I posted a discussion called "What would you do?"

Very true, people associate a doctor being a male and a nurse being a female. I guess with time people will break this stereotype. Same thing with flight attendants and firefighters. Good post there kiddo. Hey your getting up there in the numbers.

in India, the word "Babu" is the equivalent of the word "Sir". we are so accustomed to addressing a doctor as doctor-babu that we practically fumble with words when we are faced with a lady doctor. many a times i have heard people addressing a lady doctor as "doctor-babu" and the poor hapless lady just had to digest it! centuries of brain-washing and depriving women of education and enlightenment has forced us to naturally accept men in all positions of significance and prevalance. one can automatically imagine nurses as women just as doctors are naturally imagined as men. similarly the boss is always "male" just as the secretary is always "female" and so on... it will take long for us to change baby!

Isn't it funny but I do the same thing and yet up until Feb.2007 I always had a woman doctor. I had her for years but she has now retired. I am way happier with a woman doctor, we just don't have any here so maybe that is why I always say He. I think for years it was always a mans profession and I guess we were raised that way. While growing up I never knew of a woman doctor at least not where we were living.

Even in this day & age, over 50% of all doctors are still male. So, you have a somewhat better chance of getting it right with "he" rather than "she." I try to respond with "he/she" when I do respond to an unspecified gender, but I can't say I do it all the time. The fact is, that we don't have a "gender neutral" 3 person singular - "it" being the closest &, trust me, you'd like your doctor refered to as "it" even less! There used to be a certain amount of recogniction that the "male" reference could be used as a "neutral" as in "mankind." And by that instance, the "he" then becomes the gender neutral reference. Its kind of like assuming all cats are female. I posed some pix of one of my cats & even called him "he" & "him" in the posting & the person came back & called him "she." In the collective singular of cats, they seem to be all "females" and in the collective singular of humans they, at least used to be, all male.

Well certain professions have been solely been either male or female type jobs for so long we just naturally assume that when one says doctor it's a man, just as most people will assume that a nurse is always a woman..now we also have women firefighters, women postal carriers--so it's no longer postmen...etc etc

It is pretty much tradition I'd say. Myself I'm a med student and up front I got to hear there were a lot of women doing that as well, but when I actually got there it was like "wow!", the percentage of girls was about 70% and each year that still keeps on growing. In the near future, here for certain but think other countries won't be that much different, it'll become weird for a doctor to be a guy.

LOL, you know I think it is a society thing. I notice that I do that to. I refer to doctors as he, even if I don't know if it is a he or she. I actually even do that when I am referring to animal that is cute. I will say, Oh, isn't he cute??? Or if there is a spider, I will say, will you take him out of here and put him outside? I don't know, if it is a male, I just always use he. Interesting, isn't it? I wonder why.