I think this job of social services assistant is an interesting example of how a job can require more than just one facet of the personality, more than just either the male or female brain skills. The job itself is to work under the supervision of other professionals to help and aid people to take a full part in life. They might currently be denied this by age, illness, disability and so on. The assitant’s role is to help them, both in the sense of directly doing so, and also helping to navigate the complexities of modern life.

The training doesn’t require a college degree although employers are increasingly looking for those who have one. At present, to enter the job, a certificate or junior college degree is enough. However, to advance, to rise to more responsible or higher paid positions, will certainly require a higher college degree, perhaps even a master’s.

But I said that this job requires both sets of skills, both the EQ and the SQ sides of our EQSQ personality tests. Indeed it does, for you’ll work with those who cannot help themselves. The ill, the disabled, so obviously, as with nursing, a large degree of empathy would be required. However, it is also true that the job itself is helping these people organise their lives: checking if they are eligible for welfare, dealing with the bureaucracy. So it will also require a large dose of the systemizing skills as well. A job for the balanced brain type I think.

Anjana Ahuja writes about the way in which diseases come and go: not just that we actually managed to cure some of them, but the way in which some almost move in and out of fashion. ADD is a good example of one that seems to have come out of nowhere in recent years. An example that she uses is autism (which as you know, is something which our EQSQ personality tests help to explain) and she mentions groups like Aspies for Freedom and the Autism Liberation Front (I kid you not) whose argument is that while those within the autistic spectrum are indeed different, this does not mean worse.

Clearly, in one sense this is true, the moral value of a human depends upon their being a human, not anything else about them. However, they then go on to say that nothing should be done to try to change those with autism. No cures, no treatments, let us just revel in the difference. That, to both me and Ahuja, seems to be taking the argument a little too far. These groups are of course run by high functioning autists and it’s possible that they are not being empathic enough (her pun, not mine) to their low functioning compatriots.

I think it’s actually Simon Baron Cohen (a hero to this blog and the man behind EQSQ theory and our personality tests) who puts it best. The high functioning autism probably is best explained simply as neurodiversity (just as we celebrate cutural and racial diversity) but low functioning autism comes with other problems as well, like epilepsy and language delay. What we’d really like to do is take away those problems and leave the benefits of autism (such as excellent attention to detail).

Sounds sensible to me: no one worries anymore about people being descended from West Africans, but we’d still like to try and beat sickle cell anaemia, wouldn’t we?