're role of a surprising majority.

In inquiry conducted by Mikaela Wapman (CAS'14) and Deborah Belle, a Higher of Arts & Sciences psychology professor, even young 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 vii to 17, from Brookline summer camps. (They did the latter study through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Plan (UROP).)

In both groups, only a pocket-sized minority of subjects—15 percent of the children and 14 percent of the BU students—came upwards with the mom'due south-the-surgeon answer. Curiously, life experiences that might suggest the mom answer "had no clan 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 however they had then much difficulty with this riddle," says Belle. Self-described feminists did better, she says, simply still, 78 per centum did not say the surgeon was the female parent. (The results were no different for an alternate version of the riddle: a mother is killed, her girl sent to the hospital, and a nurse declines to nourish to the patient because "that daughter is my daughter"; few people guessed that the nurse might be the child'south father.)

The genesis of the research was Belle's ten-year-erstwhile granddaughter, who was given the riddle by her mom. "She idea for a moment," Belle says, "and she said, 'How could this be? Well, he could have two fathers.'" The kid 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 report, some of the answers stretched the bounds of inventiveness: the surgeon was a robot, or a ghost, or "the dad laid downwardly and officials thought he was dead, but he was alive."

The results are all the more than surprising considering that college students and participants in tony Brookline's summer programs likely hail from higher income and educational backgrounds than the general population. "These are ii populations that we would look, if anything, would be in the avant-garde," Belle says. Nonetheless, for example, BU students theorized the "father" in the machine referred to a priest, or the surgeon was "horribly confused," or, à la the erstwhile Dallas TV bear witness, the whole scenario was a dream.

What made imagining a surgeon mom and then difficult? Gender schemas—generalizations that help us explain our complex earth and "don't reflect personal values or life feel," says Wapman. (So having a surgeon female parent doesn't necessarily mean y'all'll propose that as the riddle's solution.) "Schemas are very, very powerful," Belle says, adding that the studies' results and the endurance of gender stereotypes would not surprise Virginia Valian, a Hunter Higher psychologist who has noted how people presented with the same CV for a man and a woman typically assume the man is more competent.

Valian "argues that schemas are formed very early in life," says Belle, "and that when information technology comes to gender, nosotros fixate on women's reproductive functioning, and we sort of allot competence to men. Experience tin can have some result in our schemas, merely 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 found.

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

The solution? "Having people understand that they hold this bias," says Wapman, "and when y'all look at chore 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—"but the pace is glacial."

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  • Rich Barlow

    Senior Writer

    Rich Barlow

    is a senior author at BU Today andBostonia mag. Perhaps the just native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a pocket-sized-town newspaper reporter, and is a sometimeBoston Earth faith columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile