What is wrong with me?!

[Jessica147]

Teaching about x-rays this morning I posed a question to the students "You turn up at the hospital with a sore ankle, the doctor thinks it might be broken. What factors will she take in to account when deciding whether to send you for an x-ray?"

Sounds pretty reasonable, except that I actually hesitated to use 'she'! WTF is wrong with me that it feels odd to describe a generic doctor as a woman?!

Hopefully the class didn't think it weird. That is where things will change. Our generation already has ingrained thoughts. They are being taught better. By you. ..

I think that's almost the worst thing - 29 teenage boys and not one even seemed to notice! Or maybe that's the best thing.

But in this day and age doctors under age 30 are primarily female, not male. There is speculation that there will be a significant shortfall of specialist surgeons in coming decades as older males retire if women do not take up those roles or young men do not become interested in medicine and reverse the current gender trend.

I think it's the best thing that they didn't notice!

TBR, I think I didn't even realise I did it until I started reading this board! It's also the second time this week the kids have surprised me. I was doing an exercise "close your eyes and imagine a scientist getting up in the morning and driving to work" to get them to think about science careers (ie most imagine a lab, but most science jobs aren't in labs). At the end I asked how many had imagined a woman fully expecting no hands to go up. To my surprise, about a third did. Still some way to go (sexist driving comment yesterday grr), but better I expected.