Here’s a brief excerpt from an article written by Stephanie Coontz for The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photo Credit: Will Reissner

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Here’s an old riddle: a boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says “I can’t operate on this patient. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?

When I heard this riddle as a teenager back in 1962, I was totally stumped. Had the boy been adopted, and the surgeon was the birth father?

It never occurred to me that the surgeon might be his mother.

How far we have come. Last month I attended my son’s graduation from medical school, where more than half the members of his graduating class were female.

And yet last year, when the Boston University researchers Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle posed the same riddle to students there, 86 percent of those who had never heard the riddle still could not figure out that the surgeon was the boy’s mother! It is an ironic indication of how far we have come in another direction that a higher number of students guessed that the boy had two gay fathers.

There is no denying that we have made great progress toward gender equality. Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, which was signed into law on June 10, 1963. At that time, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women earned less than 60 percent of what men made. According to Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, a female college graduate at that time, working full time year round, made less than the average male high school graduate.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Stephanie Coontz, a guest columnist, teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.