Vive la Difference

This is almost certainly the most difficult and highly trained job you can try and get. It’s a great deal more demanding than just getting the right college degree, that’s for sure. There’s the fist college degree, usually, but not exclusively, pre-med and takes four years. Then another college degree, the doctoral (an MD, rather than a Ph.D.) and then on top of that anything from 2 to 6 years further training on the job before anyone thinks that you are really qualified. It’s also, once all that training’s been finished, extremely hard work, with more than half the profession working 60 hours a week or more.

On the other hand, it’s also very highly paid. There aren’t all that many areas where the average income is around a quarter million dollars a year. After all that training, all those college loans, you might think they’ve earned that much actually. Worth noting here that the military has an excellent scheme for doctors, including a lot of potential subsidy for the training.

Now we all know what it is that doctors do (Just to remind: physicians are the ones that we spend most of our time with. Surgeons are the ones who cut us up and stitch us back together again.) so I think the interesting thing is to look at our EQSQ personality tests.

With all of that scientific training and the requirement to actually diagnose someone (which is systemizing in a fairly pure form) we would think we were looking exclusively for male brain types. But that isn’t quite true I think. There are areas where empathy (for example, in pediatrics) is very important too. So I think this is one of those professions where there are possibly different personality types within it. Everyone needs to have strong male brain skills, yes, but then some also need to have strong female brain or empathic ones as well. So we’d probably be looking for male and balanced brain types here.

It’s amazing how discussions of a particluar subject seem to come along in bunches really. After a couple of recent pieces about assortative (or assortive, if you prefer) mating I find this today via Andrew Leigh. Now remember, we’re interested in assortative mating in so far as it helps to explain the rise in autism. The assumption is that if systemizing types (as by our EQSQ personality tests) are marrying each other with greater frequency then we might well assume that this is creating more of the super-systemizing (or extreme male type brains) that Simon Baron-Cohen thinks is actually the cause of autism.

Now, for this to stand up we need to be able to prove that there really is more assortative mating going on. We’ve seen that we think there is, and that this can have effects on such things as odd, initially, as the distribution of incomes. That argument goes that if having a college degree is the gateway to a decent job and thus a decent family income, then as is more and more the case, those with college degrees marry those who also have them, and those who don’t have college degrees marry those similarly without, then we’d expect to see a widening of the income distribution. Which we do indeed see.

The paper that Leigh links to looks at the difference between preferences (do we like tall people, short, redheads etc, or of course personality types) and opportunities, that is the number of people it is possible to meet, using data from a speed dating agency. What they find is that opportunities matter most. However, when it comes to actual marriage, preferences do. We can very roughly use this to say that the larger social circles that we all have as a result of modern life do indeed lead to greater choices amongst who we marry (by any metric, not just personality type) and also that preferences matter when choosing a mate. Greater choice, more selection, that is assortative mating.

Physician assistants occupy an interesting grey area somewhere beteween nurses and doctors themselves. They have the power to both diagnose and prescribe, but they always work under the supervision of a fully qualified doctor (who may or may not be actually on the site at the time). The profession is expected to grow much faster than the average (according to the BLS) both because of the expected expansion of the health care industry and the pressure to reduce costs. The latter is really driven by the recognition that 95% of treatments really do not need someone trained for nearly a decade to diagnose or treat them. Such expertise will do well being saved for that much smaller number of problems that really need the extra knowledge.

That said, the educational qualifications appear almost bizarre. Nearly all entrants into a training programs will already have a full four year college degree. But then the college degree awarded can range from an Associate’s all the way to a Master’s. I have a feeling that this is because it is all quite new, and the 135 different schools offering these college degrees range from community colleges all the way to programs attatched to medical schools and research hospitals. The training might be very similar, but not everywhere is allowed to award a Master’s (nor even a Bachelor’s) degree. It’s also worth noting that this is an area of training where the military provide a very good program.

Our EQSQ personality tests? It’s medicine, dealing day to day with patients in a very similar manner to senior and specialist nurses, so empathy or the female brain attributes are definitely needed. It’s also like a half-way house to being a doctor, and as we know they need to have very high systemizing abilities. So I think we’d probably be looking at, recommending this, to those who are balanced brain types by our personality tests.

As with our look at the aides and assistants to physical therapists last week, there’s a definite similarity between physical therapists and occupational ones. The difference is that physical therapists seem to be working on the people, making them fit for their environment, while the occupational ones are much more to do with making the environment fit the special needs of the patients.

The training to become a physical therapist is intense: at the very minimum a Master’s college degree is required. In fact, there are some 205 places offering college degrees that will lead to accreditation and only 94 of them are Master’s: all of the rest are Doctorate level college degrees. This isn’t a job you’re going to get into without being stretched by the education system, that’s for sure.
As to our EQSQ personality tests, well, one of the things I always find difficult is placing a job or occupation on an absolute scale of requiring systemizing or empathic traits. It’s much easier to compare two and say, oh, this needs more empathy, or this is obviously more systemizing. The amount of science that goes into training a therapist means, obviously, that they will need to have more systemizing abilities than those who become aides or assistants. But on an absolute scale, where do they lie? Certainly, as therapy is a form of hands on and direct medical care, empathising is most important. As the BLS notes, physical therapists need to have strong interpersonal skills and compassionate natures: very much a description of empathy or female brain skills. But with that already mentioned science, the diagnosis of and structuring of recovery plans, so will systemizing skills be required: so perhaps a balanced brain type is best here?

Reading through this is all highly reminiscent of what we said about the aides and assistants to Occupational Therapists a few weeks ago. In fact, I was rather scratching my head (yes, I know, lovely image, eh?) over what was the difference. Then it became clear. The occupational type deal with the environment in which people find themselves, they attempt to adapt that environment to the people’s needs. That might mean designing new equipment and so on. Here, the physical therapists are more involved with designing the people to fit with the environment: so they’re much more involved with the health care side of things, if you see what I mean.

Having said that the difference between aides and assistants of the two types of therapists is pretty much the same. The aides are trained on the job and the associates usually have a college degree. There are some 260 or so schools and programs across the country that offer a two year (or Associate’s) college degree in occupational therapy which is the usual entry level qualification. Some states also have licencing requirements.

As to our EQSQ personality tests I think we can see pretty quickly that this will be a job for our female brain type people, those with the more empathic qualities and personality. Partly because this is in some ways an offshoot of nursing, which as we know is regarded as needing a huge amount of those empathic qualites, and also because of the specifics of the job: the aides and assistants are doing the hands on work with the patients, while the therapists themselves are also doing the systemizing work of diagnosing and then designing the course of treatment.

My little jaunts through the BLS job banks are continually throwing up surprises. Who would have thought that there were 129,000 professional photographers in the US? It’s one of those numbers that makes me sit back and think ‘Whoa!’. Then reality kicks back in and I begin to add together all those wedding guys, the portrait ones, the industrial, commercial and the photojournalists and it makes sense again.

Anyway, I think we all know what a photographer actually does so what about the training? To get into the more desirable jobs it is now pretty much necessary to have a college degree in the subject. Such college degrees in photography are offered at many universities, also at junior colleges, vocational schools and so on. It’s also training offered by the military: good experience there is very useful indeed in getting a job as a photojournalist, most especially covering a war (which, amazingly, is what Al Gore’s army service was).

Now, what do we think would be the brain type best suited to this job? From our EQSQ personality tests, would we think that a male or female brain type would be best? Something a little difficult actually, as the subject itself is intensely technical. Not just working out the light and settings: although digital cameras now mean that photographers don’t do their own developing, that’s been replaced by all the time they spend using photoshop. So that’s definite systemizing skills needed.

But there’s also something without which no one can be a decent photographer. What’s known as ‘the eye’. An instinctive knowledge about how to compose the image, the one micro-second when everything is just right. That to me sounds very much like an empathic skill. You can have all the technical knowledge in the world, all the systemizing skills themselves, but if you don’t have that eye you’re not going to make it professionally.

So I think we’d have to say that those with the balanced brain type would be best at being photographers, don’t you?

I’ve been looking around at some background stuff to assortative mating. As you know from yesterday’s post there’s a linkage between our guru’s (Simon Baron-Cohen that is) thoughts on what is causing the rise in autism and our EQSQ personality tests. As we saw yesterday, assortative mating covers a lot more ground that just the systemizing and empathic traits that our personality tests deal with: it also appears to be part of what is driving the increasing disparity of household incomes in the US.

There’s another well known area where assortative mating has had a huge effect. That’s in the Hindu caste system in places like India and Nepal. The essential idea is that you are born into one of four major groups (which then go on to become some 1,000 separate sub groups) and which group you are part of determines your place in society, in the workplace and, crucially, who you marry. Now one of things that is noted is that the higher castes are quite different genetically from the lower castes. The assumption has always been that the higher castes are descended from the conquerors of the land some 5,000 years ago while the lower castes are the descendants of the conquered. This article explains what they’ve found by looking at the various DNA markers.

It is indeed true that the higher castes are more European (their words, not mine) and the lower more Asian.

Now the only way that such distinctions could be maintained over 5,000 years is exactly by assortative mating: like marrying like, which is exactly what happens within the caste system. I don’t retell this because I approve (or disapprove) of the practice, it’s simply an example to show you how powerful assortative mating can be.

I’ve also seen some other research on the same subject (apologies, not online) which shows that when you break down the genetic markers into those inherited via fathers and those via mothers, those from the lower castes are very rare to find in the higher castes if they come from fathers but much more prevalent if they are maternal. This makes some logical sense: in almost all societies it has been easier for a beautiful woman to marry up than it has been for a man, of whatever talents, to do so.

Via Greg Mankiw’s blog (who commented that he had always viewed Harvard University as the world’s best dating club) comes this piece in the New York Times. It’s on our old friend assortative mating, which as we know is considered by Simon Baron Cohen (who designed our EQSQ personality tests) to be the root cause of the rise in autism we’re seeing around us.

However, in this article we’re not looking at autism, rather at the growing economic divide between the rich and poor in the US. Different problem (well, for those who think that economic inequality is a problem) but that same root cause, assortative mating. The idea is that society has changed. Many more women are getting college degrees for example: in fact, I think it’s true to say that women now make up the majority of those studying for college degrees.

Where once doctors used to marry nurses, bosses secretaries (a stereotype, I know, yet that first was indeed true of my grandparents), there was a certain amount of economic mixing taking place along with marriage. Nowadays, it seems to be that those with college degrees are really only marrying others with them: those without those without. This has two effects: with more women working, in higher powered jobs than ever before, we see the high (and college educated) income households having two of those high incomes. Those without the degree are married to someone else without and thus that household has the two lower incomes.

Whether all of this matters or not is of course up to you. But there are those who do worry about economic inequality and as the article points out, marriage itself has changed considerably in recent decades. It is now much more a matter of gender equality than it ever was before. But how ironic if that battle won for such gender (and economic, within the marriage) equality comes at the cost of higher economic inequality between families?

There’s been yet another paper on the connections (or rather, absence of them) between thimerosal and autism, the MMR vaccine and autism. Black Triangle has the basic excerpts we need to understand it. The paper likens the whole tale to an urban myth, or urban legend.

As with all such things there is a minute amount, an iota, of truth which sets off the story. But through exaggeration and retelling (what we English call Chinese Whispers) the story wanders a long way from its source. With the connections between autism and the MMR vaccine it was one paper, about 12 children, a paper subsequently withdrawn, and the researcher who published it was apparently a paid witness for those seeking damages. Not the strongest of bases for a scientific case.

For thimerosal, repeated testing, where it has been added, taken out, reduced in strength, even not used any more at all, haven’t shown any reduction or increase in autism rates.

What this means to me at least it that I think Simon Baron-Cohen’s ideas are becoming ever more likely to be correct (well, given that our EQSQ personality tests are based on his very similar research, of course, I would say that). There’s a brief description here and that post links through to a longer article explaining it all in more detail.

I think it’s worth pointing out a few more things though. While B-Cohen’s explanation does point to genetics as the cause, that in no way implies that anyone is ‘at fault’. We are no more responsible for the genes that we pass on than we are for the ones we ourselves are expressed from. I also wouldn’t want our EQSQ personality tests to be used in any way whatsoever to determine whether the child of a particular couple was likely to be autistic or not. There’s no way in which they are fine grained enough for that: worth also remembering that despite the rise in incidence, it’s still uncommon, 10 in 1,000 children even with the much wider modern definition as a spectrum, not one single diagnosis.

But I am becoming more an more convinced of one thing, that this general approach seems to be the correct one. As all of the alternative explanations fall by the wayside, the one still left standing obviously becomes more believable.

Yesterday we looked at pharmacists, who are highly trained professionals with an advanced college degree. Those who help them in their work are usually called pharmacy technicians (pharmacy aides, although the two descriptions overlap, are another level down the totem pole). Usually no formal qualifications are necessary although they are often desired. There’s something of a problem because while there is that desire for formal qualifications there are no college degrees, for example, that can be taken. Much of the training is often on the job: but there are programs at community colleges, vocational schools and so on which do prepare you for the job. Having such training is one way to ensure a much better chance of getting a job.

It’s also worth noting that this is one field where the military train people: in fact that military training is highly prized by employers: they know the quality of it.

There’s about a quarter of a million people doing this job (BLS): add in the pharmacists (and the aides) and that’s over a quarter of one percent of all people working in the US are simply handing out our drugs (well, there’s those selling the other type of drugs too but…).

For the technicians, the requirement for the systemizing capabilities is less than that required of the pharmacists themselves, for there is no need for the long and expensive scientific training. The job is also much more to do with talking to, advising and generally interacting with the customers of the pharmacy. Clearly, like almost all such jobs, this requires a great deal of empathy so I think we’d go with a balanced to female brain type from our EQSQ personality tests as being most suitable here.