Ah Epoisses, thank you for your thought provoking post.
It brings up those thorny issues of political correctness and its relationship to scientific correctness....Hmmmmmm.
The scientific examination of human male/female behaviours have had a long history of political mangling and misinterpretation and in this media-soaked/soundbite world, I think there is little scientists (and this engineer) can do to stem this phenomena, other than to reiterate over and over again what the terms 'on average' mean.
In terms of EI, the only reason one extreme is linked to male and the other to female is on the basis that on average, these are the people who exhibit these type of behaviours. Lets add the clarification that it is the continuum of male/female brainess that EI is related to rather than any all encompassing idea about what single marker makes a man or a woman (chromosomes are not as specific as you might think!)
You raise the interesting idea that one end of the scale is more desirable than the other. Would we all like to be more emotionally intelligent???? This is actually what I was trying to get at in my title for this thread. Do engineers WANT to be more emotionally intelligent???
Should we be aiming, as you hint, towards that politically correct centre where every male is more empathetic and every female more systematic???
What would become of the 'very well behaved child, shy lonely and withdrawn, considered mentally slow, unsociable and adrift in his dreams'? Ans: A lost Einstein.
And think of the words of Hans Asperger, ' A good professional attitude involves single-mindedness as well as a decision to give up a large number of other interests...It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential'
So, personally, even though the MSCEIT showed my EI shortcomings, I'm perfectly happy with my lot. I don't want to have a higher EQ, IQ or any other Q's, I just want to understand the Q's I've got and make the most of them.