[accountface]

I believe gender bias is a huge issue, but I wonder if the riddle was worded differently if the responses would be different:

>Here’s an old riddle. If you haven’t heard it, give yourself time to answer before reading past this paragraph: a father and daughter are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The daughter is rushed to the hospital; just as she’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that girl is my daughter!” Explain…

I'd also be curious to see what the results would be if it was a mother/daughter crash — I suspect that most people would say the father is the surgeon (rather than saying the girl has two moms), but I'd like to see at what rate.

My answer in the original question was two dads, but I'm not entirely sure if I misinterpreted "he's about to go under the knife" originally, or if I'm biased (I also might want to think I misinterpreted it because I don't want to be biased).

The article provides a lot of additional evidence of bias. I just found the first riddle interesting.

[metaphorm]

the basis of the riddle is the widely held assumption that the surgeon is is male, which is more or less justified based on demographics, even if it is a biased assumption.

evidence: https://datausa.io/profile/soc/291060/#age_gender

now, it's an interesting riddle because it exposes the way we often generalize from demographics even when there are reasonable contextual clues that our generalization isn't accurate.

however, I don't go so far as to call this a prejudicial kind of bias. I don't really think that the tendency to generalize from observations is unreasonable or necessarily connected to prejudicial or exclusionary actions.

[Infernal]

I read this comment before the article. I also assumed that the surgeon was male - my best guess at an answer to the riddle was in the wording: the people in the car crash were "a father and daughter" not "a father and his daughter", so my answer was that the man killed in the crash was "a father" and not "the girl's father", thereby allowing the possibility of the surgeon to be the girl's father.

[macintux]

My parents asked me that riddle after seeing it on (IIRC) "All in the Family" when I was ~10. I failed miserably, disappointing my mother.

[sushisource]

The whole riddle is set up to be intentionally difficult. The way it primes you with "father" and "son" as parent comment mentions. I think there's some validity to it, but I think it's a clever linguistic trick more than anything.

[abraves10001]

I thought the child was illegitimate or adopted and the doctor was the biological father. I am pretty sure I failed the bias test, regardless.

[Cuuugi]

Maybe the car cash duo was a husband and wife (their relationship isn't explicitly specified) and the surgeon was her father.... You ageist.