Just to veer slightly off subject here…well, it’s not that far off subject actually. One of the grand questions of the modern world (yes, a Big Question rather than just a question) is why average wages for women are still lower than those for men. We’ve had decades of campaigning and action to change the situation but on average there is still a gap.

A big report came out in Britain yesterday from the Women and Work Commission. 18 months in the making they looked at what they thought were the four main possible reasons. The most obvious, direct discrimination (we’ll pay you less just because you’re a woman) they said did still exist (I know, unbelievable isn’t it? Such outrageous attitudes still existing somewhere in the modern world.) but was only a small part of the problem. For example, it explained only 5% of the difference in the financial industry.

The second was that women tended to go and do jobs that were low paid, so called occupational discrimination. This is changing at last, as women are now the majority of undergraduates and the majority of those becoming lawyers and doctors and so on. So as their greater education and training carries them forward this reason should shrink as well.

The third was the career breaks that women take to have and raise children. This leads to less training, less experience and with everything else being equal, you might expect this to lead to lower wages. Whether it’s actually a good thing that this happens is entirely different from the fact that it does, of course, and no one has really come up with a decent solution. Not yet, anyway. Anyone with any good ideas is most welcome to let us know in the comments.
So where does this leave us as we try to think about the EQSQ tests and the “male” and “female” brain types? I think the most important part is in breaking out of that so called occupational discrimination. Yes, we do think that more women than men are empathizers, do think that more men than women are systemizers. But that is an indication only, it doesn’t actually describe the individual. What we’re interested in is working out what type of brain the individual has, then helping them decide upon the right education and training, the correct career choices, for that individual. This is exactly the opposite of sexual discrimination and can only help the gender pay gap to shrink.

If people get to choose the careers that suit them, have the right education and training to pursue those careers, then they’ll be paid by how good they are at those careers, not by their sex.

Tags [tags]equal pay, education, equal rights, EQSQ, feminism, sex differences, sexual discrimination[/tags]

You might have seen last week that Larry Summers has resigned as President of Harvard. You might even remember the kerfluffle from last year about his supposed sexism that, at least in part, led to this. As he was talking about sex differences in higher education and that’s part of what we do here it might be worth looking at this more closely.

Just to recap here a moment, when we use the EQSQ tests we’re not looking at differences between the sexes. Yes, we use the words “male brain” and “female” but that’s simply a set of names. What we’re really trying to do is find out whether a specific individual, whether male or female, is more of an empathizer or a systemizer. We can then use this information to help guide their choices in such things as careers and the higher education that might lead to them.

Larry Summers in his speech referred to this idea that there are attributes, tendencies if you like, that we find more often in men than in women and vice versa. But this doesn’t mean, as he also said, that all men or women have exactly that tendency, or that some men might have one more than many or most women and again vice versa.

What was more controversial was the way he went on. He was interested in trying to explain why there were so few women at the very top of the academic tree in the hard sciences and mathematics. It isn’t that men are more likely to be systemizers (true though it is) but that men show greater variablity around the mean. There are good biological and genetic explanations for this as well. But at its simplest, if you look for the extremes of anything, height, strength, intelligence, any of the things that we know are genetically determined, we’ll find more men than women in those extremes.

This is true at both ends of the scale as well. More morons and more geniuses as well. When you go looking for the top or the bottom 0.001% of any of these things, you’ll find more men than women there.

That was the thing that got him into trouble. For if you say what he did, then you reach an uncomfortable conclusion. The reason that the majority of science and maths professors are male at the top research universities is that the major portion of those with sufficient intelligence (that 0.001% of people who are really, really bright) to do the research are also male. Which means that there is no discrimination, something that a lot of people in the higher education world don’t want to hear.

The lesson we ourselves should take from this is not that women should not study these sciences. Not. At. All. Rather, we should be using tests, like the EQSQ ones and others like more general IQ tests, to try and find out who are those top 0.001%, whether male or female, thus helping them to prepare and educate themselves.

[tags]Harvard, Larry Summers, IQ tests, EQSQ, feminism, sex differences, sexual discrimination[/tags]

Pangea asked a question in comments that I’ve had to think over a little to provide a more concrete answer. When looking at something like writing which could be said to require both empathy and systematic thought, does one or the other attribute or skill trump the other? If we were setting out to make a career choice and had the life of a writer on our list of cool things to do would the EQSQ tests help us to decide whether this was a good idea or not?

Trying to come to an answer over this I went back to first principles. From my own results on the tests I know that I’m much more of a systemizer than I am empathic. I also had a look at my bookshelves, where there’s a lot of non-fiction, science and so on and while there is a lot of fiction that’s mostly formulaic stuff. No romance, no chick lit, nothing exploring the feelings or emotions of the characters. Certainly no “literary fiction” where the interaction of the characters and their concerns are the driving force. If it doesn’t have a strong plot then I’m not interested.

I also looked at the sorts of things that I myself write. A lot about economics and politics, science subjects like this blog, some environmentalism and so on. But very little fiction and most of that is very short stories meant to make a political or economic point. The conclusion here isn’t all that hard to reach. From the tests we know that I’m either not very observant of or simply not interested in the feelings or emotions of other people, what I read shows that I’m not very interested in them either and what I write shows this a third time.

So what does this tell us about how we can use the tests to help guide career choices? Now this is more of an informed guess than established fact but I’d say that systemizers would be better at the sort of non-fiction and technical writing that I do. Empathizers would probably be better at fiction and especially those types of fiction that explore the emotions of the characters. But I’m not sure that the tests would tell us whether writing was a good idea or not, only which type of writing to aim for.
While I might write for The Times on the economic stupidity of politicians an empathizer might do better at something like Virginia Wolff’s “To the Lighthouse”. Yoiu never know, they might even enjoy reading it which is a truly scary thought.

There is one problem with this theory, of course. I’ve based it on just one data point, myself. So if a reader who scores highly on the EQ part of the test would like to help out? What do you read and if you do write, what is it that you most enjoy writing about?

Tags [tags]Virginia Wolff, writing, EQSQ, novels, fiction, science writing, economics, politics[/tags]

Pigeontoad (by the way, thank you for enlivening my day with that pun. Very good.) makes an interesting point in the comments to the previous post. The EQ/SQ tests will indeed help us to find out more about our talents, our brain types, and thus our predispositions. However, it might be a mistake to think of them as simply an aptitude career test. What if, as pigeontoad has asked, various types of training, some of the jobs that we do, influence where you lie on the scale?

This wouldn’t actually be all that much of a surprise really. We know that education (well, the good stuff) teaches us things so why couldn’t or wouldn’t it teach us to be either more empathic or more systemizing? Why wouldn’t job experience develop either or both of the skills? We’re all aware that many things need practice before we’re good at them don’t we?

One of the points that Simon Baron-Cohen has made (well, it’s an idea so far) is that Asperger’s and other types of autism might be the outward sign of someone with an excessively systemizing (or “male”) brain. They’re simply so non-empathic that they’re just not interested in other people or animals but are in things. It’s also true that some of the newer trreatments for these conditions rely upon education, trying to point out to the individuals that this part of their character is undeveloped and that they need to consciously work on it.

Could we use the tests that way ourselves? I see no reason why not. Looked at one way they indicate what are already our strengths, things we should play up to. Looked at another, they show perhaps our weaknesses, things we need to brush up on.

There’s a third possible result from our EQ and SQ tests. Instead of having higher numbers on one or other of the tests we might find someone with the same or very similar numbers. This is what Simon Baron-Cohen (who after all, devised the tests in the first place) calls a “balanced” brain.

Remember, this doesn’t mean that the person is better or worse at empathizing or systemizing than you or I who get different scores on the two parts. What is does mean is that their ability at the two skills is more balanced, thus the name for that type of brain of course.

The advice on education and training we might give here would be to look at those careers where synthesis is important. That is, where you have to be able to work closely with people but also need to construct systems, look into not just people and what they are thinking but also at things and the rules that govern their behaviour.

I’ve said before that empathy is a useful skill in a manager, one that we’ve understimated in the past. I think it’s pretty clear that something like programming is a systemizer’s job. Get one letter or command wrong out of thousands and the entire thing doesn’t work at all: just the thing for people who are interested in the details of how things work.

But what about managers of programmers? They need both the empathic skills to create and nurture the team properly and also the systemizing ones to even understand what the coders are talking about. The sort of thing someone with a balanced brain might be good at.

Following on with our discoveries about the EQ and SQ tests and what they might mean for my or your career education. If we find someone with a female type brain, an empathizer rather than a systemizer, what might we want to tell them about career choices and the education that can lead to them?

It’s likely that we would recommend that they work with people rather than things. The very opposite of what we might tell a systemizer, of course. This could mean that we might recommend the traditional “women’s jobs”, but it would be a shame if we did only that. Teaching, childcare, nursing, yes, they all tend to work better for empathizers than systemizers. But to restrict ourselves to those in giving career education advice would, as I say, be a shame. For there are many other jobs and areas of life where we’re finding that empathy is a crucial ingredient in success.

Strange as it may seem, management is one of these areas. Traditionally (and wrongly) this has been seen as an area for tough men, the “mighty hunter” syndrome. In more recent years we’ve realised that actually, the most important thing is the ability to create a team, to guide a group to the objective rather than drive them to it. Which is typical empathizer’s behaviour, not systemizer’s. MBAs are not just for men you know!

We may be using the words “male” and “female” to describe the brain types but we’re, in the process, liberating ourselves from thinking about certain jobs and occupations as being “male” or “female”.

So now that I’ve got my EQ and SQ test results and made the proper comparison between them what should I be thinking about as a program of higher education? Remember, we’re not looking at the actual numbers at all, but at the relationship, the ratio, between them. So my getting very low numbers on both tests isn’t the important thing. This doesn’t tell me that I’m useless at everything, just as, if you take them, your getting high numbers on both means that you can do everything.

Unless you’re my boss, who can.

My results clearly mark me as having a male type brain. As I’m male that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise but this is the point of the tests. Not all men have male type brains, nor women female. Once we have the results of them we can then start to make some predictions about the sort of higher education that the individual should try. In my case I’m more of a systemizer than an empathizer. So, to be very crude about the results, I should probably be looking, after that education, to be working with things rather than people.

Which is good as I currently work with things (strange metals and words mostly) and enjoy it. The tests have saved me from that possibly disastrous decision to retrain as a kindergarden teacher. Very good actually, as I’m not all that sure about children. They always seem to be sticky for some reason.

Now that I’ve got my results from the two tests, that EQ of 12 and SQ of 23, does this mean according to this possible philosophy of education that I’m fit for nothing? It certainly looks like I simply have no interest in anyone else, cannot work out how the people around me think and feel and I’m also completely uninterested in how physical things work.

This would seem to mean that my actual career choice, economics, makes sense. For as we all know they’re slightly odd people and it’s rare that any one of them has been able to tell us how anything in the real world works.

Ah, but…there is a but you see…that’s not quite the lesson of the tests. The actual number scored doesn’t matter. This is because the answers to the questions are entirely subjective. If I say “Slightly Agree” I might place a different meaning on “slightly” than the next person to take the test. The same thing happens when I’m asked if I “care” about something. What value am I placing on “care”? That my heart grieves if I upset someone? Or that I should care because I have obviously been impolite?

I am, like anyone else, placing my own meanings on those words. This is what subjective means, that we do not have a single rigorous standard against which we are measuring things.

Does this mean the tests don’t work then? No, not at all. What we’re actually interested in is the ratio between the two numbers, the actual result of the full test. Yes, all of my answers will be subjective, but they will be in the same way throughout both tests. So if I have an SQ higher than my EQ I have a “male type” brain.
This is the point of this philosophy and its application to education. Who has a male, female or balanced type brain and what does that mean they should think about doing in the future?

[tags]philosophy of education, EQSQ, personality test,[/tags]

So I took the two (which are really one) tests linked up above there and the results seem to indicate that I shouldn’t be applying for any psychiatry jobs anytime soon. Or any jobs in fact: am I actually human?
Samantha? The envelope please. On the empathizing quiz (EQ) I got 12 and the systemizing (SQ) 23. Just to give you an idea of the scale, the men’s average is 39 (EQ) and 61.2 (SQ). Looks rather like I’m a complete and total failure then, nearly completely unable to recognize the feelings of others and also incompetent at anything that requires detailed thought and logical thinking.

As one who knows me has already pointed out this sounds about right. Actually, they went a little further and told me that not only should I not be applying for any jobs, psychiatric or not, the results mean I should be a source of gainful employment for many already in those jobs for years to come.

I could also point to my (female) boss’ results when I encouraged her to take the test, just for contrast. 65 EQ and 111 SQ. Clearly we are in the correct positions on the totem pole then.

However, despite the glee with which the proof of my inadequacy has been greeted, the two tests, SQ and EQ, actually combine to make just the one test. And it’s that one test that gives us the information we are actually looking for.

I’ll explain it tomorrow to give a chance for you, the reader, to work out what the answer is. Any guesses in the comments.

Tomorrow I’m going to take the personality quiz offered at the top there. The EQSQ one. I’m very slightly worried about it as the last time I took a similar test it actually asked me if I was really a human being at the end. Fortunately science has advanced in recent years. I’ll let you know the results of course and we’ll find out whether I’m in the correct line of work.

One of the things to remember about these tests (and other scientific personality quizzes) is that while they’re based on what seem to be sexual differences that’s actually the opposite of what we use them for. Yes, it’s true that if you test a group of men they are more likely to be systemizers than empathizers. Similarly, a group (or an individual woman) of women is more likely to be an empathizer than a systemizer. If that is all we were interested in, the probability or possibility that an individual was more “male” or “female”, then we could simply ask them “Err, umm, when you, you know, go, do you do it standing up or sitting down?” and we would have our probability. No other tests needed.

But what we actually find, outside those direct sexual differences, (the plumbing bits to do with making babies) is that while men and women are indeed different on average, men are more different from men and women from women than the averages are from each other.

If that sounds complicated think of it this way. We can find men who are more empathic than the average woman and women who are more systemizing than the average man. That’s the purpose of these personality quizzes, to find out these things in greater detail.

After all, as every relationship counselor will tell you, fun as the plumbing bits are they’re not the really important things in life now are they?

Tags [tags] personality quiz, feminism, sexual differences, quiz, EQSQ [/tags]