409  Tango and Engineers

Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 01:35:17 -0800
From: "Larry E. Carroll" <larrydla@JUNO.COM>
Subject: Tango and Engineers

In my dozen years in the tango world I've been impressed at the variety
of people (and their professions) who are drawn to tango. I'm a
(software) engineer myself, working mostly on scientific applications,
and probably more sensitive than most to the presence of scientists and
engineers in any arena. I've also been involved over the years with
salsa, several varieties of swing and ballroom, and other social dances.
I've never noticed any particular dance drawing specific professions.

Also, even if I granted the premise of "Engineers love tango" that
wouldn't mean that tango drew analytical, logical minds. What most
people (even some engineers!) don't realize is that engineering is a
creative profession. We (like everyone else) solve most problems with
creativity, not with logic, and logic and critical thinking are only
used to test solutions. Though we try hard to apply logic to our
decisions, sometimes spending a lot of time using elaborate weighted
criteria, in the end we often use these methods to justify decisions
that we made with intuition and esthetics. And the better the engineer
or scientist, the more creative we are.

Also, we often have creative hobbies. I worked for 11 years at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, which is owned and operated by the
California Institute of Technology. I rubbed elbows with a number of
scientists, some of them Nobel prize winners and the like. The variety
and intensity of their creative hobbies - including dancing - would
amaze most people who only know science and scientists through
stereotypes.

I'm often amused by people's assumptions about those supposed opposites
of engineers and scientists - artists of all stripes. Since I'm working
to become a full-time professional writer and have edited magazines,
I've know dozens of writers personally over the years. I've also been
involved in various kinds of art. (In fact, I have a degree in film/TV
production.) Any professional artist - someone who doesn't eat if they
don't produce - is very disciplined, even though that may not be obvious
to the casual observer. We are also very analytical and detail oriented.
Sit in on a writer's workshop sometimes, as I have dozens of times over
the years, and you'll see the same kind of thinking and interaction as
engineers in a design session - or dancers (of ANY kind) at an advanced
workshop.

People like easy, simple-minded, black and white answers. Often they
suppose creativity and logic to be opposites, and a person high in one
always low in the other. In fact, intuitive and practical thought are
two mostly orthogonal activities, and the healthiest mind has a "right"
and a "left" brain (like a left and a right arm) of equal sizes and
strengths, working together.

It is true that a particular kind of thought may predominate in
different areas. Someone (Laurie Moseley?) pointed out that classes tend
to focus on analysis and technique and precise repetition of standard
moves, while dancing (or playing an instrument, giving a speech,
painting, etc.) tends to focus more on creative and holistic thinking
and risking mistakes to do something unusual.

This doesn't mean that studying and practicing are inferior or useless
to dancing. Just as body building gives us the strength and speed and
endurance to be freer at a sport, so does practicing technique gives us
the freedom to feel and enjoy when we dance, because technique has
become mostly automatic.

I suspect that discussions like this one are partly because many of us
are still trying to figure out just what the Argentine tango is. (And
partly because a few of us are too lazy to feel more than one part of
the elephant!)

The problem is that tango is polymorphic, which is one of the things
that has made me abandon most of the many social dances I've learned in
several decades of dancing. If the music is boring, or my partner loves
acrobatics, I can dance tango (or try to, anyway!) with the precision,
complexity, and athleticism of ballet. If the music is hypnotic, or my
partner a beginner, I may dance very simply but with much feeling
(because a tango beginner may yet have a PhD of the heart).

We can dance tango with austere elegance, or sweaty rhythm, or sensuous
togetherness. We can dance "milonguero," or canyengue, or "salon," or
"Nuevo tango," or any of several other styles, all depending on the
music and the surroundings and (most of all) our partner.

And the sooner someone gives up trying to straitjacket the incredible
richness of the tango into one simple thing, the sooner they can really
begin to enjoy all its possibilities.

Larry de Los Angeles
https://home.att.net/~larrydla

Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 19:11:59 -0700
From: Madhav Apte <mapte@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Re: Tango and Engineers

Larry has made excellent points.
His beautiful sentence has brought me out of silence:

>
> always low in the other. In fact, intuitive and practical thought are
> two mostly orthogonal activities, and the healthiest mind has a "right" *

What I have found to be difficult for people (and for me as well sometimes)
to do is to avoid labels as much as possible. Labels resulting from
profession, race,
looks, possessions can be hugely misleading at worst and incomplete at best.
They obscure the person at whom one is looking.

Encountering another human being is a golden opportunity for discovery - why
waste
it via assumptions?!

Madhav

ps: so an n-dimensional space can accommodate lots of characteristics that
might
seem "contrary" to each other!

Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 18:56:33 -0700
From: Marisa Holmes <mariholmes@YAHOO.COM>
Subject: Tango and Engineers - results of survey of women on the list

*** "I suppose you could make a case that women are in
professions which mimic the skills they must have to
follow ... social and communication skills, reaching
out to touch someone, so to speak?" ***

Well, first of all, apologies for taking a long time
to process this information. Life intervened. The
original discussion that prompted me to run a little
survey reiterated the claim that most (or at least
many) tango dancers are engineers. And then Ira
Goldstein asked whether that included women dancing
tango. And so I posted:

" if every female reader of this list would care to
write me and tell me what your profession or
occupation is (and also if you ever lead or want to,
and what country you dance in), I would be glad to
compile the results and report. I will also accept
data from men about their primary usual female dance
partner (1 per man, please!) if they are sure she will
not answer for herself."

One hundred nineteen women responded (or someone else
responded for them). I want to thank them for their
generosity. Many not only told me what they did for a
living, they also wrote about their career paths and
aspirations, and their ideas about how their jobs -
and their dancing - reflect their skills and
abilities. Most of the women who responded are
currently in the U.S. I also heard from 7 in Europe,
two each in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Turkey,
and one in Japan.

The most surprising result, to me, was how many people
named more than one job or occupation. Some of us are
doing more than one job right now: with 119 people, I
heard about 168 current jobs. Many of these are people
who have a full-time paid job and who also run a small
business. Most of the part-time businesses are
dance-related (teaching/organizing); others are craft
or service businesses (jewelry, massage, etc.).
Although some women gave their occupation as homemaker
or mother, no one said specifically that she was
working full-time and also working in her home. I'm
guessing that a formal survey with follow-up questions
would find a great many more part-time, unpaid jobs in
the home, but the numbers presented here do not show
that labor.


Caveats
I have grouped our occupations into general fields
that I think make sense and which reflect sets of
skills, psychological characteristics, predilections,
etc., in line with the original discussion on this
list. These categories are (alphabetically): arts,
business and management, crafts and trades, education,
information and information technology, language and
communication, people out of the paid work force,
professional services, science, and service jobs.
Although some patterns emerge, the sample size is too
small to "prove" anything. In addition, I can imagine
a couple of other ways to sort the groups out which I
think are equally valid (for example, I have separated
'education' from 'communication', although
communication is the most basic skill in education).
In each case, I have tried to describe the jobs in
each classification, so you can see whether the
categories make sense to you. I consider the results
illuminating, but I make no claims for them beyond
that.

One additional warning about these results: I think
there is evidence in the responses that it may be
unwise to hold too tightly to the idea that the job
(or the inclination to dance) is defined by the
personality. Here is a characteristic response:
"I work as a high paid manager in government. I have
a graduate degree in Spanish literature and also an
MBA. What category does that put me in?"
And, less typical, but informative in this context:
" I'm a writer, and am working as a file clerk to make
ends meet . I've been a project manager at a Fortune
500 company, a waitress, a stockbroker and a brokerage
operations clerk, a margins analyst, an actress, a
singer of jazz and cabaret music, a YMCA locker room
desk clerk, a factory worker in Silicon Valley..."


Results

The original question was whether the often-repeated
claim that tango appeals to engineers applies to
women. (Whether it actually applies to male dancers,
someone else must investigate.) The short answer is
that it may appeal to female engineers, but most of
the women who dance tango are not engineers. Of the
119 women who responded, two of them identified
themselves as engineers, another as an electrical
engineer, and a fourth as a software engineer. In
fact, most of the women who answered are in fields
very different from engineering, as we will see:


*** "Women who Tango - whatever their profession - are
bright, articulate and excellent communicators (verbal
and non-verbal). They have to be in order to
follow/listen to the complex lead of the dance." ***

As it turned out, we could have just asked the women
who wrote me the message above. The largest group (26%
of the respondents) falls into the cluster I call
language and communication. [The following figures
are based only on the 168 current jobs/occupations
listed by the respondents. In addition, the
percentages are based on responses within a group as a
percentage of the total number of women (119), not the
total number of jobs (168), so the percentages total
more than 100.] This group includes:
15 writers (journals, technical writers, editors, and
fiction writers)
7 people in advertising and marketing
6 language teachers (3 of them teaching English as a
second language)
3 translators


The sciences as a whole also employ a sizeable
proportion of the respondents- 24% of the women who
wrote. Here are the members of this group:
8 in medicine (5 physicians or medical researchers, 3
other medical personnel)
6 in psychology or psychiatry
4 in the hard sciences (3 chemists and a physicist)
4 engineers (as above)
4 in the life sciences (genetics, biology,
oceanography, biotechnology)
3 in the social sciences (archeology, anthropology,
sociology)


*** 'I am a former farm wife, ongoing stained glass
artist, trying to promote Argentine Tango, but my
rotary badge says "entrepreneur".' ***

Business and management jobs were held by 18% of the
respondents:
6 administrators ( academic administrators, office
administrators, clerks)
5 managers (3 for non-profit organizations or
government, 2 for trade organizations)
2 consultants
A substantial number of the women responding to my
question (27) run small businesses. I have listed most
of them elsewhere - the craftswomen in crafts, the
dance instructors in arts, the computer-related
business owners in information, etc. Nine business
owners remain whose work I did not manage to fit into
another category:
3 spa/beauty products/massage businesses
2 shoe businesses (ah - tango!)
4 others (court reporter, dog grooming, real estate
rental, tourist services)


*** " and I teach tango ( of course I spend more money
learning it and dancing it than I make teaching it.)"
***

The next three largest groups (13% each) are the arts,
the crafts, and the information professions. Women in
the arts include:
8 performers (some part- and some full-time. 6 tango
dancers, 1 actress, 1 musician)
5 dance instructors
3 others (TV producer, events planner, arts
management)
There are many women, of course, who have a deep
interest in the arts who do not appear in this count,
and this must reflect to some extent the difficulty of
making a living as a performer or of living an
acceptable life if one is a performer. One woman
wrote: "I'm an electronics engineer who used to do
ballet." I keep thinking that if everyone could do
the job they felt called to we would be able to draw
more conclusions about personality (and maybe how
likely it is that the members of certain professions
would have an interest in tango). As it is, many
people clearly do the job they find by some sort of
chance.


Crafts and trades - 13 %:
4 jewelers (most also describe themselves as business
owners)
3 graphic artists (illustrator, photographer, make-up
artist)
3 architects
6 others (baker, bookbinder, hose remodeler, clothing
and toy designer, stained glass artist, interior
designer)


Information and information technology careers
accounted for 15 respondents (13%):
10 computer professionals (4 systems administrators or
support people, 4 software developers, 2 owners of
computer-related businesses)
5 librarians


*** "Hi, Marisa,
Does household engineer count?" ***

Another 12% of the respondents are currently out of
the paid workforce. As we know, there are four job
statuses in which people are commonly not being paid
for their labor, and one of those is much more common
for men than for women. Current occupations among the
respondents include all four:
3 students
6 full-time homemakers or parents
2 in transition between jobs
3 retired


Education - 9 %:
9 academics of various sorts
2 K-12 teachers
This is the category which showed the greatest
difference between the number of people who have ever
worked in the field and the number currently working
in it. With fewer than half the respondents giving
information on jobs they held before, there were seven
people who said they had taught at the K-12 levels -
and only two still doing so.


Professional services. 7 %. I am a little reluctant
to group these together, as they represent two
different skill sets - you can take the classification
with a grain of salt:
5 financial professionals (2 accountants, bookkeeper,
insurance agent, bank employee)
3 lawyers


Service jobs - 3%:
These jobs are not common in the group of women who
responded, although many who talked about their work
histories mentioned having held them in the past.
This reflects in part the remuneration for service
work, which may well not pay for a hobby like tango.
The respondent who specified that this job was her
career indicated that she has worked in a series of
upscale establishments where her communication skills
are essential to her success. For the other
respondents, current and past service jobs have tended
to be part-time and temporary:
2 waitresses
1 retail sales


So - does tango appeal to engineers? Maybe, but it
also appeals to a lot of women whose jobs are nothing
at all like engineering. A number of people told me
they had no idea about the occupations of their fellow
dancers, but some women clearly have employed their
communication skills within their communities. One
respondent, who was absolutely correct, wrote: "The
women that I dance with range from Doctor, dressmaker,
artists (lots of artists) real estate agents, personal
coach, therapists, Psychologists, teachers, students,
home care workers, housecleaners, architect and last
but not least homemakers/ fulltime mums." Why didn't
I just ask her?


A Leading Question
One final note: I had asked, as a matter of personal
interest, for women to tell me if they lead as well as
follow. There were four types of responses. Most
people did not mention leading at all; they either
don't lead, missed the question, or were not
interested in the question. A handful (4) specified
that they lead in class if necessary or lead to teach,
but never lead socially. Eighteen women (15% of the
respondents) told me they do lead or want to learn.
This group includes women in several fields, but none
in arts, education, service jobs, or out of the paid
work force (for this calculation retirees were
included in their previous professions). It does
include 25 % of the women in crafts and 33% of those
in the information professions (a LAN administrator, a
UNIX programmer, a software engineer, and two
librarians). Six women felt strongly enough about the
issue that they wrote to tell me they did not lead; 2
scientists, 2 language/communications workers, a
business type, and a woman out of the paid work force.


Cheers!
Marisa