Re: How do women read maps?

Mike Clark wrote:
In message <YY-dne2MWesGWhTVnZ2dnUVZ8qTinZ2d@xxxxxxxxx>
"Paul Saunders" <pvs1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mike Clark wrote:

That's interesting because Jane, my wife, is the same, she never
bothers to orient the map to the terrain whereas I prefer to do so.

However I believe that Paul's original premise is not an absolute,
I don't think I had a premise actually, other than men and women doing it differently, but I didn't state how.

Except that man "y" and woman "x" might do things similarly. Part of the
problem is that when you look at a self selected group you might find
that they are not representative of the general population. So for
example you might find that those who spend time responding to technical
questions on a newsgroup are unrepresentative of the general population.

Actually it was prompted by a TV programme last night called "The
Making of Me" in which John Barrowman was featured. The programme
tried to determine whether he was gay as a result of genetics or
upbringing. Much was made about "thinking like a female". At one
point they observed him reading a map, and he was turning it around.

So are women supposed to turn the map around and men don't? Is that the stereotype?

but
more of a statistical bias in the male and female distributions.
Exactly.

So far though, we've only talked about turning the map around.
Couldn't there more to it than that?

There's lots more to it than that.

Surely if men and women think differently there may be lots of other
differences in the way map information is interpreted. For example,
might some people pay more attention to features like church spires,
radio masts, etc?

The RAF navigates by pubs... Naturally, I navigate by shoe and fabric shops.

Yes autistic traits, more common in men than women, include the desire
to categorise and to list. Stamp collecting, butterfly collecting,
twitching, trainspotting etc are all hobbies more commonly associated
with men than with women. But these are also characteristics that might
make someone good at science, engineering or mathematics.

I'm a bit obsessive about categorising stuff like my thread collection (by colour and by type - silk, cotton, polyester, embroidery threads and decorative quilting threads...) and my fabrics (boxed by type, with an inventory of contents in each box, and every box labelled), so even us arty types can have those traits. It made me a good school librarian.

I was involved in an interesting exercise once, during a Baker day (teacher in-service training day, for the uninitiated). We were given a set of questions to answer, and a graph to plot the answers on... Then we were sorted acoring to where we were on the graphs... There was a semi-circle of us, with classic linear thinkers at one end, and classic visual thinkers at the other... This is a boy's grammar school, with Sports and Languages special status. There were slightly more men on the staff than women, but the women were spread evenly through all departments, including PE.

Most of the maths, IT and physics people were crowded towards the linear end of the line, with the arts department way out to the other end of the line. I was one in from the end of the visual thinker's end of the line, sandwiched between two members of the Art department. Most of the languages and PE staff were grouped round the middle of the line, with a slight tendency for the linguists to be closer to the linear end. My head of department was two in from the linear end of the line... the rest of the department was spread evenly throughout the line. My comment to the HoD: 'Well, as usual, the English Department have ALL the bases covered!' (Giggles all round)

A staff of 38 in a boy's grammar school, with slightly less than half being female, is a long way from a viable statistical sample, but it generally followed expectations in that more men than women were distributed towards the linear and the sciences/maths/IT end, and more of the woment towards the visual/Arts/Humanities end. I was a little surprised to see that the linguists were more likely to be more linear than visual in their thinking, but my son is good at both languages and sciences & maths, and comparatively useless at English and Art.

I'm not sure how well this relates to map reading, but I know I read maps very differently from the way hubby and son do. Both are strong science/engineer types.
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