Vive la Difference

Allow me to relax the rules a little, this being dress down Friday after all. I’m going to stray a little from our more normal subject of the EQ and SQ tests and the differences between the male and female brain types and instead make a point about online education. Or even education online if you prefer.

We’ve looked before at how recent changes in eligibility for subsidized student loans are likely to change education in America. Until the recent change in the law only those colleges that did more than 50% of their teaching on campus (that is, not by online or distance education) could allow their students to qualify for Federal subsidies to their student loans. This has now changed and I’d expect to see something of a boom in education online as people will now be able to purchase such distance education both from the traditional, campus based, colleges and also from the newer, only online, education suppliers.

Good, excellent, more choice, more education, just what a good little economist like me would like to see.

We’re also seeing much of the education provided on those traditional campuses also being provided online. Professors and lecturers are recording their material so that it can be listened to on iPods, for example. Others are filming them and making them available over the internet. Class notes are put up on websites, in essence the new technologies are allowing students to study where and when they want, not necessarily gather in one room when the teacher wants.

But much the funniest comment comes from this headline in the LA Times.

As college professors post lectures online, they’re seeing a rise in absenteeism. 

Ahem. That’s actually the point isn’t it?

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, iPod, LA Times, education online, online education,student loans, technology, tech, college [/tags]

That headline is taken directly from the New Scientist for this week from a little tale about a new device that might help those with autism.

As I’ve looked at before here there’s a connection between our EQ and SQ tests and autism. No, it’s OK, taking the tests doesn’t provoke it, not at all. You can take those personality tests up at the top there with no fear of anything happening other than that you learn a little more about yourself. And perhaps gain some guidance as to what might be suitable career choices, education and training or even higher education for you. They’re based on a philosophy of education, a school of psychology if you like, which notes that people can be divided into those who are emapathizers or sympathizers. You might think that such a free personality test would make a strange sort of aptitude career test but that is one of the psychiatric’s jobs. To look at the human mind and see which career education would be most suitable.

One offshoot of the research is the supposition that autism is simply an expression of an extreme form of the male type brain and there’s a number of reasons to think that this may well be true. The incidence of autism is a great deal higher (as much as 10x) in men, men are more likely to be systemizers and excessive systemizing (or a near total lack of empathy, if you prefer,) is almost the description of the disease.

Which is what makes this new gadget so interesting.

One of the problems facing people with autism is an inability to pick up on social cues. Failure to notice that they are boring or confusing their listeners can be particularly damaging, says Rana El Kaliouby of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s sad because people then avoid having conversations with them.”

The “emotional social intelligence prosthetic” device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate.

If it is true that people with autism are in fact excessively systemizing (or, as above, not empathic enough) then can we use technology to aid them? To show them a little more about how to read other’s emotions?

This is now where I get silly of course. If autism is simply an excessive form of the male brain then what will happen when we apply Moore’s Law to these devices? (The idea that the number of transistors on a chip double every 18 months.) They will, of course, become more and more sensitive. We might, in a couple of decades, actually have something that can read emotions properly for everyone. That may or may not be a good thing actually.

Men might finally work out what it is that their wives really want. Is civilization ready for this I ask myself? Would that increase or decrease the number of psychiatric’s jobs? (or, if we want to be picky, even psychiatrics jobs or psychiatrics’ jobs?)
[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, autism, new scientist, psychiatric jobs, mental health, health care, technology, gadgets [/tags]

So, do you think accounting is something for empathizers or systemizers? Do you think it’s something where we expect to see more men or more women?

Just to backtrack a moment here, we’re using the tests devised by Simon Baron-Cohen, known as the EQ/SQ tests. You can take them for free up at the top of the page there. They’re a personality test of a type, we’re interested in looking at whether people are empathizers (attuned to the emotions and desires of other people) or systemizers (more interested in physical systems). Because we find the first more often in women we refer to this as the “female” type brain. The second, more often found in men is known as the “male” type. Note that this is not about sex as such, many women have male type brains and vice versa. What we then do, having determined which brain type the individual has is look at what type of career or job might be suitable.

Which brings us today to accounting. Is this more suitable for empathizers or systemizers? At first sight you would obviously say systemizers. All those numbers, great attention to detail, systems, systems, systems, that’s what accounting actually is. However, we can in fact use our personality tests the other way around. While many women are indeed systemizers a majority of them are, given the very name “female brain” we apply to it, empathizers. So if we find that the majority of a profession or career are in fact female we’d have to assume that it was not an out and out systemizer’s job at all. We’d be taking the information from our personality test and, as I say, turning it around. The job must be less systemizing than we had thought.

We must, however, be very careful about what sort of evidence we use here. If we look at women of all ages we will still be seeing the evidence of the restrictions, both social and legal, that there were on women 30 and 40 years ago. The same will be true looking at only the topmost levels of jobs, for those are things that are achieved late in a career.

So, I found this very interesting from CFO Magazine:

According to an RHI Management Resources press release, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau statistics says that women comprised nearly 60 percent of the accountant and auditor workforce in 1999.

The press release also points out that research conducted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants shows that women account for more than half of all undergraduate degrees in accounting.

The RHI study comes about two months after a study by women’s advocacy group Catalyst, which concluded that women account for 1,622 of the 12,945 corporate officers in the nation’s 500 largest companies, or 12.5 percent. This is up from 11.9 percent in 1999 and 8.7 percent in 1995.

That last paragraph is what I mean about seeing the evidence of past discrimination. But look at the numbers entering the profession: the majority are women. It must be true that accounting is more of an empathizer’s job than we had originally thought. I think the explanation comes from the requirement to work in and lead teams, something that is very much empathy rather than systemizing.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, accounting, sex discrimination, personality test, college degree, career, profession [/tags]

Aha, I find I was slightly in error last week when I described the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery…isn’t Pentagonese such a lovely language?) as not being an aptitude career test. Apologies and grovelling to everyone.

What I was looking at was the way in which our own EQ and SQ tests up at the top there are in fact a proper aptitude career test. They look at the basic structure of the way you think, the functioning of your mind, and from that information we can give advice and make informed comments about what or which type of career might interest you. For of course we all know that you’re likely to be better at things that do interest you, are suitable for the innate talents that you have.

So, when I looked at the ASVAB I saw a series of questions that asked about what you know, not about how you think. I thus concluded that this was a test of how well you had been educated, not a proper aptitude career test at all. This is the part where I made my mistake. I only looked at half the test.

That first half is indeed a test of how much you know, some math and language, some basic logical reasoning and so on. What threw me ( I know, I know, I should do my research better) is that this is only part of the tests which are easily available online. The second part of the battery is much closer to a proper aptitude career test. For they take your results from this educational test and then start to ask a series of questions about your interests, what you like to do, exploring similar ground to our own EQ and SQ tests.

However, this second part of the tests is in fact super secret. You have to have already taken the first part properly (that is, not just played around with the online examples) and received your access code to the site from your high school teacher. Only then do you get to the parts which we could properly describe as an aptitude career test. Not only didn’t I know that I’m also a few decades too old to be able to convince a high school teacher to give me such a code.

So, sorry about that. But sneaky these military people aren’t they? Befuddling bloggers like that?
[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, military, career choice, aptitude career test, ASVAB, military [/tags]

You might have seen the newspaper reports over the weekend about the claimed rise in autism cases being diagnosed. Several ideas for this are put forward.

It might be the increasing amount of pesticides we’re all ingesting. This rather fails when you think that 99.9% of the pesticides you do eat are naturally there in the plants themselves. Man made ones are such a tiny portion that they don’t really matter.

It could be that vaccinations (and the triple, measles, mumps, rubella, or MMR is often blamed here) are to blame but no one has actually been able to come up with either any proof or a reasonable method for them to cause the problems.

There has also been another suggestion from Simon Baron-Cohen, rather an amusing one really, depending upon how you tell it. As you know, he’s the orginator of the EQ and SQ tests at the top there, those ones we use as career aptitude tests. Again, as you know, we’re using these to look at whether people are systemizers or empathizers and thus we can try and work out whether they are better suited to this or that career, based on their aptitudes. As I say, really, a career aptitude test.

Baron-Cohen has gone further in this distinction between the different brain types, he thinks that autism could be explained as an extreme form of the male brain, a super-systemizer if you like. In technical terms, he’s looked at the increasing social status, and thus likelihood of having children, of people who are very strong systemizers. People like programmers, operating systems programmers, people who are so consumed by the desire to study such systems that they actually do it for free.

He also adds another well known idea, that of associative mating. People tend to marry people like themselves. So, in this story, programming geeks are marrying programming geeks…and the genetic components that make people into geeks are being fortified, as genetics would make you think they will. So thus the rise in autism, as the attibutes that lead one to being almost autistic (or highly systemizing) are being strengthened through the generations.

A shorter way of putting it is that Linux causes autism.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, career aptitude test, linux, autism, Baron-Cohen, programming, assortative mating, vaccination, MMR [/tags]

Following on from a suggestion yesterday I thought I’d go and look at the ASVAB tests offered by the US Military. From what I understand these are aimed at seeing both whether you should think of joining the military and in the later stages, which part of it or what speciality to aim for.

In the spirit of risk taking and research for which this blog is justly famed I actually took part of the test myself. Apparently I have a great career ahead as a latrine orderly.

Actually, what I did was have a quick look through a set of test questions. The one part of it that I actually took seriously I got 14 out of 20 on. Not good, but then it was on ratios and percentages and I was trying to do it without a calculator or pen and paper. Just pure (and obviously faltering) brainpower.

That isn’t, however, what I take to be the important thing about this test though. This isn’t an aptitude career test at all. It’s a test of what you have already learned. The two are very different things. For example, asking me what is 20% of $600 doesn’t show very much about my aptitude for anything. It simply finds out whether I’ve been taught the basics of percentages. Yes, of course, a potential future employer would like to know whether I’ve been taught that, but this is a simple test of educational achievement.

An aptitude career test would be doing something very different indeed. Actually, you know, looking at your aptitude for a specific career in a test. Aptitude is not what you have already been taught. It is your innate ability at the sort of mental processes that this specific career might demand.

With our EQ and SQ (and to a lesser extent with basic IQ tests themselves) what is being looked at is your ability as a systemizer or empathizer. Certain careers demand more or less of each of those attributes, so that’s what we’re testing for. That’s why we call the EQSQ tests exactly that, aptitude career tests, and why we wouldn’t use the same description of the ASVAB.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, military, career choice, aptitude career test, ASVAB, military [/tags]

A couple of days back I was asked to comment on the way in which the military restrictions on what service women may or may not do have on the number of women in the civilian police services. At that point I had no idea and after quite a bit of searching I don’t have any conclusive information. I’ll simply have to make some deductions from what I have found out (and I would like to point out that making deductions is not the same as making things up!)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells me that Police Academies (and please, no more of those movies!), degree programs in police science and military service are the three main routes into police work.

We also know that women have restricted career choices in the military. While these career choices have indeed become less restrictive recently it is still true that they are not supposed to be in direct front-line combat units.

I’ve also found out that the military police are not considered to be one of those front line combat units. Which would, if this logic is applicable, mean that we would expect the percentage of women in the military police to be higher than it is in the military generally. (Well, think about it for a moment, if there are some units that are 0% women and the Army is 15% women, then those units with women must be more than 15% women, right?)

In general the Armed Forces are 15% women (although the Marine Corps is a lot lower, at 6% or so).

So, although I can’t find the actual and exact number, I’d be happy in stating that the percentage of women in the military police is above 15%.

Now for the number that really surprised me. Only 9.5% of all police officers are women. At this point I think I’d have to say that the military are in fact likely to increase the number of female police officers. If you ponder for a moment, the most likely career after the military for a military policeman is going to be as a civilian policeman, correct? So if this training ground is more than 15% women, and they are feeding into the civilian forces which are less than 10% female, then they’re likely to be increasing the number of female officers.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, military, career choice, police, sex, discrimination, military police [/tags]

Yesterday I posted about nurse midwives and the disparity between the number of men and women who actually do that job. With our EQ and SQ aptitude career tests we would have assumed that perhaps 30 % of men were empathic rather than systemizers and that we would thus find that 30% or so of the people in a highly empathic job would be men.

What we actually found was that 2% of nurse midwives in the US (and only 0.3% in the UK) were in fact men. My own (entirely unsupported by any facts, mind you) supposition is that we’ll never actually have that 30% in this specific speciality and that this will be more to do with the desires of the women actually having the babies (and perhaps their husbands as well).

In the comments it was also suggested that hospice nurses would be the very most empathic job possible. Aiding people to a comfortable and dignified death, yes, I can see the logic there. From a description of what the job actually involves:

Although being a nurse of any kind is very difficult, dealing every day with a dying person requires an exceptional temperament, one that embodies great caring, patience, and resolve.

Knowing that every single patient you have is there for the express purpose of dying. Ouch, I know that I couldn’t do that. One point that was made that was in the 1980s a goodly portion, perhaps even half, of such nurses were in fact male. I have a feeling (again, unsupported by evidence) that this was a coincidence, the meeting of the rise of the hospice movement with the onset of the AIDS epidemic. For really quite obvious reasons one could imagine that some male nurses were greatly more aware of what was going on than others, certainly more than the world in general (as that play by Randy Shilts, “And the Band Played On” shows).

When I was looking around for (and not finding) the statistics on the percentage of male hospice nurses I did find some numbers on the sex split in nursing as a whole.

Yes! Traditionally, more women go into nursing than men. In Maryland, a full 10 percent of nurses are men. Nationwide, in 1996, 5 percent of RNs were men, up from 4 percent in 1992. And, the number of men enrolled in BSN programs increased from 9.5 percent in 1992, to 11 percent in 1997. During this same period, the number of men in graduate programs jumped from 4.6 percent to 7.8 percent.

And:

A shortage of 400,000 nurses nationwide is expected by 2020, according to the Journal of American Medicine. In Washington, about one percent of the state’s nurses are men, significantly less than the national average of six percent.

I think what we’re seeing here is exactly the same as what we see in those professions considered to be traditionally male. As the direct discrimination falls away, more people are using aptitude career tests, like our own EQ and SQ tests, and deciding upon careers that suit them as individuals, based upon their own aptitudes, careers that test them, not just allowing societal pressures to push them one way or the other. The quick and dirty test for this is to see if those in training for a particular job are a higher percentage male (or female) than those already doing it. If so, then the situation is getting better.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, nurse, career choice, hospice, AIDS, sex, discrimination, aptitude career test [/tags]

Yesterday I had a look at the career choice of airline pilot. I was interested to see whether in this highly systemizing job whether there were more men than women (yes) and then also whether there were as many women as we might expect. For as we know from our EQ SQ tests we would expect some 30% of women to be systemizers.

So today I’ve tried to pick the most empathic job I can. I’m sure there are others even more so and if you’ve got ideas about what they may be please let me know. But nurse midwives, can you think of anything where empathy is quite such an important part of the job?

As I’ve tried to point out in a very rough and ready way in recent posts we’re interested not in the difference between men and women (well, not at this moment in time, at least), but in the difference between the male and female brain types. Our Emotional and Systemizing Quotient tests (up at the top of the page there) are trying to work out whether people are more likely to be interested in people and their emotions (empathizers) or in systems and things (systemizers) and as a rough rule of thumb we call these the “female” type brain and “male” such, simply because these traits are more often found in women and men respectively. But not in all men and women, our rough calculations make us think that some 30% of women are systemizers and 30% of men empathizers.

Our interest is, of course, in helping to identify those brain types and then help guide people into the appropriate career choices.

So, nurse midwives, a job description from the UK:

“You have to be a people person. Of course you need to be aware of women’s needs and it helps if you can talk the hind legs off a donkey. If you can communicate well with people it makes life so much easier.”

That certainly sounds like empathy to me.

“The male midwives in this country are excellent - they are very gentle people and they like helping women. But you don’t find many men like that around.”

“Not many” might be a slight exaggeration but certainly less than most shall we say?

But how many of these midwives are in fact men? Should we expect it to be that 30% of men that we think are empathizers? I think there’s several reasons why not. One would be the reluctance of women (or husbands) to have a male midwife, another that we’re talking about the extreme end of the distribution for empathy where we’d expect to see fewer men and one that I wasn’t aware of until today: at least in the UK it was illegal for a man to be a midwife until 1983.

The actual numbers though are still rather disappointing. In the US about 2% of nurse midwives are male and in the UK only 0.3%. One comment that did make me laugh:

…a mother who was unhappy with her antenatal care at a hospital birth centre was referred to a community midwife who turned out to be a 55-year-old man. She says she was initially “dumbfounded and embarrassed” and could not see how any man could grasp the emotions involved in pregnancy or the agonies of childbirth.
However, once she overcame these concerns she found that he was actually “much more caring and sympathetic” than the female midwives she had met previously.

You see! There are indeed men more empathic than some women. So don’t let your career choices be determined by society, go with your own desires and aptitudes. Which is, of course, what our tests are for, to help you determine your aptitudes. Go on, they’re up at the top there, entirely free.

[tags]free personality tests, IQ test, EQ, SQ, nurse, career choice, sex discrimination, midwife, nurse midwives [/tags]

I wrote last week about the differences in the numbers of women and men who take certain college majors and it was interesting to see that roughly 30% of men took classes that we think should appeal to empathizers and 30% of women to those that we would think would be better for sytemizers.

As you know, those tests at the top there, the EQSQ ones (hey, they’re free personality tests so try them out!) are trying to work out who has a female brain and who has a male type one. Now, while our study so far is extremely rough and ready, those college numbers seem to imply that some 30% of men have a female type brain and 30% of women a male one. Which is of course why such free personality tests are so important: before deciding upon a career choice or college major it might be a good idea to work out which type you are.

What occured to me this afternoon was that we might be able to use these numbers in another interesting way. If it really is true that 30% have the other type brain then we should expect to find, say, 30% of the people doing a heavily systemizer’s job being female, right? So what would be the most intensely systematic job that you could think of? If you’ve got a better idea let me know but I chose pilots. The reason for this is simple. Pilots who aren’t interested in detail, who don’t follow the precise rules, who are not in fact intensely systematic, well, we have a different word for them. We call them dead pilots.

So, we might expect 30% of airline pilots to be female. Now, from a USA Today report on one of the first women captains, I’m told that in the 1970s (as recently as that!) there were none. From Women in Aviation International I get these figures:

As you can see, nothing like 30%. But that is nothing like 30% yet. These things take time to change of course, so I would say that what we’re actually seeing is evidence that there used to be direct discrimination against female pilots (”No! you’re a woman, you can’t!”) and that the social changes are taking time to work through the system. As you can see from the right hand column (the number and percentage of women in each class) there are many more female students than there are qualified. So the numbers are at least moving in the right direction.

Hhhm. This is getting quite interesting don’t you think? We started with a little bit of research, found that we had a free personality test built on that and we’ve now got a (very crude, I admit) method of measuring discrimination between men and women. Yes, I think we might have to pursue this a little further. Now to think of the most empathic job I can and see if men are under-represented.
[tags]free personality tests, higher education, EQSQ, aviation, career choice, feminism, sex discrimination, pilot, [/tags]