Gender and Race

So far, I have enjoyed reading this book. A section that I thought was interesting was when the author talked about how people are unconciously biased. We may not realize that we have certain prejudices but I certainly did after I read over the tests that the author provided. People may say they arn't biased towards a certain race or gender but unconsciously, we are. Due to books, movies, t.v., and magazines, we have certain images of what people should be like that are from a certain back round, race, or gender. The first time I read through the author's example of the story about the son and the doctor, I was immediatly confused. After thinking for a couple seconds, my first guess was that the son had a stepfather or two Dads. It never occured to me that the doctor could be a woman. What this test did was make me think quickly about what my first image of a typical doctor was. Mine was male and I'm guessing a lot of other peoples' first impression was that too. A second test the author included was one where I had a list of names that I had to put into 2 collumns:Male and Female. This I found I could acccomplish easily. Then, the author gave us a new list and new columns: Male or Family and Female or Career. These two categories had a list of words with them that were either jobs or names. I found this to be harder because we usually associate males with jobs and females with family. The author included a couple other tests that I will not go into detail with but they also supported his point .