We all know that men are from Mars and women from Venus, but are some of the
differences between us myths? To find out Quentin Cooper, the presenter of
Radio 4’s science show The Material World, and I agreed to take part
in four experiments on subjects that traditionally define the sexes:
multitasking, empathy, gossip and map reading. The results are being
broadcast on Monday on Radio 4. And if you thought you could safely put a
tenner on them, think again; although we will agree that a trial of two does
not represent a true sample.
MEN ARE BETTER AT MAP READING
I’ll go quietly on this one. In general, men do seem better, although I know
plenty of women who are the navigators in the relationship, in more sense
than one. What’s incontestable is that the car is the site of more spats
between men and women than anywhere else.
Method
We were dumped in Milton Keynes, home of roundabouts and a baffling grid
system that seems logical only to the initiated. We were each given a map
and asked to navigate our way to a specific location, while the other acted
as driver. We had a psychologist, Dr Qazi Rahman of the University of East
London, sitting in the back of the car, noting our responses and times.
Afterwards, we were each shown a map, given two points and asked to describe
in one minute how to get from one to the other.
Result
Quentin walked this one. I took 18 minutes to direct him to a location
apparently only five minutes away. He took nine minutes. We both completed
the second task, but the directions we gave were totally different. I gave
landmarks as well as left and right. Quentin mainly offered left and right.
Conclusion
The research is unequivocal. Men definitely are better map readers than women.
“The difference between the sexes is an equivalent difference from that of
the height between a 12-year-old and an 18-year-old,” said Dr Rahman. A
wealth of research supports men’s superior abilities in direction finding.
Even if women become practised at map reading, they still do worse than the
best men. When describing a route I used landmarks, which is typical for a
woman. Quentin tended to say things such as “Go forwards through six
roundabouts” or “head north”. Pardon? I had no idea where north was. This is
typical of women. Men on the other hand rely on compass points and have a
far better sense of north and south. They are also more likely to describe
distances.
What of gay men and women? Fascinatingly, gay women are as useless as the rest
of their sex in getting from A to B with a map, but gay men employ both male
and female route-finding strategies. This suggests that their brains are a
sexual mosaic, says Dr Rahman.
Typically females will turn the map to the direction of travel (which is what
I did). Women orientate in relation to themselves. There are a number of
hypotheses as to why there is such a marked gender difference, which relates
mainly to our hunter-gatherer past when men needed to range over large
distances in search of prey and find their way home again, while women stuck
to shorter routes, which they memorised using landmarks. Science does not
relate why men never a) admit they are lost and b) refuse to ask directions.
MULTITASKING
Of course women are better at multitasking. It’s part of the deal for women.
You get a womb, you get multitasking skills thrown in. It’s why women will
take over the world one day. And since I regard myself as the MT Queen, I
was pretty confident that I’d wipe the floor with Quentin while baking a
tarte tatin. Why were we doing this, I thought, when the result was sure to
be such a dead cert?
Method
We each got exactly five minutes in the BBC kitchen, during which we had to
fry an egg to perfection, make two slices of toast, a cup of lapsang
souchong with milk, count backwards in 7s from 110, put a set of children’s
fridge magnet letters into alphabetical order, receive a text with an
instruction (pink laundry into white bag) and a phone call asking us to look
up something specific in the Radio Times. So far, so like home.
Result
For the alphabet, I used a P instead of a D and vice versa (which I call a
technical fault) and I failed miserably on the 7s, which I eventually gave
up on. Quentin did all these things faultlessly, so he won. But his strategy
was very different. He planned a time gap in which to do his counting, which
I think means that he wasn’t multitasking at all.
Conclusion
Studies of blood flow and activity during activity by Ruben and Raquel Gur, of
the University of Pennsylvania, have indicated that women repeatedly used
more parts of their brain when given a wide variety of verbal and spatial
tasks. It is believed that this may help them to focus on several things at
once, but there’s still no evidence that women are better at multitasking
than men.
The biggest myth of all is that multitasking is somehow a virtue. In fact, all
the research shows that one at a time is the fastest way to get through many
chores. The research of our expert referee, Stephen Monsell, Professor of
Cognitive Psychology at the University of Exeter, focuses on a phenomenon
called switching. He has shown that every time a particular task was
switched, it took about a third longer to do the task as the brain had to
get back into gear.
So most multitasking is no such thing, it’s really sequential tasking. When
adults genuinely combine tasks, we are better able to do things at which we
have become practised. With experience, we can change gear in the car
without taking our attention off the road. Air traffic controllers can
follow many planes simultaneously on a screen; chefs can cook several things
at once because they have become practised at it. Professor Monsell stressed
that there are many tasks that are not compatible because they are both
competing to use the same part of the brain. So women may simply be more
practised at their many tasks, but, if pressed, I bet most would say that
they’d get on faster if they did one job at a time.
WOMEN GOSSIP MORE THAN MEN
What an outrageous slur. We just chat about different things – or do we?
Method
We each took a friend of the same sex out for a drink. Our conversation was
recorded and then analysed by Professor Robin Dunbar, who heads the
evolutionary psychology unit at the University of Liverpool.
Result
Quentin and his friend Steve spent a lot of time talking about films and their
mates. My friend Sally and I talked about the best BlackBerry (honestly).
Sally and I thought we gossiped about specific people for about 2 per cent
of the time. Quentin said he and Steve talked about nothing much for half an
hour but didn’t gossip at all. I was surprised, and so was Quentin, when our
adjudicator pronounced it a dead heat.
Conclusion
Women’s language skills are more fluent than men’s, their vocabularies are
larger and richer, and they have better immediate and delayed recall of the
spoken word. Women are less likely to forget something you tell them. So
guilty as charged on gossip?
Gossip is generally thought of as those things that you would say about a
person behind their back, but would never say in front of them. But this is
not Professor Dunbar’s definition of gossip. For him it’s the “talk about
not very much” which forms about two-thirds of human speech. We gossip in
the same way that monkeys search through the fur of other monkeys for fleas.
It’s a form of social grooming, which is the glue in human relationships.
“It’s not the content of your words that matters. It’s the fact that you
want to communicate and every minute longer that you communicate is a minute
longer that says ‘I like you, I want you in my social network, I value you’.
About two-thirds of human speech consists of this form of social talking,
the “nothing very much” that Quentin described, and this does not vary
between the sexes.
Nor is there much difference in what men and women gossip about. If anything,
Professor Dunbar says, men like to talk about themselves.
But is there a difference in how men and women represent chatting to friends?
I’d suggest that women are more honest in that they will say they talked
about nothing much, while men represent that they have been involved in a
serious exchange of information.
EMPATHY
Women are predominantly hardwired for empathy, say scientists. In nonscience
language, this means that most girls just can’t help saying “Ah, there,
there” if you hurt yourself. But is it true?
Method We were each filmed as, by ourselves, we attempted to write 40
seconds of radio script on empathy in three minutes. Meanwhile we were
subjected to every possible interruption by the producer. The laptop kept
having Microsoft moments, the phone rang, the radio blared and then when the
time was up, the producer rubbished our efforts and made us do it again. We
each had to say how we felt. Then we had to watch the film of the other one
and note down how we thought they were feeling. The two accounts were
compared and analysed by Professor Janet Reibstein, a clinical psychologist
from the University of Exeter.
Result
It was even stevens overall but that isn’t really surprising because Quentin
is not typical of his gender.
Conclusion
Here the dangers of having a population of just two to study are at their
greatest. About one girl in ten has a male brain type; that is, systemising
rather than empathising, and about two men in five have a female brain type
(which means they are able to empathise more). Men pick up the big picture,
not the detail.
“Men are not tuned into the why, they are tuned into action,” says Professor
Reibstein, who works with couples. She points out that more empathy does not
mean that women are more loving. “Men code different things as loving and
women don’t necessarily pick these up.”
I think I might have sparked a whole new set of arguments in the car.
Men Read Maps, Women Gossip , Radio 4, from next Monday to Thursday, 3.45pm
Might be worth reading up on some Simon Baron Cohen. This is his field.
The "systemizing v empathizing" thing is not so much male v female as male brain v female brain. And while as one would expect from the names, more men have the male brain a substantial minority of women (17%) also do and vice versa for the female brain type.
Tim Worstall, Messines, Portugal