Map gags make women worse with directions

They get too nervous to navigate

FOR as long as road maps have been about, men have driven women round the bend by joking that they cannot read them.

Now scientists have found that this attitude has made women so nervous that many are now likely to avoid maps altogether.

They say women are more prone to anxiety around navigation, spatial awareness and visualisation because of the stereotype that these abilities are male-centred.

Spatial skills, from navigation to assembling flat-pack furniture, have been linked to success in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professions.

But people differ considerably in these skills and researchers think it could be partly due to anxiety.

The researchers, from King’s College London, surveyed 1,400 sets of mixed gender twins aged 19 to 21, asking them to record their anxiety levels from one to five.

They were asked how stressful they found trying a new shortcut without a map, following someone’s directions and finding their way around some streets.

The researchers found ‘significantly higher’ anxiety in the female twins across math- ematics and navigation skills. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, states: ‘Women who value mathematics, and are acquainted with the social

Disrupting visual memory

stereotype that women tend not to do as well as men in mathematics, tend to be the most sensitive to the pressure of gender stereotype and to feel anxious about it.’ The situation is different when genetic factors alone are considered. The study found men and women share similar genes for spatial and mathematics anxiety, which cause about 37 per cent of navigational nervousness in both sexes and 30 per cent for visualisation tasks.

It is thought that genes cause this by disrupting the brain’s system for visual working memory.

Non- shared environments were found to explain the rest of the differences between people in spatial anxiety, which are environments that twins raised in the same fam- ily do not share. For instance, non- shared environments such as driving, cycling or playing computer games may be particularly relevant to spatial anxiety.

However females were up to 5.5 per cent more likely to be anxious across all domains.

Margherita Malanchini, from King’s, said: ‘For children at a greater genetic risk of mathematics anxiety, interventions aimed at enhancing motivation and providing positive feedback may help with reducing anxiety and increasing performance in this area.’