Pocket Map Women Can’t Read Maps. Oh, Really?
In 1998, the Australian couple Barbara and Allan Pease selfpublished a funny and gentle book called Why Men Don’t Listen & Women Can’t Read Maps: Beyond The Toilet Seat Being Up. Within a year, the book had lost the bit about the toilet seat but had become a global hit (12 million copies), and not long after that it had become one of those books that people talked about at bus stops and at work. It was a war-of-the-sexes study a bit like John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, except this one took things further, veering into bonkers-land. It explained why men can’t do more than one thing at a time, why women can’t parallel park, and ‘why men love erotic images and women aren’t impressed.’ With reference to maps, their findings are unequivocal. ‘Women don’t have good spatial skills because they evolved chasing little else besides men,’ they assert. ‘Visit a multistorey car park at any shopping mall and watch female shoppers wandering gloomily around trying to find their cars.’ The Peases were really confirming a stereotype that had existed since Columbus laid out his sailing gear: men, nervous of 366
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asking a stranger the way, just get on better with directions that fold. But is any of it true? Several years before the Peases turned their success into a cottage industry, academics had begun publishing genderrelated map studies of their own. Actually they’d been doing this for a century, but from the late-1970s they began appearing with an unusual urgency. In 1978 we had Sex Differences In Spatial Abilities: Possible Environmental, Genetic and Neurological Factors by J.L. Harris from the University of Kansas; in 1982 J. Maddux presented a paper at the Association of American Geographers entitled Geography: The Science Most Affected by Existing Sex-Dimorphic Cognitive Abilities. Their approaches and findings varied, but yes, most psychological studies seemed to feel that when it came to such things as spatial skills, navigation and maps, men did seem to have the upper hand. It was thought likely that this would explain why the number of men doing PhDs in geography in the 1990s outnumbered women 4 to 1. It may also explain why, in 1973, the Cartographic Journal published a report by a man called Peter Stringer that stated he had recruited only women in his research into different background colours on maps because he ‘expected that women would have greater difficulty than men’ in reading them. But what if there was a very simple explanation to all of this, beyond unfettered prejudice? What if men and women could each read maps perfectly well, but in different ways? What if the only reason women had trouble reading maps is because they were designed by men with men in mind? Could maps be designed differently to appeal to women’s strengths? In 1999, a project was carried out at University of California by academics in geography, psychology and anthropology. This involved an extensive review of the existing literature on spatial abilities and map-reading, well over a hundred papers by now, and also a new series of experiments involving 79 residents of Santa Barbara (43 women and 36 men, aged between 19 and 76). 367
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On the Map
The strongest conclusions in the literature – that men were better than women at judging the relative speeds of two moving images on a computer screen, and also at successfully judging the mental rotation of 2-D and 3-D figures – were thought to be not overly practical in real world situations. So the new experiments involved a bit of walking about and map sketching, as well as responding to verbal directions and learning to read fantasy maps. One of these showed an imaginary theme park named Amusement Land. It measured 8.5'' x 11" and featured such landmarks as Python Pit, Purple Elephant Sculpture and Ice Cream Stand; having been given some moments to study it before it was taken away, participants then had to sketch the map for themselves with as many landmarks as possible. They were asked to perform a similar task with another fictional map entitled Grand Forks, North Dakota, which was actually a rotated map of the city of Santa Barbara. They were also led on a walking tour around a
Amusement Land, where cartography, sex-differences and ice cream meet, at last. 368
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part of the university campus, before being given a map of the area and asked to write in the route they had taken. The authors concluded that although men were better at some tasks (estimating distances and defining traditional directional compass points), women were better at others (noting landmarks, some verbal description tests). When it came to map-use, both imaginary and real, women ruined the Peases’ book title; they could read maps as well as men, only they read them slightly differently. And there was growing evidence that they knew it. In 1977, the Journal of Experimental Psychology published an experiment that found that 20 of 28 male participants but only 8 of 17 females regarded themselves as having a ‘good sense of direction’. But by 1999 this had shifted, at least in Santa Barbara, as residents of both sexes reported feelings of growing ability. Out of ten categories (including ‘It’s not important to me to know where I am’, ‘I don’t confuse right and left much’ and ‘I am very good at giving directions’) there was no statistically significant difference and high self-belief among both sexes. Men did appear to be more confident when in the category of ‘I am very good at judging distances’, but on the big issue of ‘I am very good at reading maps’ there was again no discernible difference. What, then, is the perceived problem? The problem is, although women have no difficulties with navigation, the way they are told to navigate may be at fault. In December 1997, in an early British edition of Condé Nast Traveller, a writer called Timothy Nation wrote a brief essay wondering why, when we wander the streets of London it is far easier to get around by looking out for well-known landmarks than it is to rigidly follow a map or compass. This was because maps only follow the line of a street – they look down. But when we walk we tend to look up and around. The flat, two-dimensional, look-down approach is suited to cognitive strategies used by men, but it is one that generally puts women at a disadvantage. 369
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On the Map
Timothy Nation, whose real name was Malcolm Gladwell, the writer not yet known for his books The Tipping Point and Blink, then examined a famous experiment conducted at Columbia University in New York City in 1990 involving mazes and rats. This found that, when searching for food, male rats navigated differently to their female counterparts. When the geometry of their testing area was altered – dividers were introduced to create extra walls – the performance of male rats slowed down, while there was little effect on females. But the opposite was observed when the landmarks in the testing room – a table or a chair – were moved. Now the females became confused. This was the big news: males responded best to broad spatial cues (large areas and flat lines), whereas females relied on landmarks and fixtures. Could this have been a freaky result? Possibly, but several other experiments in the last twenty years have produced similar findings. The most recent was in 2010, when the American Psychological Association reported an Anglo-Spanish experiment in which even more rats were placed in a triangularshaped pool to find a hidden platform. Again a comparable result – female rats benefit from locational cues, whereas the males race by them. Similar experiments have continued with men and women, again with comparable results. Few psychologists would now argue against these navigational differences. What is less certain is how these changes have come about. But we may well be back on the African plains with the hunter-gatherers. In this theory – and it’s a plausible one – men and women’s brains both developed through their navigational skills, but in different ways. Men sought the broad sweep of tracking and pursuit over large areas, while women tended to be down with the roots and berries, foraging skills aided by memory, and memory aided by landmarks. The traditional map, however, a 2-D flat plane, is designed by hunters for hunters. Female gatherers don’t get much of a look 370
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in. But with 3-D maps – either panoramic views with highlighted landmarks on paper, or digital renderings on screen – the road ahead becomes instantly more readable. One further experiment, conducted in 1998 by social psychologist James Dabbs and colleagues at Georgia State University, found that the strategy differences of the sexes extend to verbal communication. Dabbs found that when men give directions they tend to use compass points such as north or south, whereas women focus on buildings and lists of other landmarks en route. So perhaps Barbara and Allan Pease were right after all, or at least half-right. Men don’t listen because they don’t need to listen so much. And women can’t read maps because they’re the wrong sort of maps. What can possibly save this troublesome marriage? A plastic dashboard-mounted box perhaps?
Maps for Women? Nancy Chandler, based in Bangkok, has been producing highly successful ‘3-D’ maps of Thailand for the past two decades. They look crowded and a little chaotic but feature handdrawn landmarks and useful text, as well as colour-coding for different attractions. And, yes, she notes that her maps are bought and used predominantly by women. 371
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This paperback edition published in 2013 First published in Great Britain in 2012 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH www.profilebooks.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © Simon Garfield, 2012, 2013 Design by James Alexander/Jade Design Typeset in Bembo Book and Archer Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 846685 10 1 eISBN 978 1 847658 55 5
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