Sex differences in parking are affected by biological and social factors
In short - Men are better at parking. Scientific fact!


Abstract
The stereotype of women’s limited parking skills is deeply anchored in modern culture. Although laboratory tests prove men’s average superiority in visuospatial tasks and parking requires complex, spatial skills, underlying mechanisms remain unexplored. Here, we investigated performance of beginners (nine women, eight men) and more experienced drivers (21 women, 27 men) at different parking manoeuvres. Furthermore, subjects conducted the mental rotation test and self-assessed their parking skills. We show that men park more accurately and especially faster than women. Performance is related to mental rotation skills and self-assessment in beginners, but only to self-assessment in more experienced drivers. We assume that, due to differential feedback, self-assessment incrementally replaces the controlling influence of mental rotation, as parking is trained with increasing experience. Results suggest that sex differences in spatial cognition persist in real-life situations, but that socio-psychological factors modulate the biological causes of sex differences.


Claudia C. Wolf, Sebastian Ocklenburg, Beyza Ören, Cordula Becker, Andrea Hofstätter, Christa Bös, Markus Popken, Truls Thorstensenand Onur Güntürkün **

in Psychological Research; doi:10.1007/s00426-009-0267-6 No print citation yet.


** And I thought REF was making co-authoring silly in the UK!!
(dxg, Mon 28 Dec 2009, 1:08, 3 replies)

My girlfriend
is someone I deeply respect. She is incredibly intelligent and hard-working and far, far more capable than I will ever be.

But she can't park a car for shit.

It comes naturally to me. It frustrates me that it doesn't come naturally to her, but that's an unfair frustration and I don't take it out on her.

A FAIR frustration is that she absolutely refuses to take the slightest bit of advice from me on this and refuses to try to understand the movement of the car, which to me is essential. How the hell are you going to understand how to park a car if you can't work out what happens when you turn the wheel and reverse? I'm trying to help, damnit! I don't think you're stupid! I don't have less respect for you because you can't park - I have less respect for you because you won't fuckin' try to learn!
(cypherspace is not a toaster, Mon 28 Dec 2009, 1:16, closed)

I just read this:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8432887.stm
(floella, Mon 28 Dec 2009, 19:18, closed)

But
The sample sizes are too small to show conclusively that the differences are statistically significant. Regardless of anecdotal evidence, that study can not be accepted as evidence supporting the hypothesis that men are better at parking than women.
(jade, Wed 30 Dec 2009, 18:55, closed)