There are some 4 million secretaries in the US, making it one of the largest occupations in the country. Even though as a result of increasing automation this will grow more slowly than other jobs, so many people move in and out of the career that there’s not expected to be any shortages of jobs.

Training is most often on the job: certainly no college degree is required. This is changing slowly though, as all those computers and so on mean that knowledge of software packages is becoming even more important. There are a huge number of different training programs offered by vocational schools, community colleges and so on and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to start seeing college degrees being offered, perhaps called something like office administration.

Most people seem to think that the job is about taking dictation, or typing up letters and so on. With most people now using computers this isn’t really the case any more. Most managers and executives do this themselves now. What the job is really about (and always has been) is organisation. Making sure that things work, that machines are ready and available, that diaries are complete, that the right people have the right information about where they should be and so on.

It is, if you like to put it this way, really about managing the managers and their time. When you put it this way then those most suited, by our EQSQ personality tests, are the systemizing, or male brain types. Not quite what you think of when considering secretaries, but it is true: the real job is all about organisation.

Science technicians are those people you see in the white lab coats in shows like CSI. They’re not confined to forensics and police work though, you can work as a technician in just about every science there is. The job is, while it varies across the different branches of science, to set up and operate the experiemnts, to collect the results and, in some industrial jobs, to work out why processes are not working as well as they should.

Another way of thinking about it is that you’ll be doing the hands on science, not just the ivory tower thinking and experimentation.

From that description it’s obviously fairly easy to work out which type from our EQSQ personality tests will be best suited to this job: the systemizers or male brain types.

The education is usually a two year college degree in science although there are expections to this. Some technical schools offer one year certificate programs and there are also those who have a full four year college degree in an appropriate subject. But whether it’s nuclear technicians, chemical, forensic, or any other of the myriad possibilities in the different flavors of science, the most usual entry level qualification is a two year college degree.

Pay varies across the different specialties and can be from $14 an hour to nearly $30 (which is from about average for all jobs in the US to just over double it)

A fascinating piece of research here in the Daily Telegraph that has implications for the results of our EQSQ personality tests. Looking at one extreme variant of the autism spectrum, Rett Syndrome, in animal studies at least, researchers have been able to reverse the condition.

Now leave aside for a moment all of the caveats about how long this might take to become a routine treatment and so on and concentrate upon the real finding. Even though the damage to the brain and the nerves has already been done during the development stages of the fetus, such damage can still be reversed. Yes, it’s wonderful that we might find a treatment for this type of autism, but it’s that fact of the reversibility of previously thought to be permanent damage which is the huge point to note.

Now, as you know, our personality tests depends upon brain differences, ones that are thought to be caused by exposure to fetal testosterone. They’re permanent and while we can, as we have discussed, alter the training of our minds we can’t change the underlying innate talents which we are born with.

Or, perhaps, in the future, we will be able to. And isn’t that a fascinating concept: drugs to make you more empathic, or drugs that aid you in systemizing? There would certainly be a market for those going through school and college but perhaps further too. Something designed for certain types of autism, to increase empathy, would appeal greatly to those who want to increase the general emotional intelligence of the population.

I think we might have found our perfect example of the balanced brain job (to go with nursing as the empathic and, say, software as the systemizing) here with sales engineers. The phrase doesn’t mean engineering a sale, that would be the more common “salesman” tag. Rather, we are talking about people who sell complex products, who therefore need to be engineers themselves, in order to be able to sell to other engineers.

Products like turbines, complex production machinery or corporate computer systems. It’s no good turning up and saying “Hey, look at my bright shiny machine, wanna buy one?” It requires someone trained in engineering to be able to explain, in the required technical language, why someone might want one or how they might use it. So, by our EQSQ personality tests, that’s certainly a requirement for systemizing abilities. However, it is still selling, there’s a need to both read and persuade the buyer, so it requires empathic qualities as well. As I say, a balanced brain type of job.

The training thus almost always includes a college degree in engineering. Those selling chemical equipment tend to have their college degree in chemical engineering, those offering computers in computing and so on. The training to sell is usually something added by the employer after that college education in the engineering field.

As the BLS tells us it can be, for a certain type, a very attractive career. A lot of travel, the ability to set your own schedule, good money ($70,000 a year on average). There are also those who wouldn’t like it because, well, there’s a lot of travel and the high income is partly made up of sales commissions: many people don’t like that sort of uncertainty.

John Tierney has an interesting little piece at his blog in the NY Times. No, this isn’t anything to do with our EQSQ personality tests, it all works at a rather deeper level of the brain that that. But I just thought it was interesting because it shows how diligent observation and a bit of theory (well, OK, in that sense it is like our personality tests) can open up a new vision of how the world works.

The theory is that, in a evolutionary sense, females should be pickier about who they mate with than males. As they (despite Women’s Lib, which hasn’t quite reached most animal species yet) do almost all of the rearing and, much more importantly, the gestation, they should be much more concerned with looking for the optimal mate than the males are. Another way of putting it is that females need to look for quality while males can substitute with quantity.

Now, with humans, this does very much seem to be the case. Looking at the results from singles sites shows, for example, that women will travel much further than men, preferring the hassle for the chance of a better date while the men seem happy enough with what is on offer locally.

But we also see animals that keep harems, like elephant seals and deer. It has been thought that the males corral the females, insist that they mate with them (the male’s fighting for dominance being another way of signalling prime genes).

But as Tierney points out, the female seals are in fact the ones that do the choosing by moving along the beach. Thus our original hypothesis, that the females should be greatly more interested in quality, the males in quantity, seems to be bourne out.

It’s not often that I comment upon legal cases here but this story about WalMart and a gender discrimination class action speaks directly to one point coming out of our EQSQ personality tests. I don’t presume at all to pre-judge the case itslef, rather to show that what is currently being used as evidence doesn’t appear to pass muster.

One of the things that comes from our personality tests is that certain skills or attributes are unevenly distributed across men and women. Yes, on average, men are better systemizers and women at the more empathic skills. This only tells us something about the probability that an individual man or woman will have certain skills, of course: averages hide a lot of variation between individuals. Indeed, that’s what the personality tests are for, to try and uncover that individuality, rather than painting all men or women as the same.

However, what comes out from this is the point that we would expect there to be certain careers and jobs where there is a preponderance of men, just as there are others with a majority of women. Physics or software development at one end, nursing perhaps at the other. Further, from this, we would not say that a gender imbalance in a job is evidence of discrimination. It’s not evidence of non-discrimination of course, either.

But the evidence against WalMart seems to be that two thirds of the company’s workers are women while only one third of its managers are. As above, this is not evidence of discrimination.

Now, I would be hesitant, at the very least, to claim that our EQSQ tests show that women are not as good at managing as men. The truth could well be the opposite in fact. But the gender imbalance in and of itself is not evidence of discrimination.

Just to make sure that our travels through the various jobs available is complete, here’s the information upon roofers at the BLS. There’s not a lot for us to say about this job as it most certainly does not require a college degree to do it. Far from a college degree actually, it normally doesn’t even require a high school diploma. It’s hot dirty work, usually (although depending upon the technology used, not always) requiring the spreading of hot bitumen upon the roof. There are disadvantages, work is very scarce in the northern states in winter because ice can cause serious dangers for the workers.

On the plus side there are usually enough jobs to go around: precisely because it’s hard, hot work, people continually leave it for other construction trades. Training is either purely on the job, it taking about three years to become proficient in the use of all of the different materials, or via an apprenticeship scheme in association with the union. Both provide very much the same training although the appprenticeship is better structured.

As to our EQSQ personality tests I’m not really sure how much they will help here. Certainly, few female brain skills (or empathizing ones) are used, as there is little contact with anyone other than co-workers. There’s not all that much male brain or systemizing skills required either: the technology is fairly simple, although getting more complex. The real requirements are no fear of heights whatsoever and an ability to do heavy physical labor for long periods at a time. Not so much a male brain job as a male physique one.

I found this piece from The Economist to be absolutely fascinating. It’s not about “male” and “female” brain types, as we deal with in our EQSQ personality tests, rather, to do with the surge of hormones through a woman’s brain over the month. The differences in the levels of progesterone and oestrogen at different points in the cycle mean that women will be more or less sensitive to certain stimuli at different times.

It’s long been known, for example, that women’s reactions to illegal drugs like cocaine vary over the month and indeed, treatment with progesteropne has been used as a way to reduce the desire for it (by lessening the pleasure gained).

By looking at things like oxygen flow to the amygdala (a part of the brain closely associated with pleasure) researchers were able to show that greater pleasure would be had from these stimuli when it is oestrogen that is the predominant hormone (that is, when leading up to ovulation) rather than when progesterone is also present, as it is after ovulation.

The speculation is that there is an evolutionary component to this: women will be more open to the pleasures of gifts and attention in the lead up to their fertile period than after it.

As I say, this is little or nothing to do with our personality tests but it does provide an interesting diagnostic tool. It appears that those parts of the brain which increase the enjoyment of sex over the cycle are also those that enjoy chocolate. Finally, science provides an answer for why men buy women chocolates: it’s a signalling mechanism. If that first bite of a Belgian chocolate causes a dreamy look, better order pizza and stay in tonight.

The formal qualifications required to become a retail salesperson are often, quite literally, zero. Not even high school graduation is insisted upon in most stores, although a pleasant manner, a tidy appearance and basic literacy and familiarity with computer equipment are. However, this is in fact changing, as the BLS points out. For a very long time, decades, retail sales has been one of the few areas where you could get ahead without those formal educational requirements. If you were good at the job then you would be promoted, to better departments, to junior management positions and, if you kept showing that you were good at each stage of the process, all the way up into general management.

However, this has now changed: to get into the management stream you need a college degree. the larger companies prefer to hire those with a college degree directly as management trainees. The side effect of this is that however good you are at the actual job, it will remain just that, a job, not a career.

Which brain type, by our EQSQ personality tests, is likely to do best here though? The answer should, I think, be obvious, from our own experience of asking for help in a shop. What we actually want is not the help to find what we think we want, rather, for someone to read us and lead us to what we really want but don’t know about. That’s empathy that is, the ability to do that, so it will be the female brain types who do best in this line of work.

As with our earlier posts on therapists of various kinds respiratory therapists are in a sort of middle ground between nurses and doctors. They’re much more specialised than either, dealing not with the whole range of diseases and injuries, but rather with the effects of just one type of problem. Obviously, given the name, that’s to do with breathing. As the BLS points out, the number of jobs is expected to increase faster than most other jobs in the future. Partly because as the population ages there will be more people needing help to breathe as a result of lung disease but also at the other end of life. As medicine advances, babies born ever more prematurely can survive, although they almost always have breathing problems to begin with.

The training is pretty much as you would expect for this sort of medical job or career. The minimum is a two year college degree in the subject although many take a full four year college degree version. There are hundreds of community colleges, vocational schools and so on that offer the training and the Armed Forces also offer training up to the required certification level.

As for the brain type, by our EQSQ personality tests, who would be most suited to this job, it would be the balanced brain type. The actual treatment requires close attention to details and mastery of the computerized equipment: but of course, dealing with and nursing patients also requires a great deal of those empathic qualities.