The riddle is only a riddle due to gender assumptions associated with particular professions. The willingness of those answering the riddle to go directly to the gay parents scenario instead of the female surgeon scenario shows how ingrained some gender associations with some professions are.
You can probably make a similar riddle with:
“A mother and her child were in a car crash. They were taken to separate hospitals. The child needed surgery. A nurse walked into the operating room and announced, “what a coincidence to be involved in this operation on my child.””
Now the surgeon could be his mother. Or could be his second dad. Or could be the egg donor. Or could be the surrogate. Or could be his biological mother who has since transitioned.
It’s an interesting point you are making. Not sure about whether it holds in this scenario.
My kids claimed that they had first thought the surgeon was the mother, but rejected that idea in their minds because it was too obvious to even be a riddle. Two dads seemed slightly less obvious, like they could see how someone might have been tripped up by that.
One might say that perhaps they were trying not to admit to having gender role assumptions… I seem to remember that they were pretty young for that, but maybe?
As the original poster of “the riddle” I will add that while this might be the case in other areas, I really doubt that is the case in this school. There is a very high probability that their pediatrician (or other doctors they have seen) is a female. There is also an extraordinary number of moms in STEM-related, mostly medical research or biomedical engineering, fields. If it’s not your mom, it’s going to be your neighbor or your friend’s mom.
To give this some context, it was in a discussion about the “Don’t say gay bill” and some of us were showing how LGBTQ issues come up even when the discussion was not planned that way by the teacher.
But, despite the significant exposure to female physicians, medical researchers, etc., does this mean that such exposure still cannot break through an ingrained assumption that a surgeon is male?
Many of the kids seemed to think that would make for a really bad riddle as most of them didn’t think being a surgeon had a gender.
But, again, I think these kids probably have very different kitchen table discussions than a huge percentage of kids that were raised in less progressive areas.
I have heard this riddle mentioned as an example of how one’s visualization of a scenario affects logical reasoning.
The idea is that when you hear a word like “surgeon” or “doctor” you immediately get some kind of picture in your mind. Even if a person is VERY aware that doctors can be any gender, the archetypal surgeon or doctor that is called up in this picture will have a specific gender, since that is how most of us visualize things. Given the choice, then, the immediate mental picture of “surgeon” or “doctor” is more likely to be male (and wearing a white coat, etc).
Once you have this picture in your mind, and you are proceeding through the story, it’s hard to let go of the picture in order to solve the riddle.
According to this theory, it would make sense that it would be much easier to come up with the “two dads” solution, since you wouldn’t need to let go of your mental image.
Edited to add:
It’s possible that modern kids who are surrounded by gender fluid or non binary peers might spontaneously visualize an archetypal “surgeon” or “doctor” without a specific gender. But for most of us, it’s natural for a mental picture of a human being to be either male or female. The mind picks one and goes with it. That’s supposedly how the riddle works.
I recall hearing this riddle ages ago, and I couldn’t figure it out. I like that the younger generation thinks about the question very differently than I did.
I first heard this riddle as a child and at that time (1960’s ) there were very few female physicians.
When my kids were young, they had pediatricians who were female and S’s allergist was also a woman. We were getting together with my cousin and his wife and I mentioned that both are doctors. They were confused that a man could be a doctor
