Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a lively debate concerning gender stereotypes and gender-fair language (GFL) in English and other European languages. An example of this debate is the surgeon riddle, which has been used to measure gender stereotypes in professions (e.g., Belle et al. 2021): "A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to the ER. The attending surgeon looks at the boy and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son!’ How can this be?". While the most plausible solution is that the surgeon is the mother, recent findings indicate that people struggle to envision the surgeon as female.

The riddle has primarily been tested in English. Mara Floris (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele), Camilla Borgna (Università degli Studi di Torino), and I tested the riddle with Italian adolescents. In our study, we compared the interpretation of a translation of the riddle with the generic masculine "Chirurgo" (surgeon) with two variants including GFL strategies: “Persona che opera” (person who operates), which is gender neutral, and "Chirurg*", which is an innovative GFL expression that does not specify the gender of its referent. We found that the GFL strategies, especially the innovative strategy, increased the likelihood of envisioning the surgeon as female.