Our Ingrained and Unconscious Biases

One night, a father and his son were driving home from an event. It was a stormy night, and as they rounded a corner, the car skidded off the road, hitting a tree. The father dies on impact, and his son experienced significant injuries and was transported to the hospital for emergency surgery. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, the paramedics rushed the patient into the operating room. The surgeon looked at the boy on the table and said, “I can’t operate on him. He’s my son.”

Transcript of "What does my headscarf mean to you?"

Yassmin Abdel-Magied talks about unconscious bias

The surgeon could not operate on the boy because she is his mother. The above riddle is called “The Surgeon’s Dilemma,” and it is used to highlight our unconscious biases, those biases that we hold in our subconscious and that we do not, a lot of the time, even recognize that we have. In this case, the riddle points out our gender biases. More than half of the people who encounter “The Surgeon’s Dilemma” struggle with riddle. I admit that when I first heard it I struggled, and it pointed out my unconscious gender biases because I immediately, without realizing it…