Vive la Difference

So we all know that men have greater spatial awareness, yes? Can read maps better and navigate more easily? These are the sorts of things that make the foundation of our EQSQ personality tests of course: but do remember that such things are a probability only not absolutely indicated by the possession of XX or XY.

So some researchers decided to go and test this out, for women, as the gatherers in a hunter gatherer society, would have needed to be able to remember and navigate back to sources of fruits and berries, would they not? By touring around a farmers market and asking people to indicate the direction of where they had picked up certain items from the researchers think they have shown that women do indeed have such navigational abilities.

Well, yes, but as with our personality tests and all such cultural items, we do have to make sure that we are comparing like with like. Men’s spatial skills are thought to be conceptual: what we’ve shown here is that women seem to have good memories, not quite the same thing. Although it did amuse greatly to see that the higher in calories the items were (like donuts!) the better the memory was.

Others are even less convinced, thinking it to be entirely a cultural artefact.

There was a recent report that claimed that there’s an evolutionary reason why we dress little girls in pink and boys in blue: those are the colors that the sexes naturally prefer.

The thinking is that men will prefer blue as a result of their being the hunter part of a hunter gatherer society (clear blue water is less likely to be polluted, clear blue skies mean good hunting weather) and women being the gatherer part: red berries and so on (and note that there are no naturally blue foods).

Well, yes, all very just so. But it’s based on just 84 subjects (certainly not enough to show the sort of variation we would expect from such personality tests). Further, all we see are the final results: we don’t (just like we would expect from, say, our EQSQ personality tests) know whether there was a spectrum of responses, with a probability that women preferred pink, or whether the claim is the much stronger one that all did.

Now despite those caveats, it’s entirely possible that women do indeed prefer pink, men blues, but that won’t be the reason that we dress the young that way. For other human societies associate other colors with men and women. Once again, a beautiful theory slain by an inconvenient fact.

The first and immediate response to that questions is: of course not, don’t be silly. However, if this report is true that may also be the wrong answer. Researchers have noted that some of the personality traits are similar, a fixation with detail, perfectionism and so on. Indeed, some even go as far as to say that anorexia is the female version of Asperger’s. It’s also been claimed that some 20% of those with anorexia show symptoms of having a condition somewhere on the autism spectrum.

Quite whether this is true or not is another matter: more research, as they say is needed. But at this point we can offer an idea, a way of conducting said research. Our EQSQ personality tests would work. If those with anorexia are skewed towards the male brain end of he results then we would take that as being, well, at least no inconsistent with the hypothesis. If we also found that the extended families of those with anorexia skewed to that end, as the families of those with autism do in the personality tests, we would take that as another building block.

So, where do we find a large number of people with anorexia, plus their extended families, to take our EQSQ personality tests?

How about this for a thought: you’ve probably got more female ancestors than male. Before you say it’s impossible have a look at this report from John Teirney. The plain fact is that women are more likely to have children than men are. Historically (and it’s still true to some extent now) for men to have children means that they’ve “won”, beaten the other men to the fertile women in that society. But just about all fertile women who wanted to have had children (as well, no doubt, as many who didn’t want to). Thus, while it still takes one man and one woman to have each specific child, some men are the fathers of many more children than others and thus turn up in the family trees much more often than others. It’s said, for example, that Ghenghis Khan has over 16 million descendants now: even after 800 years that would not be possible for any one woman.

Too much can be made of such things in trying to explain human behavior: as with our EQSQ personality tests such is a spectrum, not a rigid divide between male and female behavior. So saying that people will, purely by virtue of their genes, be on one side or the other of the outcomes of such personality tests would not be true: just that there are probabilities. But this difference in the likelihood of having children (and thus “winning” the Darwinian race) does help to explain some aspects of modern behavior: why men are always competing with each other, for example.

That’s the slightly odd headline to this piece. Looking at the results of a Pew Centre Survey the writer assigns the different behaviors of men and women on the net to Google or Yahoo. We can see what he means: Google is indeed a place for information searching, while Yahoo has many more opportunities for exchanges of views. As it appears, from first glance at the figures, that men use the web to hunt for information, and women to extend and nurture relationships, this appears fair.

However, I do think that, while it’s a fun piece of pop culture, as a serious piece of analysis is leaves something to be desired. There’s two things, one of them to do with our EQSQ personality tests.

The first is that the reported differences between men and women are very small. In fact, in a study of this size, they’re almost certainly smaller than the margins of error. Thus our numbers don’t really mean very much.

The second is, and this is where our personality tests come in, we know that there is no sharp dividing line between male and female behavior. There’s a spectrum and all we can really say is that women are more likely, with a very high spread in the distribution, to be at one end rather than the other. Thus, dividing this sort of behavior into male and female isn’t really all that interesting. It would be more interesting, and almost certainly more factual, to say that systemizers are from Google and empathizers are from Yahoo.

Research at Harvard University is showing that in one way, the differences between men and women are more complex than many think: in another, that they’re actually a great deal more simple. The first part of that is explained by the fact that while, yes, there are observable differences in male and female brains, this isn’t the full explanation of what is going on to produce male and female behavior. Several different parts of the brain will interact to produce behavior, so, say, the fact that men generally have a larger hippocampus is not the open and shut case that some think.

However, we also get to something that touches on our EQSQ personality tests, and this makes it a rather easier. The variations in behavior within sexes is greater than the variation on average between them: we are therefore, as our personality tests rely upon, looking at a spectrum of behavior. At human beings in fact, rather than separate beasts named men and women.

They do on to point out that it’s an interaction of genes and hormones which create the distinctive patterns: again, something which the creator of our personality tests, Simon Baron Cohen, insists upon. We might have XX or XY (or any of the other dozen human haplotypes possible) but that is tempered both by hormonal influences in the womb and out in the wider world.

The conclusion of this research is, I think, hopeful: that while there are indeed probabilities that men will be thus, women that, in fact, human variation is such that we should take each individual as being unique, and to be treated as such.

Wound, ostomy and continence nurses are, if you think about it, doing nursing in the raw. Or, if you prefer, they’re doing old style (even if with new techniques) nursing. Wound nurses are those who treat, would you believe it, wounds? Ostomy, well, here, you’d be dealing with bodily wastes, just not those coming out of the normal holes. A colostomy, I think we know, is routing around the colon into a bag. There are other such diversions possible, from the bladder and so on, and your job is to take care of these, make sure they are emptied, don’t become infected and so on. Continence nursing is dealing with very much the same things except when they do come out of the right places, just not into the right places nor at the right times.

As you can tell from the descriptions this is very much a job for those on the empathizing end of the results from our EQSQ personality tests. The training is much the same as it is for other nursing specialties but you do want to think a little about what this job directly involves. Essentially, al of the stuff that we generally consider to be “icky”, but it has to be done. Wounds must be cleaned, bodily fluids have to be cleaned up. Patients are generally incredibly embarrassed at these things and there can be, especially amongst the old, intense shame almost at their need for this help.

So, if you’re thinking about this specialty I really do recommend that you take those personality tests. If you’re not fully towards the empathizing end of the spectrum, you might find that this isn’t for you: if that’s where you are, then caring for people in this manner could be just what you do want to do.

Oncology nurses are those who specialize in the treatment of cancer. One of the surprises here is that they do, at least at times, administer treatments like radiation therapy and chemotherapy. That’s the sort of action that in other areas of medicine is more usually reserved for doctors. So if you were to become an oncology nurse, there’d be a great deal more actual medicine involved, rather than just the caring for people while it’s done that is usual in other specialties.

It’s also true that nursing those with cancer can be emotionally harrowing. It’s entirely possible to have a patient who looks and acts entirely fit but who has, in reality, a terminal (and untreatable) cancer. The only unknown is when they are going to die of it, not whether.

On the brighter side of the job this situation is happening less often than it was. Not only are cancer rates falling (the rise in total numbers is because we are living longer. The true measure, age adjusted cancer rates, are falling) but survival rates are rising. More can be done and each passing year brings more, and more effective, treatments to continue that process.

Training is as with other types of nursing, via a four or two year college degree or a Diploma and then the license exam. However, given the complexity of the treatments it can be advisable for you to go on and get a further college degree, a Master’s in Nursing. This can usually be done while you are working and can lead you a long way. I’ve seen a job advertisement recently offering $120,000 a year for a senior oncology nurse. That’s pretty good money by anyone’s standards.

It’s a sad measure of how hard this disease has hit us, from being unknown in 1980 to requiring an entire nurse specialty less than three decades later. It also provides us with a great background to show just how much medical treatment can change in such a short time. Through the 80s and into the 90s there really was no treatment. Various of the symptoms could be treated, advice on how not to catch it (or pass it on) could be given, but the actual way in which the immune system turns upon the body could not be halted. Now, while not cured directly, HIV is a chronic condition, one that persists, but should (although we really don’t quite know yet, not enough time has passed to be sure) allow one to live long enough to die of something else: that is, sad to say, actually the definition of curing a disease.

So those who were HIV/AIDs nurses at the beginning could do little for their patients but empathize: these days it’s more akin to diabetes management: making sure that the cocktail of drugs that must be taken is well adjusted than preparing them for their burial shrouds. Odd how a job can change so much in such a short time, isn’t it?

The training for this specialty is just as it is for other registered nursing jobs. One of the three routes in, a full four year college degree, a shorter two year college degree or a one year Diploma, followed by taking the license exams.

I don’t think I’ll try to hazard a prescription for which type of results from our EQSQ personality tests are best here. I think that from the above we can already see that it has changed once in the last few years: who knows when it will again?

As you regular readers know one of the matters we like to talk about around here is the gender pay gap. If you average out the pay of all women and all men then you find that women earn some 71 cents for every dollar earned by men. The big question is, why? Some say that it’s because we’re in a patriarchal world where women are deliberately exploited, discriminated against. Others, who look more closely at the figures, say that it’s more to do with (there’s no one who says that women were not discriminated against in the past and few who deny that it exists in small amounts now, but is it still a major cause?) choices and biology: women do take career breaks to have and to raise children, is this the reason?

There’s an excellent piece in the New York Times which provides another little piece of the puzzle to make that latter explanation even more believable. Amongst those in their twenties, in New York City, the gender gap has reversed itself. Women in that age group now earn 117% of what men do. So instead of 71 cents on the dollar, they’re getting 117 cents. This is probably the first time, the first generation, that this has ever been seen.

The reasons appear to be all to do with college degrees. We’ve known for a decade or so that more women get college degrees than men. That does now seem to be translating through into women earning more than men: given the returns to education it would have been a surprise if we did not see it. It’s also true that over the past decade we’ve seen more women getting professional qualifications and certifications (lawyers, accountants, doctors and so on) than men and these are clearly linked to the possession of college degrees.

I think it’s fascinating and I hope you do too: we’re seeing something that some (myself, as an example) have predicted would happen, but here it actually is, going on right under our noses. What will be even more interesting is what happens in a decade or so, as these young women start to have their families (as we assume that most of them will). Will it be shown that the gender pay gap is indeed (now, at least) a function of having children: and if it is, what, if anything, are we going to do about it?