No, I’m afraid this really isn’t anything to do with our more normal subject of the EQSQ personality tests. It isn’t about careers, the college degrees and training that you might need to partake of a particular job, well, in fact, it flies directly in the face of our personality tests to tell the truth. For this is based specifically upon a difference in the physique of men and women, not in the brain.

You see, scientists have actually shown, properly proved, that it really should be women that do the housework. No, I agree, this doesn’t agree with the new male facade that so many of us have adopted as protective coloration in recent decades but there’s an inner Cro-Magnon within every man cheering the news. And we can’t really argue with it now, can we, for it is science?
The report is here, in The Times (that’s the London version). The point is that a certain amount of exercise that women should do so as to reduce the risks of getting breast cancer. When the scientists (remember, these are scientists!) looked at women who did housework and those who did not, then those who did had a 30% lesser risk of getting the disease. It appears that housework itself, in modern quantities, is just the form of exercise needed to make that risk reduction.
How odd that the world should be organized this way. That those most at risk of a certain disease have, culturally, been assigned the one everyday task that reduces that risk. Makes you wonder if there wasn’t some wisdom in the old ways after all?
Myself, I’m all ready for the next time my wife asks me to vacuum. I shall say, no, my dear, I really wouldn’t want you to risk your future health in that manner and I’ll add the further good news that the U-bend is all her own.

Well, I would, if I wasn’t quite so certain that my solicitousness for her future health would be highly injurious to my own short-term such. I have a strong feeling that I would end up wearing either the vacuum or the U-bend. But there we have it you see, just as our EQSQ personality tests tell it: men, the systemizers, the scientists, and women working with empathy and emotional, instead of logical, intelligence.

Production clerks are a vital part of the industrial process and while it’s a job you might think will disappear with computerization I don’t think this is actually true. It’s all about the scheduling of tasks in the production process, checking that things are indeed happening as planned, making sure that there is the required inventory and so on. As I say, you might think this is something that will disappear as an occupation with mechanization but I don’t think it will: for a huge amount of the job is in fact making sure that what the computer thinks is true is in fact true. It’s all quite fine to place trust in computers and software, but it is necessary to check against the real world at times.

The job doesn’t require a college degree, most employers hire people with a high school diploma and some experience with computers. Those who have a college degree in something related, like business services (perhaps from a community college or vocational school) will of course be more likely to get the better jobs.

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned which brain type do we think would be most suited? My opinion is that the female brain talents such as empathy will indeed be required, in so far as they are always required when you work with other people. But given that the job requires great attention to detail and the checking of them, it’s the male brain skills of systemizing that will be more necessary I think.

The real reason I’ve put this job in here is to use it as an example of a job that you really don’t want to start doing. It’s one of those ones that’s going to be entirely killed off as a result of automation and computerization. It might survive as a training ground for those who want to become purchasing agents but even that is unlikely. The actual job itself is dealing with the nitty gritty of making purchases on behalf of a company. Checking to see whether there is sufficient already in stock, looking for people who might want to bid on making supplies, sorting through the paperwork and so on. The actual negotiating to make a buy is done by the purchasing agent, a rather more exalted figure.

As you can see from that description this is, by the standards of our EQSQ personality tests, something for those with the systemizing, or male brain, type. It’s all detail and process as is obvious but what might be less so is that you really don’t want to have any empathy at all. For you’re preparing the way for people to sell to your employer: the last thing you want to do is actually start liking the people who do that now is it? You want to be entirely indifferent to them, so as to be able to get the best deal possible.

At present there is no requirement to have a college degree to enter the job: most training is done while actually working and usually only a high school diploma and some knowledge of computers is required. There’s not really much that a college degree can teach people about the job really.

However, a little advice from someone who has been looking at the employment market for most of this past year: this whole job sector is going to get wiped out by computers in the next couple of decades: look for something else to get into.

There’s a technical difference between what probation officers do (monitor those sentenced to less than jail) and what parole officers do (monitor those under similar restraints after they come out of jail) but in many places it’s actually the same people doing it. So it’s a slightly academic difference we might think.

The training itself, well, all the States and the Federal government (who between them set the standards for just about everyone in the field, even if they don’t employ them all directly) have a certification process and so on and just about everyone will have a college degree in social work, criminal justice or something related. Some places insist upon higher college degrees as the entry level qualificiation, a Master’s for example.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, whether it should be male brain or female brain types who would succeed in this career? That’s actually something of a bone of contention with those others who work in the criminal justice system. The general feeling is that probation and parole officers are too emotionally involved, too empathic to their charges, to be able to perform the needed oversight. Others point out (possibly quite rightly) that if they were not suitably empathic then they wouldn’t actually get the parolees and probationers to trust them and thus be unable to influence their behavior. Which leads to the crux of the argument perhaps, are they supposed to influence behavior or simply monitor it? A difficult question to which I don’t even pretend to have the answer.

A small note about job prospects: the BLS thinks that opportunities will grow about the same as the average for all jobs. That may well be true but it does depend upon the continuation of the current methods of the War on Drugs. Get some sensible policies there and the numbers of all jobs in the criminal justice system will fall like a stone.

Who hasn’t dreamt of doing this job? Usually right after Mickey Spillane gets the girl (update to Ace Ventura, Pet Detective if you wish). However, without wanting to curb anyone’s enthusiasm for being on the side of right and goodness, very little of what we see in novels or on the TV or movie screen is actually to do with what detectives and investigators do.

Most of the work that private detective do deals with civil charges and suits and most of these are dealt with, one way or the other, by paperwork. There’s very little of the bounty hunting, of the chatting up informants in seedy dives. It’s vastly more likely to be sifting through months of telephone records or credit card bills that proves the case one way or the other.

There’s no requirement to have a college degree (although almost everywhere requires licencing) at all yet nearly everyone who does the job does have one. This is because a large proportion come into the field from others, others where a college degree is required. The law, accountancy, the police themselves, even military intelligence, provide a lot of the recruits. Those who come into the field directly will probably have a college degree in criminal justice or something similar.

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned, well, we’ve got something of a conundrum here. Investigation is by its very nature a systemizing or male brain skill. What’s worse, as well as trying to work out what happened and how (the very essence of such systemizing) we always know that we’re not actually playing with the full set of information. So it’s necessary to make logical leaps, then to test them against whatever other evidence we do have, or perhaps to see what the reaction of a witness or someone involved is to a new piece of information or a question. This synthesizing, using left and right sides of the brain together, is of course a female brain trait. So it is probably true (although I as always welcome your view) that we’d think that those with the balanced brain type would do best here.

As we know from earlier posts the existence of assortative mating is important to understanding Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on the increasing prevalence of autism. As another part of his work is what leads to our EQSQ personality tests it’s fairly important to the intellectual underpinnings of those personality tests that the very idea of an increase in assortative mating stands up.

Chris Dillow over in the UK has been reading some economic papers which seem to imply two things. One that assortative mating is indeed increasing, and second, that it is in fact leading to an increase in income inequality. For we do actually know that income inequality is increasing…it’s increasing within most societies, as it is decreasing between societies as a result of globalisation. OK, so how does like marrying like (which is the definition of assortative mating) increase income inequality?

Well, the supposition is that more liberal divorce laws (and more specifically the way in which assets are divided upon divorce) mean that the rich are less likely to marry poor people. They’re worried that too much of their wealth will be lost is the marriage fails. If the rich are only marrying other rich people, then the poor are of course left marrying only other poor people. We thus see an increasing divergence in the equality of the distribution of wealth, and in so far as wealth also determines income, in that also.

The important part for us though is that we’re seeing increasing reports of assortative mating from other sciences which aids us in supporting our contentions here.

One further thought: if we really do think that the allocation of assets upon divorce is causing an increase in income inequality via assortative mating, then England should be seeing more of it than Scotland, for in England all assets are divided, while in Scotland, only those acquired during the marriage are.

Anyone looking for a subject for a little economic paper or a Master’s thesis?

This is the next stage along the printing process from our piece of yesterday about prepress technicians. The actual operators are those that operate the printing machines themselves, rather than delicately explaining to the customers why mixing Verdana, Times Roman and Arial on one page isn’t quite what people want to read. Fortunately, other people have done all of that hard work so the job can simply be running the machines in the most efficient manner possible.

That of course makes our diagnosis of which brain type, by our EQSQ personality tests, would be most suitable for this job really rather easy. Systemizers, male brain types seem to be most likely to be successful at this job. Actually running printing machines is a continual process of analyzing how things are going, which machine needs care and attention, where things might go wrong or need attention next. Along with the fact that no customers see this stage of the process, yes, I think we can see that this is indeed a systemizing or male brain type job.

Training for the job usually takes place on that very job. Juniors start by cleaning the presses and other machines, sweeping up and so on and as they get more experience, doing more complex jobs.

However, as the industry becomes more complex (the technology of printing is ever advancing) there are more and more people entering the field by way of college degrees. It’s still unusual to have a full four year college degree but there are many vocational schools, community colleges and so on offering the two year college degree as an entry level qualification for this profession.

It’s one of the things I find fascinating actually, how the training requirements for different jobs seem to morph over time. Here we’ve got one in the transition from an old style industrial apprenticeship scheme to a more modern college degree based one.

This shows you how much I understand about our brave new digital world. I’d thought that this job had died out with the advent of digital publishing. The BLS tells us that it is still thriving, although it’s very different from what it was. It used to mean messing with all sorts of chemicals and even at one time molten lead. Nowadays it is all done on computers so the job has entirely changed from one of sometimes dangerous physical work to one of a more cerebral kind. But what is ‘it’ that prepress technicians do? Essentially, save customers from themselves, if that’s not too an unkind way of putting it.

With the modern word processing software anyone can think that they can create great documents but that really isn’t true. There are centuries of experience about what works and what doesn’t on the printed page and, despite the fact that this isn’t what the job description actually says, removing those beginner’s mistakes in the work that is offered to the printing shop is really what it’s all about.

The training these days is as you would expect for something in the digital or computing field. There are a variety of college degrees on offer, from two year ones to four. There are also any number of non-college degree programs that chan aid in training for the job. Many of the more traditional workers in the field take top up courses, parts of the college degree programs if you wish, to modernise their skills. After all, the most difficult part is knowing what works in print, not the technology you use to get there.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, as you can imagine, something based on computers (and maths is also very important) will need people to have the systemizing or male brain skills. However, there is also a huge need for the empathic and customer orientated skills. Explaining to the insistent customer that using 30 different fonts does not improve the readability of a document takes some skills.

So I think that the balanced brain type, rather than the male or female, might be best here.

We can probably imagine what these people do, right? They, err, repair precision instruments? Good, well done: this classification includes watch and camera repairers as well so it wasn’t just precision instruments (and musical instuments as well as precision!). Looking at the BLS description of the job it becomes very clear that this is very much a systemizing or male brain type job as measured by our EQSQ personality tests. Of course the first and most obvious reason is that these people are repairing things. To do that you have to analyze the system and then work out where and whether they are going wrong: pretty clearly systemizing behavior. There’s also the fact that it’s highly detailed work, requiring great attention to those details. The work is also usually done alone (although there might be others there, the actual work is done alone, if you see what I mean?) and very rarely will the repairer be required to interact directly with the customers. So no great need for the empathic skills then either.

The education system depends a little upon what exactly it is that people are going to be repairing: musical instruments are of course wildly different from watches. But one of the commonalities is that rarely is a college degree required. There are many certification programs, which can take just as much time as a college degree, and there is also the option of learning on the job or of taking a formal apprenticeship. Exactly the best way into each of the specialties differs so it’s best to check: for example, there are college degree programs in musicial instrument repair, but not in watch making.

It’s also worth noting that repairing musical instruments is thought of as an excellent plan B for aspiring musicians. Clearly, instruments do not get repaired at the same time that everyone is playing them, so it’s possible to repair them while still maintaining a full performing schedule yourself.

I clearly made something of an error last week when talking about Hans Zinsser’s book. Apologies, mea culpa, grovel, grovel and all that. I quoted him talking about the difference between the sciences and music and lyrical poetry, alluding to the similarity between his views and the basis of our EQSQ personality tests. What I atually said was that he regarded them as inhabiting different spheres, that they need (as with our male and female brain types, systemizing and empathy) to be regarded as different, neither one better or worse, simply more useful in some cases than the other and vice versa.
Almost before the electrons had had a chance to dry two commenters leapt straight down my throat. Millie to point out that lyrical poetry requires a great deal of systemizing (which indeed it does, it’s a very complex use of language) and Jonathan to point out a glaring error in my thinking. Maths and music are indeed very tightly associated, talent for one often including talent for the other, so placing them at opposite ends of our systemizing/empathizing spectrum seems really rather remarkably odd. Which indeed it is and the fault is entirely with my explanation, most certainly nothing to do with Mr. Zinsser’s thought process or writing. I went back and had another look at it and can now make another attempt to get it right.

It’s in a way like the way in which we at times use our personality tests to try and work out what brain type would be good at a particular job and then at others to look at what we as individuals are bad at and thus need to work on.

What Zinsser was actually getting at was very little to do with the production of these things, music, poetry or science, rather, the tools you should use to evaluate them. When reading lyrical poetry or listening to music one should be seeking the emotional effect upon yourself, not analyzing (unless you really want to of course) the structures that generate those emotions. In contrast, when evaluating a piece of science, you should use only reason and systemizing to do so and ignore any emotive issues.
There, is that better?