Mother or Doctor? Why can’t I be both?

I am going to tell you a riddle that I learned recently, so riddle me this:

One fateful day, a father and his son are in a car accident, the father dies immediately upon impact, and the child is taken to the closest hospital. The child is evaluated by a surgical team and it is determined that he will need surgery. The surgeon on duty exclaims “I cannot operate on this boy; he is my son.” How is it that this is possible when the child’s father has died?

Take a moment to mull over the answers you may have to this. Are you thinking that the child has a stepfather? Do you think that he has two fathers? Was he adopted? While there are a plethora of possible answers to this question, the answer to all of the questions listed is no. In fact, the boys mother was the surgeon. This "riddle" is meant to be comical and get a rise out of readers, but I think there may be some unintended reactions. Where some may find humor in this riddle, I see sexism and gender bias. Where does the humor come in? Do people find the idea that the mother is the surgeon to be funny? I see no humor in the riddle and I can imagine that many others do not either, especially those that identify as both a surgeon and a mother.

Source: 2019 lifeadvancer.com The Ridiculous Double
Standard Women Face in Modern Society

Though today over 1/3 of surgeons in the United States are female, some still find it difficult to wrap their minds around the fact that a woman could both be a nurturing mother and a hard working woman. We are socialized to believe that woman and mother are synonymous terms, when in fact they are far from it. Shifts in the ideal family unit over the last several decades have allowed for women to join the workforce full speed ahead, but to get there we need to understand that woman and mother are not synonymous.

From a young age women are conditioned to become mothers. The composition of our body predisposes us to an arbitrary set of expectations: we must grow up to become nurturing, get married, have children, and most importantly, be feminine (whatever that means). Women aren’t conditioned to succeed as both a mother and a woman, we are meant to be one or the other.  Women’s bodies are seen as a means for reproduction, simply because we have the ability the get pregnant, the uterus to carry a child, and breasts to feed the infant. Women are not seen as a brain that can think for itself. This MUST change. Women are more than a set of parts waiting to be tinkered with; women are smart, women are beautiful, and women are unique.

By maintaining this separatory culture, we are recreating a conundrum.  A woman is not seen as someone able to hold a position of importance at work because it is assumed that they will leave to have children. If you leave your career to have children you are a waste of the companies time but if you create a career for yourself instead of having children you are selfish. It seems that there is no in between, but in fact there is. Not everything is as black and white as it may seem—there is some grey space. You can be an excellent mother and be a hard worker – and no you don’t need to settle. Become the surgeon, lawyer, nomad, or law enforcement officer. Become whatever YOU want to be. Society’s molds are being recreated and it is about time women get to define what it is they want to be.

Let’s rethink that riddle now. Can you see how the woman could be the mother and the surgeon now? She was a hard-working woman that was a nurturing mother. Without women, the world would stop in its tracks. It is desperately important that we find a place where women can create their own path and not be defined by their choice of a career, to be a mother, or the latter. Let’s band together as women and support each other in whatever we want to do. Let’s create new definitions for woman and mother without basing them on our "function" – showing society just how different those two words are.