Re:autism quotient (Score 1)

There's another set of tests created by Simon Baron Cohen, a version of which is here: http://www.eqsq.com/eqsqtest.php There's also some of his papers etc referenced. His essential theory is that there is something called the "male brain" and something called the "female". Actually, it's a spectrum with balanced in between. Taking the known differences physiologically between the brains of the two sexes he asks why they occur. His answer is exposure to fetal testosterone. We then end up with (by his estimates) some 17% or so of women with the male brain type and 17% of male with the female. What this in turn means is that those stereotypes, about male ability at spatial recognition, for example, or maps, or systemizing tasks, are true on average, just as women's greater empathic skills and communications etc are, but only on average. For a specific individual someone of either sex can be anywhere on the spectrum, with a probability attatched. Further, he thinks that autism is an expression of the extreme male brain: something that can indeed happen in either sex but logically, more often in men, something we do see in the real world. One of his papers looks at the incidence of autism in the exteneded familes of students at Cambridge University: it's vastly more prevalent in those in the Engineering Faculty than in the Arts. It's probably true to say (and B-C certainly does not say that either test is diagnostic, rather, indicative or a research tool) that the AQ test above is a part of the over-arching theory, not something that stands alone. Certain careers and occupations most certainly seem to attract people at one point or another on the EQSQ scale. People here at Slashdot are highly likely to score highly on the SQ (systemizing) part, lower on the EQ. Those in nursing, the other way around. This is an anecdote, a data point, no more, but one economist put forward the idea that economic models are like maps, abstract models that help us navigate in the real world. I then asked a female economist what her map reading skills were like and she was 2 standard deviations better than the average male, let alone female (however it was that she measured it). As I say, an anecdote, but even as such, it is pointing to the idea that certain professions are correlated with certain mental skills (well, duh!) but possession of these by men and women (the old stereotypes) is on average, not an accurate description of individuals.