Consider this riddle I heard as a kid: A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The man dies on the spot, and the son is rushed to the hospital. Upon entering the operating room, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.”
The above riddle (do you know the answer?) is posited by Physics and Astronomy Professor Meg Urry. She suggests it has a lot to say about why so many science-related jobs go to men rather than women. And the implications go far beyond science, or even gender, in CNN’s “Why Are We Biased Against Women in Science?”
But back to the riddle, just in case you’ve not figured it out:
I was utterly unable to figure out how the boy’s father could both be dead and about to perform surgery. Of course, the answer is that the boy’s mother was the surgeon. That possibility never crossed my young mind because, until I was in my 20s, I had never had a female doctor. So it’s not surprising that I developed an unconscious expectation that doctors would be men.
This article is a must-read…. for Christians as well as Scientists.
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