The more I think about this the more it  makes sense. The key to the iPad and its marketing is women.

The piece that parked this off is here.

There are three basic ideas here and all of them do add up to at least a case (how convincing you find it is really up to you) that the key to the iPad’s success, indeed, one of the keys to its design, is its attractiveness to women.

The first thing to note is that the iPad really isn’t a computer. Yes, yes, of course it is but it also isn’t. It doesn’t multi-task, there are a number of things you simply cannot do on it, you’re not going to go all geeky with it. It’s much more a piece of consumer electronics than anything else. And when we start to talk about consumer anything we come up against the undisputed fact that women control 80% of discretionary expenditure across the country. No, men may earn more but women get to decide what it’s spent on.

The second is that again, as a piece of consumer electronics, it’s clearly optimised for certain activities. It’s not a surprise that Jobs used the Facebook application to show it off. Using Facebook on a regular PC (even a Mac) isn’t really quite how most would like to use it I think. Rather than it being something one sits down at the workstation to do you can see that having an iPad by one’s side, while on the couch, watching TV, maybe chatting to others in the room as well: that famed multi-tasking perhaps that women are supposedly so good at.

The third is, well, back to geeky again. It isn’t geeky. There’s no webcam, no Flash, most won’t care that there’s no physical keyboard. It’s not made for those who would spend hour upon hour on a task: it’s for just having around and using for short periods when one wants to.

And the fourth point is that there was indeed a huge imbalance between men and women on the net. And there still is an imbalance in what men and women do once they get on the net. The floods of women who’ve arrived in the past few years are using, as a matter of choice, the net for this social networking stuff. And that’s what the iPad does seem to do better than a PC, the social networking stuff.

So maybe that is it then? The iPad is aimed at the female market?

Sadly this does indeed seem to be one of the secrets of a happy marriage: to marry a woman better looking than you. It also works the other way around too: a woman should marry a man worse looking than she is.

The result comes from this paper:

In the current study, the authors examined how observer ratings of each spouse’s facial attractiveness and the difference between those ratings were associated with (a) observations of social support behavior and (b) reports of marital satisfaction. In contrast to the robust and almost universally positive effects of levels of attractiveness on new relationships, the only association between levels of attractiveness and the outcomes of these marriages was that attractive husbands were less satisfied. Further, in contrast to the importance of matched attractiveness to new relationships, similarity in attractiveness was unrelated to spouses’ satisfaction and behavior. Instead, the relative difference between partners’ levels of attractiveness appeared to be most important in predicting marital behavior, such that both spouses behaved more positively in relationships in which wives were more attractive than their husbands, but they behaved more negatively in relationships in which husbands were more attractive than their wives.

Quite how to explain this behavior I’m not quite sure. OK, the male part I can.

Men are indeed hunting for physical beauty in women. No, that isn’t just some expression of the patriarchy nor is it mere (and further) proof of how shallow man are., No, this is something really rather different. We know now what we didn’t say 30 years ago, which is that what is deemed “good looking” in women is also what indicates both fertility and good genes. That hourglass shape, facial and bodily symmetry and so on, these are indications of what are likely to produce both good and lots of children. Sure, OK, we limit family sizes these days but we’re not going to wipe out hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary selection in just the few decades since the invention of the pill.

So, if what men desire and pursue is physical beauty, even in part, once having persuaded it into marriage men are likely to be willing to compromise on all sorts of things, those bits and pieces of grit and daily life which afflict us all, in order to keep it.

Now note that the finding is that it isn’t absolute levels of looks: no, it’s relative levels. So it isn’t if a stunning man gets a stunning woman: it’s if an average man gets a stunning woman. And in a case like that I think we can see that he’s likely to work hard at keeping such stunningness.

But quite how it works the other way around I’m really not sure. Women are, as we know, rather less interested simply in looks than men are. It’s also true that good looks in men are similarly associated with good genes and fertility. So why would less good looking men make wives more ameliorative?

To be honest, I can’t really think of a reason at all: unless perhaps we’re just saying that all of the effect comes from the woman being better looking than the man. If he’s going to work a little harder to keep the relationship going then that’ enough?

Anyone got any better ideas?

Why don’t I have a girlfriend? One of those great all time questions really. Fortunately we now know the answer for a scientist has been able to work it out for us.

First we should get rid of the easy answers to why you or I don’t have a girlfriend. The first and most obviously would be that you are a heterosexual female and thus have no interest in a girlfriend. A second simple answer would apply to me: I don’t have a girlfriend because I’m married. Having a wife and a girlfriend tends to be frowned upon outside of certain Mediterranean cultures. OK, leaving aside those, why don’t you or I have a girlfriend?

Well, the answer lies in something called the Drake Equation. This was originally worked out to see how many alein civilisation there are out there. How many solar systems are there, how many planets that could support life, how many actually do, how often does life lead to intelligent life….and so on through the various constraints. We end up with the answer that there should be some thousands of intelligent civilisations out there just waiting for us to say “Hi!”.

As it is instead we’ve been beaming out “I Love Lucy” reruns which is perhaps why they’ve not said anything back yet.

Ho ho, I know: but back to the subject. A researcher in England has applied the same equation to the question of why don’t I have a girlfriend.

How many women are there in London, how many in the right age group, how many with university educations, how many are single, how many would he find attractive and so on, all the way to how many would find him attractive. His end result? That there are only 26 women in London with which he might have a relationship (and London is 10 million souls) and that his chances on any one night of meeting one of them are one in 285,000.

Well, that certainly explains the popularity of dating agencies then, doesn’t it?

The answer to how to attract a man might actually sound a little silly really but here it is: drink beer.

Yes, it really is true that men like women with a beer belly and who burp a lot….no, actually, umm, no, that’s not the reason why. But here’s the results of the survey:

MANY men would much rather see women sinking a pint of beer than sipping a cocktail, it seems.

On a first date especially they would be impressed by a woman who opted for a beer or lager instead of a glass of wine or other more “girlie” drinks.

It makes the women appear more sexy, confident, fun and independent, according to the men questioned for a survey.

Not to say cheaper as well which might not be quite such a turn on for the women if they realise that men really are that cheap. But again, I don’t think that’s the reason why drinking beer is attractive to a man nor do I think it’s the reasons the men are giving there. Something deeper to this and the answer I think is here:

The researchers commissioned by beer company ­BitterSweet Partnership found that only one in 10 women would order a lager or beer when out on a date. Most of them would go for other options because they think drinking beer makes them appear masculine and ­unattractive.

Now I agree, this is just me pondering on this, I’ve no proof or anything quite as tacky as that. But why would ordering a beer attract a man?

OK, take a step back and think about the rather different attitudes (at least traditionally) that men and women have had to casual sex. We can even think of it in evolutionary terms if we like. Yes, it’s true, really it is. Men are (usually it has to be said) just absolutely delighted by the idea of casual sex. The more the merrier. Women are by contrast really rather more picky about it.

We can see this either in old sayings (men propose and women decide for example) or in the really rather different dating patterns of male homosexuals and female (or lesbians if you wish). Promiscuity is a great deal more common in the former than the latter.

OK, so men are up for a bit of no holds rumpy pumpy more than women are. And both men and women see drinking a beer as being somehow more masculine than some other drink like a cocktail or a glass of wine. Drinking beer is thus a symbol (in however weak a fashion) or being male: and thus perhaps more likely to be up for some no holds rumpy pumpy.

Which is why men find it attractive and alluring (“She’s drinking beer! WooHoo, where’s the condom machine?”) and women think that it makes them appear more male and thus easier to persuade into the sack: which is why they don’t choose it.

Please note that for this rumination to work it’s not actually necessary for anyone to believe this consciously: the underlying associations are enough for the connotations to get through. We humans are, after all, extremely perceptive when it comes to matters of sex (although, as any number of women will tell you, not so much when it comes to matters of emotions).

Or rather, women are 75% of all newly qualified veterinarians. That’s a huge change from a generation ago when they were almost none. So what’s been driving this change?

Why are there so many women veterinarians? In part because educated women are drawn to professions that are providing flexibility to combine work and careers, Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin said in a lecture at the American Economic Association in Atlanta.

This speaks to the complaints that certain careers and professions are still male dominated: while some are becoming very much female dominated. (I would note that at the vet practice that we use all of the staff are female: not a man in the place.) Why is it that this is still happening, given that everyone is now able to choose?

And no, it’s not something to do with our EQSQ personality tests. We’re finding that within what we might think of similar classes on empathic or systemising jobs, some are still becoming male (or remaining male) dominated while others are becoming female so. So it isn’t anything to do with the probability that a woman will be more empathising. It’s to do with that other choice being made, about how to combine career and family.

As the economist herself points out, this is really (at least, since the graduating classes of around the mid 1970s) the first time that it has been possible to have a career and a family for most women. Before that it was career or family: or possibly a family then a career.

“Women are 77% of all newly minted veterinarians, but they were a trivial fraction 30 years ago,” she noted. Women are 25% of all recent MBAs from the University of Chicago but are 8% of those who work in venture capital. Among young medical doctors, 41% are female, but the fraction in public health, pediatrics, dermatology, psychiatry, immunology and obstetrics and gynecology is far higher than in surgical specialties and cardiology.

The answer seems to be that women are deliberately choosing those careers where there are set and short working hours and also where it is easier to go part time for part of a working life. Surgery doesn’t really allow that: public health doctoring does. And being a veterinarian? Well, the vast majority of that work is now small animal surgeries which keep regular hours quite unlike the farm work of generations past.

The numbers seem to bear out the basic assumptions that economists make about jobs: people choose the total package, income, flexibility, enjoyment, that suits them best. And if women wish to have and raise a family then we might expect them to choose those jobs which offer more in non-cash terms than in cash terms. Which is indeed what seems to be happening.

And the end result of that is that perhaps we shouldn’t worry about the gender pay gap so much. Cash incomes are only a part of what we get from our working lives so concentrating upon that to the exclusion of all else seems a little odd. We should be celebrating instead the point that we all now have a great deal more freedom to choose the package that we ourselves desire.

An interesting piece celebrating the moves which have been made over the decades to get women into the workforce. Or, if you prefer, those moves which have reduced discrimination against women being able to do so.

AT A time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times. Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. They were routinely subjected to casual sexism and were expected to abandon their careers when they married and had children.

There are three possible candidates for the most important change of the last 50 years to my mind. This, women entering the workforce on equal terms (which for the current generation they are), globalisation and the reduction in poverty and the digital or computer revolution. Which you assign the most importance to is really up to you.

However, the thing that I find most interesting is that the usual story doesn’t really pan out. There’s a trope, an insistence from some quarters, that it’s really heavy handed government intervention that has made all of this possible. And I’m pretty certain that isn’t true: it’s been a societal rather than legal change to my mind. I also tend to think that it’s been largely driven by economic matters: the change in the nature of work itself. As work has moved from being something, which for most people at least, is about deploying physical strength to it being about deploying brain power then women’s former constraint has simply disappeared.

It’s also true that some of the suggestions for yet more action by government to aid women more also might not work. For example, Sweden has long paid maternity leave, the US has no statutory paid maternity leave. But that long maternity leave might dissuade companies from hiring or promoting women: and it’s true, 75% of Swedish women who work do so in the government sector. And it’s also true that there are more women managers in the US than there are in Sweden.

But to be honest, given how far we’ve all come in only 50 years we’re now arguing about the details, not anything important any more.

I’d not heard of the Michelangelo Phenomenon until now but it looks like a very interesting concept indeed. The name comes from the idea of a sculptor, like Michelangelo himself, creating a statue. As the old joke has it, when asked how he turned a block of marble into something like the statue of David he (as the joke goes) said “Well, I look at the block of marble and then chip away everything that doesn’t look like David”.

The phenomenon part of the Michelangelo Phenomenon is that we, in our relationships, carve the other into, well, not a statue, but into a different person. When we offer or with hold approval, when we express our desires or dislikes, we are of course subtly changing the character of the person we are doing this with.

OK ,so much for the basics and you can see where the name comes from. But there’s more truth to the old joke than I’d realised, for for this process to be successful, we have to be working at what is already there:

A new international review of seven papers on “the Michelangelo phenomenon” shows that when close partners affirm and support each other’s ideal selves, they and the relationship benefit greatly.

“To the degree that the sculpting process has gone well, that you have helped mold me toward my ideal self, the relationship functions better and both partners are happier. And over the long term, I more or less come to reflect what my partner sees and elicits from me,” said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

But as you can see it goes further than that. It isn’t just that Michelangelo should chip away the parts which aren’t David: it’s that the process will only be successful if the marble really wants to be David.

Hmm, no, perhaps that analogy doesn’t quite work. With people it isn’t so much what you the sculptor want to bring out in them and it’s not even what is there to be brought out. The process works best when what is brought out, what is emphasised and nurtured, is the would be self-image of the one being sculpted.

In short, don’t help me to be what I could be and don’t help me to be what you want me to be but help me to be what I want to be.

An idea, which when it’s put quite that bluntly, really sounds like the simple advice we’ve been getting for millennia: treat others as you would be treated perhaps.

The G Spot doesn’t exist it has been announced. And it’s very difficult to work out whether this is good news or bad news.

Originally posited over a century ago, supposedly positively identified in the 50s and again supposedly found by millions of women ever since, it appears that the G Spot doesn’t actually exist at all.

A sexual quest that has for years baffled millions of women — and men — may have been in vain. A study by British scientists has found that the mysterious G-spot, the sexual pleasure zone said to be possessed by some women but denied to others, may not exist at all.

The scientists at King’s College London who carried out the study claim there is no evidence for the existence of the G-spot — supposedly a cluster of internal nerve endings — outside the imagination of women influenced by magazines and sex therapists. They reached their conclusions after a survey of more than 1,800 British women.

There’s never actually been any physical evidence, in the sense that a surgeon could look at an autposy and say: “Look, there it is!” in the same way that one can with a kidney or a liver. There’s been some thought that it might have been the female counterpart of the prostate gland (yes, each and every part of a male is mirrored in the female and vice versa: testes are ovaries, the clitoris is the glans, labia the scrotal sack and so on) but again there’s been no physiological evidence for that.

The actual study was done by looking at twins, identical and non-identical. This is the standard way of trying to tease genetic influences out of any point. If one of the identical twins reported having a G Spot then if it’s in fact something physical then we would expect the likelihood of her twin sister having one to be high. Certainly higher than the rate at which non-identical twin sisters both reported having one.

And this turned out not to be true: there was no such pattern.

Thus the explanation becomes something not physical: something in fact made up by the popular culture, which is what the team reported.

In their comeback, those who support the existence of the G Spot said:

This weekend she dismissed the findings of the British study as “flawed”, saying the researchers had discounted the experiences of lesbian or bisexual women and failed to consider the effects of different sexual technique.

“The biggest problem with their findings is that twins don’t generally have the same sexual partner,” said Whipple.

Well, yes, but if the difference between the existence of the G Spot or not is sexual technique then of course it is sexual technique which creates the G Spot, not some physical attribute.

Dearie me, you’d rather hope that a scientists (even a purported or self-declared scientist) would be able to handle simple logic.

As we all know the brain is divided up into two hemispheres. Leaving aside left handers where the situation is reversed, the left brain deals with systems and details, the right with wider issues and most especially integration of what’s around us.

There’s also, tying in with our EQSQ personality tests, an identification with male behavior being left brain and female behavior being, well, not more right brain, but with more collaboration between the two halves. And indeed, we can actually see physical differences between male and female brains which underline this: a female brain has a lot more connective tissue between the two parts.

An interesting piece in the Wall Stree Journal on what this left/right brain division means.

The neuropsychological evidence shows that the right hemisphere pays wide-open attention to the world, seeing the whole, whereas the left hemisphere is adept at focusing on a detail. New experience, whatever its kind, is better apprehended by the right hemisphere, whereas the predictable is better dealt with by the left. And because the right hemisphere sees things in context, as inseparably interconnected, it recognizes the vast extent of what remains implicit. By contrast, because of its narrow focus, the left hemisphere isolates what it sees, and is relatively blind to things that can be conveyed only indirectly.

In humans, the left hemisphere controls the grasping right hand and the bits of language that enable us to pin down meaning unambiguously. It helps us manipulate and use the world, in pursuit of our aims. The left hemisphere’s world is sharply delineated and certain, along the lines of the general’s strategy map on the command room wall, where the complexity of the world is stripped away. Yet we still need to see the essentially human world as it is before we simplify and disconnect it. A general needs to be in touch with the world in which his soldiers actually fight. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness.

The writer goes on to, to my mind at least, make a great deal too much fuss about whether a particular civilisation is right or left brained. Civilisations are made up of the people in them and there’s not going to be all that much change in the percentages in the population over time.

But as I say it does talk to our EQSQ tests. We might look at these in one way, as purely diagnostic: you’ve a left brain/male brain so you should be doing something that plays to those strengths. Or we might use it rather differently: currently you’re excessively right brained so you might want to put some work into training your more analytical side.

For as the author entirely correctly points out, being too far to one side or the other is going to prove to be a handicap so if you are, worth trying to open up the other side of your talents as well.

Here’s something really rather fascinating and it talks to a precursor of the empathy that we measure in our EQSQ personality tests. It also helps to explain why men and women have such a hard time managing to understand each other. The basic idea is this:

WOMEN feel more guilty about falling in love with someone else than having sex behind their partner’s back, a new study reveals.

And men are found to feel more guilty the other way around. Falling in love with someone isn’t the crime to be ashamed about: betraying the concept of sexual fidelity is though.

Why this confused researchers (and why it interests me) is that they had assumed it would be the other way around. Given that women place greater value on emotional fidelity than men do it was thought that men would place greater shame (ie, feel more guilt about) emotional betrayal of this sort. Similarly, it was thought that women would feel the other way around given the different way that men feel: sex itself isn’t a betrayal, it’s just sex (if the men do it that is).

Where this ties in with empathy is it’s precursor, the sympathy that Adam Smith (no, not in his economics, in the other book that no one ever reads, the Theory of Moral Sentiments) described. We can look at a man on a tightrope and we twist our bodies as he does: very much what we found 200 years later with the discovery of mirror neurones.

Now, with men and women the researchers were expecting the guilt to be greatest when one betrayed what one’s partner cared most about. Men should be guiltier about emotional betrayal because that’s what women care about women about sexual betrayal as that’s what men care about in their women more.

But it seems that the guilt is entirely the other way around. Each sex feels guiltiest about what they themselves dislike: that is, there’s a marked absence of that sympathy, understanding the other point of view.

And given this, there’s no wonder that men and women seem not to understand each other: instead of, erm, understanding what the other feels is most important, we’re all projecting our own desires onto that other.