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I don't think it's just Engineering and Maths that have a problem. There's this joke where someone says "A man and his son are in a car crash and they're taken to hospital. The doctor sees the child and goes 'Oh no! It's my son!'". Then they ask you "who is the doctor"?

The point is that you are supposed to struggle with the answer because you can't imagine the doctor to be the boy's mother. That there exists an assumption that people will find this difficult to answer suggests that there is some sort of expected cultural bias about doctors being male or female.

An anecodte, of course- literally.

>>YeGobl+(OP)
That works much better with "surgeon" instead of "doctor". Lots of doctors are female, but not so many surgeons, at least here in the UK.

>>YeGobl+(OP)
I don't know, I would immediately think that the doctor is the mother if this question somehow came up in a natural context. But if this question is posed as a quiz, it makes you think, am I not getting something here? Maybe that's why people struggle with the answer.

>>bloak+O5
I dunno, it threw me off for a bit - "doctor" still has a very male connotation with me. Mind you I've not seen one in forever.

>>Cthulh+Og
In english 'Doctor' is a word that at one time exclusively did refer only to males. A word used for females was 'Doctress'

http://doctordoctress.org

>>bloak+O5
My kid sister is a critical care-trauma surgeon. One of her (least) favourite stories when she worked in the South was when she took care of a rather complex ICU case. At the end of it the patient said, "I just want you to know that you were great, but I never saw the doctor once."

My sister is rarely at a loss for words but I'm not sure _she_ even knew what to say to that.

>>err4nt+Gi
That could be relevant. Also the word "actor", with the same ending, is sometimes (by some newspapers, for example) reserved for men.

Sometimes a similar trick anecdote is told about a "German". There's a suspicion that the ending "man" in "German" primes the listener to imagine a man.