Jackie Ashley, over in The Guardian in the UK, is getting most annoyed about the way in which people regard women and women as voters. She’s actually very funny about it:

There is a caricature of the female voter which I’ve heard, with numerous variations, for years from all parties. It goes like this. First, she is fickle. Men have grown-up, fixed ideas about politics which are difficult to shift. Women? All over the shop - suggestible, easily impressed, quick to take the huff. In the past I’ve heard pollsters, columnists and MPs describe “the female voter” as if she’s an amalgam of all their worst girlfriend experiences. It’s a wonder they haven’t got round to blaming election results on the time of the month.

And of course there’s a lot of truth to this: not that women voters are like this, but that they are regarded as being like this. However, it’s also true that male voters are looked upon in a certain similar manner. Look at the way in which all US Presidential candidates end up going hunting, to show how “manly” they are, and to connect with the Bubba vote. That is just as much a sexist discrimination, isn’t it?

Much of the truth, I think, lies in the results of our very own EQSQ personality tests, what they show us about the division in the way people think. We divide people up into those with systemizing or empathic brain types, with a goodly chunk in the middle having balanced ones. OK, we’d expect systemizers to look at politics in a systematic manner. Here’s a problem, here are potential solutions, which politician is supporting the one most likely to work?

We also have empathizers, who would be much more interested in whether they connected with the politician. Hunting being one way of doing so with male empathizers, kissing babies perhaps (an old political activity of course) with the female empathizers.

One thing though which I think makes empathizers of almost all of us. Modern politics is incredibly complex: there are thousands of issues. So we can’t in fact be systemizers about it, we have to go the emapthy route. Who amongst those standing “feels right”?

Next, and closely related to that, she is dangerously easily swayed by pretty men. A glossy head of hair, a sexy, growly voice, excellent dental work, the hint of a six-pack behind the well-cut shirt and a melt-your-heart smile - that’s what wins the woman voter. She is unimpressed by her own kind and she wants a man in charge. A second element is that she is attracted in particular to the faithful, reliable new man. Be filmed washing the dishes, or with a tousle-headed mite clinging on to your shoulders, and you’ll improve your leadership magnetism no end.

And that’s why politicians assume that such things will attract the female vote. Not because women don’t care about policy, not because it isn’t important, but because there’s so much of it that we are all, in the end, both male and female, forced to make our political judgements on just such matters. Who looks good, who has the trustworthy smile?

Of course, we’d all like a better way to run a country but we’ve not found one yet.

James Watson really is bright enough to know that you should engage brain before opening your mouth. He is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner (and not one of those faux ones, Peace or Economics) for his part in the discovery of DNA. His “crime” was the following statement, that he’s gloomy about the prospects for African development because:

” all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”

Now the thing is that what he says is in fact true. If you take a random group of Africans and a random group of Europeans or North Americans then you’ll find that their results in an IQ test are lower. There are some obvious reasons for this: malnutrition is a known cause of mental stunting, such is known to happen in Africa, not so much in the other two places. It’s also true that “g”, the thing measured by IQ tests is defined as whatever it is that makes you a high functioning individual in the societies of N. America or Europe. Which may very well be not the same as the things required to make you a high functioning individual in the largely peasant economies of much of Africa.

Now what has gained attention is the idea that he’s saying that all “blacks” are dumb for genetic reasons. Which is near insane, for there’s more genetic variation in Africa than there is in the rest of the human race put together. There is no such thing as an “African” in terms of genes, they are wildly more genetically different than Europe or even the USA. I don’t think he actually is saying that. Rather, I think he’s making a point which thoughtful economists have been trying to make for some time.

Africa (in so far as you can make generalisations about a continent) has a different culture. Within that culture are different incentives and as any and every economist will tell you, people respond to incentives. It’s not because of any difference in intelligence that our own solutions to poverty won’t work, not because of any genetics: it’s the culture that will.

Note please that this doesn’t mean that there are no solutions. just that they need to be different ones.

Returning to the article I mentioned yesterday there’s more interesting things about men and women in the IT world. As we know from our EQSQ personality tests there’s a spectrum of brain types, from systemizers at one end to empathic at the other. The distribution is not even, we’re more likely to see men at one end and women at the other. But this is a probability, not a certainty. We also know that certain jobs suit one brain type more than another: computers suiting the systemizers and that’s why it’s largely a male world, because men mostly are systemizers. In the UK only 20% of computer science students are female but:

Margaret Sambell, of e-skills, a government-funded skills organisation for the IT sector, said that, unless British universities adapted, businesses would turn to China and India for recruitment. “Previously, the role of technology was about automating stuff that used to be done manually. But the focus of IT systems now is on business change and how technology can be used to help companies address new markets and attract new clients. To do this, students need to understand about business and dealing with customers,” she said. “Our research tells us that more than 30 per cent of employers say there are problems recruiting IT graduates with business skills and 40 per cent say there is a shortage of interpersonal skills. Only 3 per cent say there is a shortage of recruits with the right technical skills.”

and

Mr Champion believes that the new course will help to redress the gender balance in the industry, which has long been dominated by men. “The new course plays to the strengths of female students. They contribute equally well on the technical side, once they have overcome the perception of IT as a male-dominated area, and quite often they do better than the men with the softer skills,” he said.

That 20% number looks about right: it talliss well with the number of women we think have the systemizing type brain as shown by the results of our personality tests. But the important point here is I think that while there will still be jobs for the stereotypical geek most of the IT world is no longer that way. The job is no longer supremely technical, the aim is to take the business forward, not to simply write great code. That, in turn, means that the team working skills, the empathy, of the female brain are ever more in demand.

If you’re thinking of going into the computer field that’s an important point that you should consider: yes, the hard technical skills will still be needed, but the people that will really succeed are those who can do that and also display the wider social skills so necessary for working as part of a team.

As regular readers will know we have our EQSQ personality tests here, based on the ground breaking work by Professor Simon Baron Cohen. But the one question we’ve never really quite answered is what they’re for. We know how we can use them, very effectively, of course, because if you take the tests this gives you more information about what you might do in the future: what would be a good career to follow, given your innate personality type. We’ve also floated the idea that the tests might show where you could develop your character more fully: how certain skills might be lacking that could be usefully worked on. But which if these is the most important use of the personality tests? This article in The Times gives an interesting answer:

Computer geeks beware: your days are over. A “charm academy” is being created for IT students in response to employer complaints that too many lack basic social and business skills.

Backers of the initiative say that it is no longer acceptable for universities to churn out students with great software skills but no social ability. What companies need now, they say, are technicians who can talk directly to clients and realise that IT operating systems contribute to the bottom line of the business.

As you can see, employers are increasingly asking that people coming into work are more balanced. Certainly, they want those at th systemizing end of the spectrum (who would be god at those sort of IT tasks) to be good at those IT tasks: but they also want them to be more rounded, better trained in the empathic skills which working as part of a team requires.

So it would seem that the best way to use the personality tests would be to first use them to discover your basic type, the essential character, if you like, and use that to guide you in your choice of training and career. Then, use the tests again to find where you need a little more training and polish, those skills which you’ll need over and above the career specific ones.

Long term care nurses are those who provide ongoing care to those with chronic physical or mental problems. As such it’s really a whole great big barrel full of specialties all in itself. You might specialize in treating those with learning difficulties, or autism, or schizophrenia: you might specialize in the diseases of children or adults, in specific diseases, or you might find yourself, if working in a small town or area, working with a mixture of all of them. You could also be working in hospitals (or even mental hospitals) or out in the community, tending to people in their own homes.

As you can see in this listing of the different types of nursing, there are many blurs between the different types. The important distinction here is that long term care nurses treat those with chronic diseases: as long as they are properly treated the illnesses are not going to kill the patients, but nor is the treatment going to cure them either. It might remove some of the symptoms, make them feel better, but that’s what chronic means, that it’s not going to go away.

As with all forms of nursing the training is via one of three different routes: a college degree in nursing, a two year college degree in nursing or a Diploma, all then followed by a licencing exam. Many of those who start with the latter two routes then go on, later, to take the full college degree as that’s how to get the promotions and the interesting (or more so) jobs.

As for our EQSQ personality tests, like almost all forms of nursing, you’ll want to be at the female brain end, the empathizing, to make a good go of this career.

Being a hospice and palliative care nurse is, to my mind at least, one of the most difficult and harrowing jobs in the world. It’s taking care of those who are dying and making sure that their pain is relieved as they do so. You might work in a hospice or with people in their own homes: but for people like me the difficult thing would be to know that each and every one of your patients is going to die, usually within the next few weeks. There will be no miracle cures, no getting better, just the management of pain as they descend into that long dark night.

As you can imagine, spending your working life with those who are about to die takes a special sort of person. From our EQSQ personality tests, those at the extreme end of the empathizing, or female brain type. Some will have gone through the various psychological stages and be prepared, having come to an acceptance that this is how life ends for all of us. Others will be angry, ashamed even, some decrying their bad luck and demanding to know “Why Me?”. Then there is also the physical aspect, to add to this mental strain. Those who die in their own beds tend not to do so of things like heart attacks and accidents: it’s a slow process of the body shutting down, withering away.

I’m making it sound very gloomy, I know, for it can indeed be that way. But there is another side to it, hospices can be incredibly cheerful places. All there are aware that they must make the most of the last few pleasures that life has to offer, and you, while working there will be amazed at the resilience of the human spirit.

A tough job though, and you’ll want to have a look at those personality tests to make sure that before you decide upon this specialty, you’ve got the right sort of character to be able to deal with it.

Home health care nurses are another of the sub groups that nurses fall into. If you prefer you could say it’s another of the specialties that you could take up within the profession. As with all forms of registered nursing, a college degree is not required but it certainly helps. In fact, many people who come into nursing with out a college degree, through some of the vocational training schemes, for example, find that they will go on to get their BSN, as it makes both promotion and the more interesting jobs so much easier to get.

Home health care nurses go into peoples’ homes (as you might expect) and help them with the aftermath of surgery, accidents and childbirth (which in itself is sometimes an accident, ho, ho). The actual treatment is all fairly regular: it has to be, otherwise these patients would still be in hospital. But there are two things that make it really quite interesting. The first is that, unless you’re working in a very large city, the different patients will all be being treated for different things: so there’s a variation in what you’ll actually be doing. The second of course is that as you’re visiting people in their homes you’ll be in several different places each day.

As to our EQSQ personality tests, like almost all nursing, you’ll both enjoy it more and be better at this job if you are at the empathizing, or female brain end of the results. It’s not quite as extreme as the next specialty that we’re going to discuss, hospice nursing, but the basics of nursing people in their homes do mean that a healthy dose of empathy will be required.

Continuing with our jaunt through the various types of nurses we come to holistic nurses. This can cause some confusion as “holistic” as a word really just means treating the whole, a veiled criticism of conventional medicine which attempts to treat the disease rather than the patient. But in this specific meaning “holistic”, as it refers to nurses, means those who use treatments like acupuncture, massage and aromatherapy.

Even this can be controversial as there are those who insist (and I’m often among them) that such alternative treatments are not in fact medicine at all. At one end of course this is true, waving crystals at someone does nothing at all for them. However, that’s not to say that these treatments don’t have a value at all: much of it is in the placebo value.

For example, let us take the example of someone who is a little run down, perhaps a touch depressed. Not to the point of needing happy pills or anything, just a touch of the glums. This can indeed lead to disease as even mild depression is correlated with a depressed immune system. How should we treat them?

We could be rather callous and simply tell them to get their act together but this is not known to be all that helpful. We could treat them with drugs but again, not all that helpful when side effects are taken into account. We could stick needles into them until they stop complaining but acupuncture doesn’t actually work that way, nor do the other complementary treatments. It’s that placebo effect that does though. Half an hour, an hour, of someone devoting their attention to us does in fact make us feel better. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Swedish massage or one with scented oils, we perk up and lose some of our depression.

Given that this is the way holistic medicine works, those best suited to it by our EQSQ personality tests are easy to identify: those with the most empathy, those at the female end of the personality tests’ results. Given that it is the human interaction, the care being shown, the empathy in fact, which effects the cure, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

While we’re on the subject of the different types of registered nurses I need to explain something about categorization. With a few exceptions, there are four basic ways of dividing up the different areas of nursing. It’s entirely possible (and it is in fact usual) to combine one or more of these different specialties. So there’s a definite sense of mix and match available, which slightly complicates whatever we might say about the results of our EQSQ personality tests.

The four areas are, by where the treatment takes place, by the disease being treated, by the part of the body being treated or by the type of person being treated. So, to be slightly silly about it, we could have a nurse who specializes in treating lung problems in a clinic, or in a hospital ward (”place”), a nurse dealing with lung cancer (disease), or lung problems (organ) or breathing problems in the old (person). Similarly, we might have a nurse who specializes in al treatments of the old, or of any lung disease anywhere and so on.

As you can imagine, the mixture of empathic requirements and systemizing are going to change markedly, depending upon whether you’re working with whoever comes into the emergency room next, purely with children ill with cancer or in a vaccination center for the healthy. So to work out precisely which results of our personality tests best suit you to exactly which nursing career is going to be a little difficult, but we’ll give it the old school try in the next few posts.

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.