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Men really ARE better at parking
December 29, 2009
It’s a thorny subject, so it is probably just as well it was a female scientist who confirmed that men are better at parking than women.
Men were typically five per cent more competent at parallel parking – where the car draws alongside anther vehicle before reversing into a bay – according to research.
They were also better at driving head-on into a space and then reversing into place.
During the tests, in which volunteers were asked to repeatedly park a saloon car, psychologists found women didn’t benefit from the extra 20 seconds they took to complete the manoeuvres on average.
In fact, they tended to end up much closer to the edge of the bays than the male drivers, despite showing far more caution.
The scientists from Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, concluded men benefit from superior co-ordination and spatial awareness because their brains can process the changing position and speed of a car quicker than women’s.
The study’s co-author, Dr Claudia Wolf, a PhD student at the university’s Department of Biopsychology, said she became interested in the subject because of the number of chauvinistic comments she encountered about women drivers.
‘These prejudices exist and, as a scientist, I decided to find out if they are true or based on myth,’ she said.
‘I don’t think feminism or the cause of women is in any way set back by these findings. It only proves what
previous studies about the spatial differences between men and women have shown.
‘Besides, it is not as if there was a massive failing by women. It is just about parking – not the triumph of men over women.’
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