Career impacts on fidelity

A couple of months ago I read about a study conducted to determine if there is a relationship between career choice and infidelity rates. I don't remember any specific numbers but here's the gist of the study:

The experiment monitored two professions that are similar in scope but widely divergent in environment, elementary school teachers and high school teachers. Elementary school teachers work in environments relatively devoid of sexual temptation from not only the student population but from the coworker population as well, since the majority of elementary school teachers are female. High school teachers work in environments infused with massive amounts of sexual tension from the raging hormones of adolescent teenagers. And to toss fuel onto the hormonal fire, high school teachers are surround by young, budding bodies of near-legal age. As if that weren't enough temptation, high school teachers also have to contend with the coworker population that tends to have a more balanced female/male ratio then their elementary school counterparts.

The results of the study are just what you would expect: High school teachers have a higher incidence of infidelity than elementary school teachers; thus, a correlation exists between careers and infidelity rates. A correlation exists, but causation remains unproven. Are the higher rates of infidelity in high school teachers caused by their environments or are individuals who choose to be high school teachers predisposed to higher infidelity rates? Regardless, a correlation exists and it makes sense. For example, the married business man who flits across the country from conference to symposium to trade show has ample opportunity for discrete extramarital encounters, while the married computer guru who performs all of his programming voodoo next to the furnace room in his basement office has limited access to external poon. Right.

Following this logic, my career correlates to high fidelity; perhaps it's one of the highest fidelity rates per profession, Civil Engineering. First of all, engineering is a male dominated career. I remember back in my college days the first two years when I was inundated in the mainstream classes, like English 1000 and Psychology 1010, the student population was vast and diverse. As I started slipping into engineering-oriented classes the female population began to dwindle until my senior year when the boy/girl ratio was 15/1.

Secondly, engineering tends to attract ugly people. I don't know why, it just does. Sometimes the education system churns out a babe-a-licious engineer (witness yours truly) but the odds are against it. If the engineering education system spits out one hotty for every 100 graduates then the possibility of encountering a cute engineer-ette is 1 in 1500.

Thirdly, civil engineering is the least lucrative of the big four engineering types (civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical) and, women being the more astute of the sexes, tend to gravitate to one of the higher paying alternatives, further depopulating the number of female civil engineers.

I don't mind the lack of eye candy at work, because I'm in a committed relationship. I'm just glad I'm not like all my single male coworkers who are reduced to flirting with the creepy mustached female-esque engineer in the asphalt design unit.
...and so it was written, shenry at 2/06/2003 07:57:00 PM.
...and so it was appended with .