I have to admit that the requirements for this particular career rather surprised me. Two college degrees? Indeed, it is necessary to have a Master’s in library sciences in order to get just about any job as a librarian (except in smaller schools, for example) which means, of course, before taking that advanced college degree, one must have a Bachelor’s. This can be in just about any subject: here, the first college degree is being used as a signaling device, to show that you are bright enough to do the second program, that second college degree not building on your previous knowledge but starting anew in the new subject.

The job itself does involve what you think it does: what you see librarians actually doing, helping people to find things in a, umm, library. However, it goes much further than that. Libraries don’t work without rigorous classification of what is in them. It’s not too tough in a high school library, of course, but imagine in a college one (or for real horrors, The Library of Congress, which gets a copy of every book published), if there weren’t a series of stern rules about how everything was going to be organized.

As the BLS tells us, the job is pretty well paid averages being over $40,000 a year (for reference, the median household income is just over $40,000, the median for an individual, $29,000) so that second college degree, all indoor work no heavy lifting, might well be worth it.

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned I think it’s pretty obvious, don’t you? A rigid system of classification, where each incoming books must be assigned to the correct section (and subsection and so on), the librarian having to decide into which it goes, yes, this is something for the systemizers, the male brain types among us.

Yes, I knew we would get to talk about lawyers at some point! What I didn’t realise was that there were quite so many of them. According to the BLS there are nearly 750,000 across the country! With roughly 150 million people working that means that 0.5%, or one in ever two hundred, is actually a lawyer. Those jokes about an empty seat in a bus full of lawyers going over a cliff being a waste of a seat make a little more sense now.

Well, perhaps not actually because a society ruled by laws requires lawyers to operate and even the most grasping partner in a commercial law firm is upholding that very law that keeps us all free. Even more so those who are doing general practice work or criminal law. So we’ll keep the jokes to a minimum I think.

At the top end law is amazingly well paid, senior partners at the biggest firms make well over $1 million a year. Those at the lower end or newly qualified still do well, $40,000 and up.

The educational qualifications necessary are tough though. The first college degree (which can be in pretty much anything) and then a further college degree, meaning three years in law school. There are a few states that allow correspondence courses or distance learning instead of law school and even one or two that allow learning law by doing it: instead of law school, working in a law office. After that, it is also necessary to pass the bar exam which is, as the laws in each state are different, different in each state. (Note, Louisiana is completely different, it’s based on French law, not the old English law of all the rest.)

As to our EQSQ personality tests, the method of educating people to be a lawyer requires intense systemizing skills. However, after qualification it becomes rather different. Those specializing in corporate or commercial law can be complete male brain types while those working in courtrooms need much more empathy, to be able to question witnesses properly and talk and persuade juries. Male and balanced brain types then, for I’m not convinced that pure empathizers would get through the training.

There has been a move, stoutly resisted by the professionals, to rather change the meaning of this job description. You see it on lawn services, gardening companies, calling themselves ‘landscape architects’, in rather the same way that garbagemen are now waste disposal experts. As I say, stoutly resisted by the professionals for landscape architects are in fact designers more than anything else.

As the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us, the job is not the maintenance of an existing environment, but the design of a new one. This involves highly systemizing activities, such as analysis of the current landscape, the rainfall, drainage, sunlight patterns and so on, and a great deal of thought about how these might be changed in order to improve them. Sometimes this is in the creation of a new park, as an example, or the beautification of a residential area, other tasks could include the resotoration of a coal mine or similar industrial site. This is, as you might imagine, a more complex task than deciding to throw a few bushes in that plot of land over there.

However, before we start to think that this is a job exclusively for systemizers (as defined by our EQSQ personality tests), we also need to note that the second part of the job is about design. This obviously requires empathy, for the important point is the effect of such designs upon other people, how they perceive them, how they make them feel. So, again by our EQSQ personality tests, we should probably class this profession as one for those with the balanced brain type.

Entry level jobs are almost exclusively awarded to those who have a college degree, a Bachelor’s in landscape architecture. Even then, that might not be enough as many employers now also want to see practical reults from an internship. There are also those seeking advanced college degrees, perhaps a Master’s, again in landscape architecture.

A book that’s been out a month or so, ‘The Female Brain’ has been getting a certain amount of bashing from all the right people. Perhaps the most startling claim was that in a day women use 20,000 words while men use 7,000. Given that most people have a vocabulary of a couple of thousand words (you need, according to some dimly remembered factoid, about 5,000 to read a serious newspaper cover to cover) I thought that was odd but what was meant was the number in total, all repetitions of individual words. So, women talk more than men. Unfortunately, as Mark Liberman points out, this is nonsense. As Jonah Lehrer says, this was not the result of any research or science, rather, taken from an, umm, self-help book. Linda Hirshman is also most amusing (and scathing) about the academic qualifications, methods, well, almost everything about the book and its author.

Mark also uses this story as a stepping off point to look at our own EQSQ personality tests. It’s a more in depth look at the statistics behind much of our discussions here and for those who like their graphs and numbers it repays a close reading.

His basic point is that we should neither accept the absurdities propagated in books like The Female Brain nor deny that there are (or could be) distinct differences between male and female brain types. We should be looking towards the science, what we can both observe and replicate (and logically explain) rather than using rather weak stereotypes. Our personality tests are part of that science.

I would add just one more point to Mark’s analysis. As he points out, male and female brain types are not entirely distinct, they are a continuum, a spectrum and deciding that one person has a ‘male brain’ or female is a matter of our classification system, not necessarily some immutable feature of the universe. Yet as we saw from yesterday’s post, using our personality tests and that classification system we do think that 17% of men have the female type brain, and 17% of women the male, these types being influenced by the amount of fetal testosterone. If we look only at the averages of male versus female performance on tests we miss that important distinction, that there will be some women who greatly outperform most if not all men and vice versa, on things normally considered to be the preserve of the other sex.

Which leads to the conclusion that we should be treating everyone as individuals, not simply group members, for as so often, when we look at things like IQ, or race, or in this case supposed sexual characteristics, variations within the goups are greater than those between them.

One of the things my Google Alerts threw up at me this morning was a link to this New York Times (registration required) article by Simon Baron-Cohen in which he expands upon his ideas about autism. All the things that we’ve covered here are mentioned. That (using our EQSQ personality tests) autism can be described as an extreme form of the male brain, that both mothers and fathers of autistic children show evidence of systemizing or male brain type behavior, that there are indeed physical differences between male and female brains physiologically and then came the bit I wasn’t aware of.

While there are indeed physical differences between male and female brains (the size of various bits and so on) this isn’t the part that Baron-Cohen is concentrating upon. Rather, he’s interested in the influence of fetal testosterone which is know to influence the future sociability of the child. It is large amounts of such that create the male brain type (and thus, given that males have more, men are more likley to have such) and low amounts that create the female type. Note that this has little to do with the physical structure of the brain.

However, that’s not actually the part I found most interesting. Rather, his comments on assortative mating, whereby like attracts like, and we thus have systemizers marrying systemizers and thus reinforcing the genes that lead to the male brain type. This is what, he thinks, is causing the rise in autism as such genes reinforce each other and create the super systemizers: the autisitics.

Two things follow from this: why the rise in assortative mating? That, I think, comes from the vastly greater freedoms that women now have in the workplace. Society is now much freer in who one might meet and marry and that greater freedom has led to more assortative mating.

The second is that we might use our EQSQ personality tests as a dating guide. If you have a male type brain, or at least a very male type brain, you might want to make sure that you don’t end up marrying another with the same brain type. Or is that being too logical about things like love and attraction?

Reading through the BLS description of this profession it should be immediately obvious to regular readers of this site where I’m going to place them on our EQSQ personality tests. (Go straight to the bottom if you can’t wait!)

The first and most obvious requirement is of course that you are fluent in more than one language. (Although I have done some translation work myself and I’m not fluent in any other: taking a half translated piece of Russian style English and turning it into good written English. But that’s more editing with a knowledge of a language than actual translation.) More than that is a college degree. The interesting thing about this is that the college degree doesn’t have to be in languages or any specific language. In fact, being bilingual and also having a college degree in say, engineering, or physics, or business, can make you much more attractive as an interpreter or translator in the fields of, respectively, engineering, physics…etc.

The difference between the two jobs is that interpreters work with spoken language and translators on the page. The former are almost always face to face, they need to be because there is so much in spoken or vocalised language that is more than the mere words. Translators almost always work from an office or home and at their own speed. The level of accuracy required in the latter job is much higher.
So, I think you can now see what I’m going to say about the two, yes? While both jobs need superb language skills the interpreters will be the female brain, empathic types, dealing as they are with people and trying to convey emotion and nuance, while the translators will be the more male brain ones, working alone to provide an absolutely accurate version of a text in another language.

I must admit to being rather surprised here as I thought this was something which first wives did after they stopped being such. OK, OK, that’s my disgustingly patriarchal remark for the week out of the way. More seriously I was indeed surprised to find quite how structured the education requirements are. At minimum is a two or three year college degree (an Associate’s) in design which leads to a possible job as an assistant or a full college degree (a Bachelor’s) which could lead to joining a full apprentice program. After that, at least three, possibly four years of on the job experience before you are even eligible to sit the licence exams which just under half the states require (in states that don’t, it’s still a good idea to take it to prove how well trainend you are). That is, as I say, a great deal more than I had originally thought.

I think this is part of it. In my (outdated no doubt) language an interior designer is someone who advises on paint color, curtains and furniture. It appears that the job is much more than that now, encroaching very much on the prior preserve of the architect. Advising and helping to design the basic layout of a house, for example, most especially in renovation schemes. This thus requires the use of CAD programs and so on, not just ideas for design in and of itself: the reading of blueprints too.

As for our EQSQ personality tests I would, given my misconception above, have said a purely female brain, empathizing type job. With the new knowledege I would now say balanced brain type. Yes, the female brain talents for understanding moods created by certain layouts, colors and so on are needed, but so are the more masculine ones of structural and spatial design.

As I mentioned yesterday insurance underwriters are the other side of that split in the insurance industry. If we are to think of things with respect to our EQSQ personality tests then there’s this slightly weird thing about the whole sector that puts all of the empathizers, the female brain types, on one side in sales, and all of the male brain types, the systemizers, on the other, here, as underwriters.

The reason being that the sales people are dealing with the customers all the time, persuading them, listening to and reacting to their hopes and desires. The underwriters are then taking the information collected and making the decisions as to how much the insurance is going to cost. In fact, the companies don’t want them to have any empathy at all! While a lot of this is now done by computer there’s still something of an art to the work. The aim is decide how much of a risk the individual is and then charge the appropriate price. As the BLS says this can be a satisfying career for those who ‘ enjoy analyzing information and paying attention to detail’ . Yes, that really does sound like systemizers, doesn’t it?

To get even an entry level job as an underwriter it’s normally necessary to have a college degree in business administration or finance with classes in accounting. They will sometimes accept those with other college degrees (the so called intelligence loophole. The possession of a college degree shows that you have the intelligence to do the job, even if that degree is not in the right subject) but the accounting classes will still be necessary. The job also requires continual ongoing education, both to learn new computer programs and databases and also to keep up with developments in the policies and underwriting processes themselves. The law, for example, changes all the time on such complex products.

These poor guys, the insurance sales agents, are the butt of so many jokes it becomes not funny. Woody Allen even once pointed out that he knew there was a hell because he’d once spent a whole evening with such a sales agent.
All of that is really rather unkind as we do indeed need insurance and someone has to sell it to us (or, if you prefer, there has to be someone we can buy it from). The reputation really comes from the old days of door to door sales, purely on commission. That’s pretty much dead now, most now working out of offices, on salaries.
Although there are a number of old line people in the profession who started as high school graduates and passed the various State licence exams, nowadays it’s really only college graduates (or those who have been extremely successful selling elsewhere in the financial industry) who get hired at the entry level. While there are some college degree programs specifically in insurance, more likely is a college degree in business, business administration, economics or a similar subject. A good familiarity with computers is also essential.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, the insurance industry is really quite interesting for us as a case study. The way the industry is split puts almost all of the systemizing types on one side, in one job (underwriting) and almost all of the empathic people on the sales side, as our insurance sales agents. While the ability to use the sophisticated software is necessary, the people who are successful in this side of the industry are those who can relate properly to the emotions and desires of the customers. That’s empathy by another name.

Yurk, what a job title, eh? What they actually mean is, as the BLS tells us, those who train teachers and help to develop the curriculum. Or, as every teacher I’ve ever come across calls them, the enemy. Of course, they’re not quite that bad, that’s just a little bit of inter-professionals rivalry. What the job actually entails is working for the school district (or if in the private sector, for a school or series of them) in developing the teaching methods and teaching staff. The aim is to gradually and continually improve things by applying the latest and best methods of drumming a few facts into the tender minds of the little darlin’s supposedly being educated.

One of the down sides of the job is that it’s one of the few jobs in education where you don’t get the long vacations and the summer off: one of the plus sides is that the income is considerably higher.

The education requirements are, at minimum, a four year college degree, usually in education. A teacher’s licence is sometimes also required although this varies by state. More and more, as with so many such professional jobs, a further college degree, a master’s, is required as the entry level qualification.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, this is, I think, a job suited to those with the balanced brain type. One part of the job, the investigation and design of books, software, programs and so on suitable for use would be something for systemizers. Being able to meet with, convince and carry with you the teachers necessary to makce such plans work would require more empathic qualities. So, as I say, something for the balanced brain types to do.