Riddle: A boy and his father are involved in a car accident in which his father dies. The boy is taken to the hospital where he is rushed into the operating theatre. Upon viewing the boy, the surgeon exclaimed, “I can’t operate on this boy; he is my son!” Who is the surgeon?
If you struggled to answer this question and did not consider that the surgeon could be the boy’s mother, you are not alone.
In a study conducted by researchers Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle at Boston University in 2014, 86% of the study participants, including several self-described feminists, overlooked the possibility that the surgeon could be a woman.
