Yes, I know, it’s a little strange to have this job in here, given that there is very little formal training needed, most certainly no college degree. We all know, I think, what taxi drivers do, although there might be one wrinkle to the business unknown. Most drivers do not own their own car, they lease it from a large company. This also gives them access to the controllers, the maintenance and so on provided by that large company and the long term contracts they might have for supplying services.

As I say, there’s very little education needed to become a taxi or cab driver. A high school diploma and a driver’s license is enough in many places. Some others ask for an advanced driver’s license, some even for up to 80 hours of classroom time in training, but that’s about the top of it. Far from needing a college degree to do this job it’s often been used, especially in some of the big cities, as a job to use to pay your way through college. Because those big companies like to have a 24 hour service, it’s often quite easy to fit in shifts behind the wheel around the classes and so on you need to do to get a college degree.

As to type of person who would be best at this, from our EQSQ personality tests I think we can quite easily see that it’s the empathic type, those with the female brain. Yes, I know that most taxi drivers have been historically (and still are) male, but this is indeed changing. Dealing with customers all day long, perhaps chatting or not, as they wish, clearly this is where empathic skills are needed.

Yes, yes, I know, boo, hiss, but as long as governments levy taxes (which they have done since the very instigation of the first government) then there are going to be tax collectors. The three different groups, examiners, collectors and revenue agents usually refer (in order) to those who look at individual returns, those who chase money due and those who look at the more complex accounts of businesses. The job opportunities are expected to grow more slowly than average over the next decade, mostly because the process is becoming ever more automated (you have probably aleady tried filing your own taxes online, yes?).

While it’s possible to start work without a college degree it is becoming increasingly common for the minimum qualification to be a four year college degree in accountancy. There are still some State jobs where only a two year college degree, or accounting and tax experience alone, will suit, but without that full college degree promotion and advancement will be difficult.

Given what the job actually is placing it on the spectrum of our EQSQ personality tests is simple enough. It’s dealing with numbers all day long, the checking of forms against increasingly complex tax laws. This is obviously one for the systemizers, the male brain types. You might think that collectors, who need to chase those who owe money should perhaps be empathizers but, then, well, when you’re trying to collect a debt empathy is possibly the last character attribute you want to have.

Surgical technologist is one of those jobs that’s expected to grow much faster than average over the next decade for two reasons. The first is simply that advancing medical technology and an aging population are going to expand the whole medical sector. The second is that tasks, as in many industries, are being handed down, or devolved. What three decades ago might have been done by a doctor, a decade ago by a specialist nurse, is now being done by a surgical technologist.

There are a variety of ways to train for this job, in the military, via vocational or technical schools, and the qualification can range from a certificate to a two year college degree. It’s likely, as has happened with other similar jobs in the past, that those with the college degree will have the best opportunities: it is also true that to progress further, at minimum a full four year college degree is likely to be required. They pay is good though for something requiring this little training: $34,000 on average for a 40 hour week.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, this is one of the few jobs in the medical field that does not require large amounts of empathy and so might be suitable for those with the male or balanced brain types. Almost all of the work takes place inside the operating theater or surgery, meaning that the patients will all be unconscious both when they arrive and when they leave. Systemizing behavior therefore becomes more important than the empathy needed in so many other areas of medicine.

An interesting little report from Ireland on why, despite the truth of the matter, it can be difficult to actually speak out and point to that truth. A professor from Trinity (in an Irish context, think Harvard) said that on average, men and women are different. Shock! This is of course the lesson of our EQSQ personality tests, that certain talents and aptitudes are not equally divided or distributed across the sexes. Rather, as the personality tests show, they are distributed by brain type. The “male brain” type is more systemizing, the female more empathizing. But before anyone starts to say that this is simply backing up the aged stereotypes, let us remember that the male and female brain types are indeed distributed across the genders. Just not equally.

So while the professor was indeed correct in stating that on average men are better at, say, math and engineering, that doesn’t tell us anything useful about an individual. While the probabilities of a woman being good at these subjects might be different from those of a man, what we should actually be interested in is the actual talents of the individual, not assigning to one group or the other on the basis of gender.

The writer does have some fun with this concept but makes one very good point. Given that universities exist to inquire into the human condition, why is it that such statements of the truth cannot be made on a university campus? For just as Larry Summers had to, the errant professor was forced to withdraw his remarks almost immediately.

Which is, of course, near insane. Our personality tests help us to explain something true about the world around us. Why on earth should this truth be impolite to mention in an academic setting?

This is something that I’m sure has nothing at all to do with our EQSQ personality tests. It isn’t, I think, anything at all to do with male and female brains, rather, this is the other side of the argument, where we do indeed have proof that there is in fact discrimination in our society. Think of it this way: we can use our personality tests to show that simply having more or fewer men or women in one particular career or job is not (necessarily) evidence of discrimination, for the talents required for certain jobs are not distributed equally amongst men and women, for nor is the “male” or “female” brain type.

However, we can also find times when there is indeed discrimination. This (slightly bizarre sounding) research comes to us from Mahalanobis. College students, male and female, were asked to don either a jersey or a swim suit, and then take a math test. The results for the men were roughly the same, whatever the dress. However, for the women, those in swim suits scored markedly lower. This is taken to be evidence that women self-objectify to a greater extent than men: that the way women think about their bodies is such that exposing it, even when no one is watching, makes women mess up on math tests and possibly other activities.

Certainly, anyone who has ever been on spring break will agree that swim suits do tend to lower perceived IQ.

There is, however, a reason to wonder at the validity of the paper. In the footnotes, average weights were shown as 299 kg and 300 kg. Even if this was simply a misprint for weights in pounds, yes, you might expect young women of such weights to be a little nervous about donning a swim suit.

Structural ironworkers are those people who build the steel and metal parts of the structures that then go on to be buildings and bridges. You’ve seen them in innumerable films and cartoons, when the main character finds himself clinging to a metal bar 300 feet up in the air….and then a workman wanders past whistling a merry tune. That’s them and probably the most important qualification of all is that you don’t have a fear of heights (I’m one of those who doesn’t like going above the fourth floor on the inside of a building, so this isn’t for me).

There’s no college or degrees involved in the training, it’s usually taught either on the job or via a formal apprenticeship. This can take three or four years to become fully qualified and involves quite a large amount of classroom teaching (so almost like a college degree then) as well as practical experience gained out in the field. There are also various vocational and technical schools that teach part or all of the theory needed for the job: but that practical experience is also necessary.

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned I’m not really sure that they have much influence here. I can’t see that the job requires either systemizing or empathic skills in any great measure and so can’t see that there’s any benefit for one brain type or another. However, that not having a fear of heights is essential but I can’t see that that would be influenced either way by male or female brain types. The pay is good ($20 an hour) if you aren’t afraid of heights: if you are then then times that would be too little.

There’s not a great deal that can really be said complimentary about this job, being a stock clerk. At some companies and levels (say, in jewelry and the like) there is indeed some complexity and responsibility but most of the 1.6 million people who do it are employed simply as a set of hands, rather than as part of a fulfilling career. For stock clerk includes the job of supermarket shelf stacker: yes, filling up the shelves is what a lot of people do. As you might imagine, there’s no requirement for any college degree to do this: indeed, having a college degree is likely to be an impediment to getting one of these jobs. Employers really don’t like to have people who are overqualified for the job on offer: they know that any training they provide will be wasted as if you’re overqualified you’re going to be moving on as soon as you can. The pay is also pretty bad, averaging $20,000 a year (and in some supermarkets that can include having to work night shifts).

As far as our EQSQ personality tests are concerned this is probably a job for the systemizers, or the male brain types, in the sense that detail is important. However, it might actually suit empathic types better, as one of the things that can make it fun to do is the other people you work with.

However, our recommendation is that, despite the ease with which you can get a job as a store clerk, plus the fact that almost no training is needed, do get some training and get a job with a better career progression. Being a store clerk (I speak from experience) is actually great for a time, it teaches you the value of education so that you don’t have to be a store clerk for 40 years.

I’ll admit that this is something that has puzzled me for some time, being on the verges of “real journalism” as I am. Why are there so few women who write Op Eds for the newspapers? I don’t mean journalists, that seems to be fairly equally divided, but the opinion pieces. They do seem to be largely male areas. Catherine Orenstein is mentioned in this New York Times piece as running classes to start changing this and she seems to think that it’s all about the way in which women simply don’t think they can write such pieces. Me, I can’t help thinking that there might be something to do with our EQSQ personality tests here. I don’t doubt that many women do indeed think that there is “something special” about those who get to air their opinions in the newspapers. I’m living proof that there isn’t. Until I started doing it, I too thought there must be “something special” about people who got paid to pontificate in such a manner. I’m sure that both men and women would benefit from her classes.

But how is this to do with our personality tests? I have a feeling that trying to put the world to rights (along with the inevitable male desire to show off in public, to boost status), attempting to order it in 750 words, is a systemizing or male brain trait. There’s an awful lot of female brain style writing out there too, empathic, in touch with emotions, more concerned perhaps with communicating feelings than an idea, but they turn up in other places, for that’s simply not what the function of an Op Ed is. An Op Ed is meant to say, here’s a problem, here’s the solution, we should go do this. That’s systemizing and I’m really not surprised that there are more men than women doing it.

So I followed up our little story of yesterday, on why women are more religious than men, with the scientist doing the research (actually, he’s the Professor, the research is his PhD student’s), who strangely enough, is a reader of my main blog. Small world, eh? As you’ll recall, it turns out that when you use our EQSQ personality tests, women are not more religious than men. It’s that empathizers are more religious than men and more women than men are empathizers.

So, our personality tests help to explain something about the real world, again. Bruce (for that is the Professor’s name) then went on to explain what he thought was actually happening here. His basic belief about religious beliefs is that they are an expression of animism/social intelligence. (This is explained here.) We’re veering into areas of philosophy that I don’t understand here but his point was that on the empathic tests, the results matched very strongly indeed. On the systemizing tests, there was much less correlation. No, this doesn’t mean that the SQ part of the personality tests is less accurate than the EQ part, unless we restrict that statement to this one meaning, measuring the religious. He further thinks that what the EQ personality tests are measuring is not in fact empathy, rather the level of animistic thinking.

As I say, I’m not sure about this area of philosophy so I can’t really comment on that. It could be that the tests are measuring empathy, and this causes the religious feelings, or animism, or even propensity to believe itself. It doesn’t really matter which for our purposes though, showing that the personality tests can indeed be used to predict beliefs and behaviours outside our own field simply strengthens their argument within it.

That’s the question that was asked here by Tyler Cowen, one of the most perceptive of economists. There are various possible explanations, perhaps it is just something to do with different attitudes to risk? After all, we know that young men take many more risks than young women. At Crooked Timber there’s some other ideas floated, social insecurity perhaps? Other ideas include the fact (yes, it is a fact) that both Christianity and Islam have increased women’s power in highly patriarchal societies, even the idea that as it is women who take care of the dying and the dead, they will be more concerned about the whole subject. I was wondering whether this might in fact be something to do with our EQSQ personality tests in some way.

Does this greater religiosity hold for women with male type brains? Do men with female type brains have a greater attatchment to religion than those with the male? This is alluded to by one of the commenters at Crooked Timber who points out that those parts of the brain that light up under the influence of religion are those that are also associated with empathy: and as we know, empathy is another way of describing the female brain (or the possession of it is).

Then, back at Marginal Revolution, rather than my musings on our personality tests, we have a British social scientist who has just actually done this research. Using the same personality tests as we do (rather, we’ve adjusted them a little, made them more American) he controls for the male/female brain, rather than male/female gender, and finds that there is in fact no difference. Empathic people, whether male or female, are equally religious, systemizers, similarly.

This fascinates me I must admit. The test of a scientific theory is whether it can predict: our personality tests seem to be able to do that.