'Women can read maps — they just need Lego '

[ErrolTheDragon]

Report in The Times today on Gina Rippon speaking at the Hay Festival

Women can read maps — they just need Lego

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-says-women-can-t-read-maps-they-just-need-lego-kdlp5x2nw?shareToken=e523367a117a4ca5c3927f8270a4bbc1

I'm pleased to say that DD did indeed have a lot of Lego (and k'nex which imo is even better), and began with a megablocks self-build pink fairy castle.

"A previous study has shown that girls as young as four were slower at completing a Lego construction task than other girls if they had been exposed to a so-called gender activation task, such as colouring in a picture of a girl holding a doll."
Sounds like bullshit to me. Did they do the same study on boys? Did they show the girls other pictures and did they make them faster or slower?

I never had lego but am great at reading maps.
But the thing I discovered was that when they say men are better at reading maps - It's a very specific thing - It's reading the map upside down that they are good at.

I tested it out - my head hurts when I have to navigate from an upside down map. Dh is very comfortable going the wrong way irrespective of which side the map is facing. So it's true

Boys don't receive the same socialisation as girls so I wouldn't expect the results to be directly comparable.
I'm not convinced by the gender activation task. Colouring in would activate a different set of skills for me than making something out of lego, and I might take time to adjust to changing task. Especially if I were 4.
I'd find the attitude and sex of the people setting the task would also have an affect.

My mum is an engineer and so a huge lego set was our first toy. My mum’s first ‘toy’ was the family generator in India - she and her sister were expected to fix it from the age of 5. My mum, sister, and I are all shit at map-reading.

Ok, let's search using google scholar for 'Lego gender activation'.

I think this is the one referred to. Obviously it used another picture as a control.

www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-psychologie-sociale-2014-3-page-53.htm#

This is another study which uses different 'activations' and both sexes.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-14784-002

Those were the first two hits but there are others, don't know what they find - if I have time later I'll try to take a look.

Have they used an an activation that is a similar task, such as making a jigsaw?

I'm not convinced by the gender activation task. Colouring in would activate a different set of skills for me than making something out of lego, and I might take time to adjust to changing task

That's why - of course - they use a control.

Re reading maps 'upside down', given that the orientation of a map is actually completely arbitrary - perhaps some women (for whatever reason) are more focussed on the textual clues in placenames etc? This wouldn't be a factor in any experiment on small children.

Hopefully at some point mapping will be done on screens with the annotations keeping constant orientation while the map rotates (I work with 3 dimensional rotating images and we always keep the labels the right way up!)

I can read a map. But then I was taught to do so by a women in a female only environment and it never occurred to me it wasn’t something I could do.

I can follow Lego instructions too.

Mind you I’d be a shit engineer can’t do the maths. As far as I’m aware a penis wouldn’t help with that though.

I came on to say I don't believe Prof Rippon wrote 'casual biological differences ..' but now see they have changed it to 'inherent biological differences'. Makes me wonder about The Times and the quality of their journalism if they confuse casual with, presumably, causal. Wonder if there's a print version.

I can read a map and navigate, or produce a route map (although with google, who needs to these days).

Mind you, this pales into insignificance against the genius of my DP, who once guided his family around Leeds with a map of Nottingham

Maps make no sense to me. Well, they do in themselves, but I simply can't seem to place myself on the map (mentally) in order to work out which way to go.

I used to be quite good with an A-Z, but even those maps you see near the exits to Tube stations baffle me. I even fail at using my Google maps for walking directions...

Ancient - yeah, that one is almost up to grauniad standards!

Butter

I'm great at reading maps. DH is rubbish because he's dyslexic. Mind you he has an amazing internal compass. Probably explains the memory of a pigeon though (lighthearted).

So they thought causal was a misspelling of casual?

If this is the case, why not give more girls more lego? When did lego become unladylike?

It's very easy to type "casual" instead of "causal" and a spellchecker won't pick it up.

I have a lot of difficulty with maps and spatial skills in general. But obviously there's a vicious circle with this stuff - once you decide you're crap at something, you convince yourself you're never going to be able to learn it, so you don't put the effort in. Also, in my experience, teachers don't try as hard with weak students as they do with strong ones, and if there's a gender element to that (ie they assume girls will be less skilled at something), then that has an impact too.

I can read a map. But then I was taught to do so by a women in a female only environment and it never occurred to me it wasn’t something I could do.

Hm, I wonder if DDs map reading abilities are more due to the megablocks castle or doing DofE in a girls school? plus, on walks, DH giving her the map.

I'm shit at reading maps nowadays but that's down to shortsightedness. I'm fine at rotating 3d solids (in my head or by using maths).

I'm afraid we're slipping into anecdotage.

The stereotype threat study makes more sense to me than the first report.
It also annoys me how many people ignore the fact that women are underrepresented in some fields because they can't afford to study and don't get any support from home.
We didn't have many toys at all when I was a child, but the lack of support in later years had more of an affect and has followed me into adulthood. If researchers want to know why there are fewer women in STEM they need to look at women who are excluded from studying, imo.

I always turn the map so that I'm travelling up the page. Men often don't seem to need to do this, perhaps because they tend to be better at doing the rotations inside their heads. But even that is likely to be a skill they've learned.

I think they see a woman with an upside-down map and think she can't read maps. What they're actually seeing is a woman who knows exactly where she is and what direction she's travelling in.

Just as well I can read maps, because I have no sense of direction.

Mind you he has an amazing internal compass

DH does most of our map reading when we're walking, because he has maps on his phone and can still read small print (i meant longsightedness upthread). But I'm better at knowing which way we're facing. I only realised this recently. It's mostly a matter of being somewhat aware of where the sun is and the time of day.

I'm fine at rotating 3d solids (in my head or by using maths).

3d visualisation is something that women often struggle with. I found this when teaching maths, that most of the boys could solve a 3d trigonometry problem just by visualisation from a drawn diagram, but nearly all the girls needed a solid model to help them to see what they should be doing.

It can be taught, though. I've become much better at this sort of thing just from practice. I still like my maps orientated in the direction of travel, though.

I’m very good at map reading - years of practice as the official navigator on family holidays from age 8 upwards. OH has a terrible sense of navigation and leaves it up to me to get us back to the car when visiting a new town or city.

3d visualisation is something that women often struggle with.

That gets us back to the original point - why is this? 'It can be taught, though. ' rather suggests it's not an inherent inability, doesn't it?

On the map-turning thing - we've had contradictory views on that in this thread. (DH is more of a map-turner than I am). Maybe someone has done a study?

While I'm hopeless at maps, I'm amazing at accurately estimating what time it is, without looking at a clock. What does that say about my brain?