A PhD friend of mine, who is now a director at a major Chinese Institute, loves coming to American meetings to lure people back.

Of course I immediately got labelled by the phallocracy: “Sandgroper likes to employ girls.” But it was just silly trivial commentary, because I had an interview board, I was just the lead interviewer, and we were scoring independently and aggregating. The two highest scorers in interview, the real stars, were both female. You could posit that females have better interview skills, and I wouldn’t disagree, but we were asking hard technical questions to which there were right and wrong answers that needed to be thought through on the spot.

We had over a thousand applications, short-listed about 200 for interview, and ended up employing 35. The one gender-biased comment I will make is if they all get pregnant and go on maternity leave at the same time, we’re screwed, which is a real possibility among Chinese. One year not too long ago was a Golden Pig year, which is apparently a good year to have a baby, and suddently 5 of our female engineers were all waddling around with big tummies and then on maternity leave, while their male colleagues worked extra hours to cover for them. What surprised me a bit was that the male colleagues didn’t mind. They were even discouraging the more pregnant of their female colleagues from doing arduous field work and saying “I’ll do it for you.”

Maybe Paul is right and it’s the subset who are attracted to the science stream, I don’t know. I don’t have any numbers for the others. And I’m talking about 100% Chinese people, if that makes a difference. Well, it does make a cultural difference for sure.

I was talking to a sister who is a elementary (primary) school teacher, over the weekend. Irish school teachers are were some of the best paid in the world, but she said that she had to take a 12% pay cut 6 months ago, then they fired her teaching assistant, then fired a few teachers and consolidated classes, to give her 37 pupils in her class. Now the latest is that if a bill passes in early December, she will have to take a FURTHER 30% PAY CUT!!!

In general women have more problems reading maps than men, as this skill directly correlates with visuospatial skills, and men have the advantage here. Of course if you work in the hard sciences, you already have better than average visuospatial skills, so this wouldn’t apply to you or your colleagues, male or female.

I have very high visuospatial skills (> 1 in 10,000), and am something of a cartophile, while my wife, whose background is medicine and public health, while a smart person who can do stats, has poor visuospatial skills. So it’s comical when we go on a trip, I look at a map and get a gestalt image of where we are, and she doesn’t pay any attention to the map, only turn by turn directions. So if we get lost and I say, I think we should head in a more NE direction, it means absolutely zero to her, meanwhile I don’t remember landmarks at all. So neither of us can give the other directions that make sense for our own cognitive profile.

Incidentally, our local Mexican limo service have poor English skills, so when going anywhere out of the way, I print a map for them, but after a while I noticed that NONE of them can read a map – so yes map reading is linked to cognitive ability, but more particularly visuospatial skills.

It is weird that perceived power of groups affects so significantly how we can speak about them. On the one hand it makes a lot of sense given the crap marginal groups typically have to put up with. On the other there’s something really disheartening about not being able to have a straightforward discussion without fear about connotations be created out of power relations and dominating over more “literal” discussion.

Regarding the FT and many other sites that limit cut and paste, there are plugins for Firefox and Safari that disable the associated Javascript.

I’m really shocked about that statistic on France. It’s always interesting talking to educated immigrants and why they immigrate. I’ve friends who’ve moved from the US to Canada and are quite happy. I went the opposite direction. What’s more interesting yet are those who moved, are unhappy, yet inexplicably stay. I knew some people from South America like that who loved to complain about the US. I never understood that.

Regarding multitasking, I think there are two groups. Those who think they can multitask well but can’t and those who just recognize they can’t. Debate about what group multitasks best is like arguing over what kind of cat plays the piano best.

OK it’s not, but whatever the advantage of having blonde hair and somewhat lighter skin where the sun is as strong as it is in Melanesia is, it can have nothing to do with balancing UV protection/ vitamin D synthesis. Therefore it’s not just the architecture of hair pigmentation that is different it’s what the purpose of it is; the genes which result in blonde hair in Melanesians must be conferring a fitness advantage by doing something completely different to the ones in Russians.

Rather than blonde hair in Russia resulting from a different mechanism aimed at solving a totally different problem to blonde hair in Melanesia (which just happens to produce similar looking hair), is it not at least as likely that blondes around the world are just different solutions to a somewhat similar problems?

Sexual selection and/ or “parental selection” could be a super parsimonious explanation which also explains why albinism is so common in Africa. Statistically, the chances of a child being born with albinism are 1 in 17000 but one in every 4,000 Africans is born with albinism. That points towards an non-natural selection advantage for light skin precisely where it is rarest (and given African solar irradiation, the biggest handicap ).

didn’t know you were a specialist in my thoughts

Chalk it up to my own probable bias in this area. My first impulse is to think, if anyone says they’re conservative, that they’d necessarily be biased toward some sort of innate gender difference which almost always puts women in the disadvantaged position. Not necessarily true, of course, but my first impulse in this respect, while not justified, might be explained by the predominantly misogynist attitude of conservatism in general, specifically the morally authoritarian aspects of it.

(On a bit of a tangent, fundies are like commies: fundies are morally authoritarian, commies are economically authoritarian – although Stalin and his lot were kind of morally authoritarian too. Also, I think libertarianism is a wonderful thing to eventually work toward as a civilization when we don’t actually NEED the things economically liberal-to-moderate folk want the government to pay for, but right now implementing libertarianism is kind of like taking the training wheels off a bike when a kid’s only just started riding it with training wheels. And even then, there are some things that should perpetually have government support, such as education and research.)

Regardless, we haven’t really created nor have been truly able to create a situation yet in which one could really discount environmental influence due to inability to control for previous experience, though there has been some altering of conditions in some examples (e.g. girls and math in the Middle East) which has shown that environment has a frustrating amount of negative influence on kids out there and reducing that negative influence goes a long way toward solving the problem.

True, sandgroper, it is a cognitive thing, but here’s the problem: there is culturally-biased comment about these cognitive abilities, a whole lot of which is unsubstantiated by fact.

Injury patterns suggest that Mum used to go out hunting big game with Dad, up close and personal using thrusting and chopping weapons. If Neanderthals died too young for kids to know their grandparents, that could help to explain high childhood mortality. You know, the grandmother theory for post-menopausal longevity.

But then, that’s a Neanderthal stereotype – some ate oysters, salmon and salad. Yum.

#2 – You and I are probably equally sick of reading this stuff. In my career, (no exaggeration) I have interviewed several hundred young civil engineers and engineering graduates, and engineering geologists and mapping geologists also, a substantial and increasing minority of whom are female. On map and plan reading ability (which are learned skills), the correlation is not with gender, it is with cognitive ability. And you don’t need to be a high end math genius to be a good engineer, just good enough at engineering math, so even if that stuff about the tails of the distribution is true once cultural factors are eliminated, cognitive ability in a civil engineering context is not gender-biased – if anything, the girls are gaining the upper hand over the boys, now that the shackles are off and the harrassment illegal. Geologists don’t do math, but they do need to map very well. That’s the other gender myth that needs to be exploded – that girls are not up to field work in dirty conditions and rough terrain. It is absolutely not true.

Reminds me – I once interviewed a very pretty and intelligent y0ung female Chinese engineer, and said “So what have you been working on recently?” and she said “Well, for the past 12 months I’ve been out on site up to my knees in shit every day.” The seawater around Macau is diluted human shit. I employed her.

And I can hold the baby while I stir the soup – been there and done that. I did it once when it was hot and I was shirtless, and she suddenly fastened like a little suction cup onto one of my unfortunately useless male nipples (I have good pecs from weight training, and my dear wife is, shall we say, on the under-endowed side, so the baby could be forgiven for getting confused), which was utterly embarrassing and awful for me and very disappointing for her. I am not THAT well equipped for multi-tasking

Natural selection vs. what – I mean, what would be an alternative mechanism?

balancing selection?

Skin lightening is not a parsimonious explanation, given the dark skinned blondes in Melanesia would require a different rationale entirely.

no shit they’d require a different explanation. but the genetic architecture of europeans is very well elucidated. and it is moderately well elucidated in east asians. the architecture is different across populations, so why is it so inconceivable that melanesians would exhibit different architectures? i’ve blogged it, google it,but aboriginal blondes seem to have different inheritance patterns too.

I don’t see how “doing things at once” is a helpful generalization, and even if you do a study that some people are better at doing 2 particular tasks together, you would have a good reason to suggest that they do better at any other couple of skilled tasks chosen at random.

don’t offer your opinion, offer your rationale. if blondism is a frequency dependent trait then it would make sense why the frequency “tops off.” i happen to think though that it’s mostly a side effect of the lightening of skin (several of the loci which effect skin color effect blondism, oca2 & kitlg).