Everyone better at reading maps than women
‘A new study into the mental skills required to read a map has handed blokes new ammunition and dealt heterosexual women a final indignity.
The research, from the University of Warwick in the UK, suggests that not only are straight women worse at map reading than straight males, they are also outperformed by bisexual men, gay men, gay women and bisexual women – in that order.
The study looked at what’s called mental rotation. This is our ability to mentally visualise an object from different perspectives.
Applied to real life, the most practical example of mental rotation is map reading, says Dr Michael Tlauka, an expert in gender differences and spatial ability from Flinders University. ‘
