I knew we were right!
January 24, 2005 10:54 PM   Subscribe

I knew it would be proven one day...
posted by trinarian (34 comments total)


 
It seemed so true when she rammed into me in reverse.... now it's proven. Does this mean there is evidence to raise female insurance rates?
posted by Dean Keaton at 10:59 PM on January 24, 2005


they're not saying ALL women are bad drivers, just the ones without enough testosterone in the womb (and small ring fingers).
posted by trinarian at 11:32 PM on January 24, 2005


Anecdotally, I knew this was correct from the start.

My girlfriend has trouble with anything spatial. It takes her 6 or 7 times going somewhere before she gets the route down pat. Takes me 2 or 3.

She also has trouble parking as well. Stuff where I just go in she still has trouble with and is nervous about where the car is positioned.

Also, just playing something like Quake3 with her or ET. I can pick up a map in 10 minutes. Takes her hours to learn a map layout.
posted by Talez at 11:37 PM on January 24, 2005


The next time I get in a car and a woman is driving, I'm going to ask to see her fingers. If her ring finger is too short, I'm going to insist on driving.

And then I'll probably be laughed at.
posted by Parannoyed at 11:37 PM on January 24, 2005


My ring fingers are about the same size as my index fingers. Does this mean I'm gay???

/not that there's anything wrong with that...
posted by zardoz at 11:55 PM on January 24, 2005


Parannoyed: you'll be lucky to be laughed at. If it were me I'd probably kick you in the face. On a non-pms day.

What's not clear from this or any other study is how much of the overall difference is due to the fact that men and women are socialized differently. I am awesome at maps and spatial skillz. Is this because I have a longer ring finger or because I spent lots of time with puzzles as a child? The relative size of the correlations seems more important than the overall presence of one.

This article interests and troubles me because on the whole, I tend to see things from a social-constructionist perspective, but I was trained as a scientist so I have trouble writing off evidence. Although a sample size of forty seems too small for any definitive conclusions.

Oh, and Dean Keaton, men (esp young men) tend to be more reckless as drivers than women. So their insurance rates are usually higher. Which probably has nothing to do with ring fingers whatsoever.
posted by mai at 12:29 AM on January 25, 2005


So, testosterone improves spatial orientation skills? Does this apply similarly to the different levels between some of us men? I always wondered how I could forget something entirely I had read only a minute earlier and yet I still know the way to a friend's house that I was only at once some 12 years ago.

Now let's see this related to things like "photographic memory." There must be further correlations to test...
posted by mystyk at 12:29 AM on January 25, 2005


Does this mean there is evidence to raise female insurance rates?

Rates should be based on actual driving behavior.

If I were king, I'd tie insurance rates to how each person drives. Use an electronic key that identifies the driver, then an onboard system (part of a black-box system) to track trip frequency, distance, speed, speeding, acceleration, deceleration, weaving (knitting, needlepoint, etc.), bumps, vehicle type, and whatever other indicators might help. Insurance companies wouldn't have to know where you were going other than in a general way (to compare to statistics gathered through the same system) -- highway traffic or city traffic, time of day, weather conditions, road conditions, street speed limit (adjusted in real time to conditions).

As a benevolent king, maybe I'd let drivers opt out of it, but they'd pay pretty high rates for their age and sex (and finger length, of course), whereas someone who drives safely and can prove it (through this system) might pay almost nothing or might even earn (as a reward for safe driving) a share of the cash taken from dangerous drivers.

Instead of following all the rules and getting no encouragement for it, you'd know that you were profiting at the expense of the dork who just roared past you at twice the speed limit only to slam on the brakes and drum his long ring fingers waiting at the same stop light you calmly rolled up to.
posted by pracowity at 12:38 AM on January 25, 2005


pracowity, I worked for Progressive Insurance about 5 years ago. This is acually very close to coming to market, as an option for drivers. They were doing market tests with gps trackers, which at the time, they said would only be used for yearly mileage calculations for rates. However the question of tracking someone's speed and driving characteristics always came up from employees. At the time, it wasn't really feasible, nor was there a lot of public interest for it, but I would assume given the increase in functionality in gps and computers in general, this will come around pretty quickly.

And from my experience, young men are more reckless, but young women are far worse drivers, overall. Though it tends to even out in the mid-twenties, it seems.
posted by efalk at 3:04 AM on January 25, 2005


Oh no! I have the hands of a girl! And I'm infertile!

Counter-hypothesis: demands on adult women that they perform spatial tasks causes an increase in testosterone. More testosterone in the uterus indicates that your mother performs lots of spatial tasks, but does not affect your spatial ability. However, when you are growing up, your mother teaches you the spatial tasks she performs all the time, because that's what parents do.

In other words, I'll buy that testosterone = spatial ability when we know how spatial ability works and how it interacts with hormone levels. Until then we are, as emotional people, too close to the subject for us to be dispassionate, so there is a higher standard of evidence required.
posted by alasdair at 3:23 AM on January 25, 2005


This article was written in a manner that was frighteningly awkward.

Also, I have a terrible sense of direction and take forever to memorize maps in video games. OMG I'M SUCH A GIRL :(

or :)

I don't really care.
posted by The God Complex at 3:55 AM on January 25, 2005


my ring finger is about the same size as my index, and I'm a girl, and I'm quite good with directions and maps.

my husband's ring finger is about the same size as his index, and he isn't as good with maps on games, and knowing where he is after only a couple times out on the road.

so what is that supposed to mean??

I have to say I think this is a bunch of nonsense. to publish this, after 1 study with such a small sample size is crazy.
posted by evening at 5:04 AM on January 25, 2005


The difference in insurance claims seem to agree with this data. Insurers in the UK were told to stop charging different rates for men and women because it was against EU sex equality laws. They responded with evidence to show it was fair, because women have more prangs in general, but they are minor, cheaper, ones such as parking scrapes. Men have fewer accidents, but they're more likely to be more expensive, like writing the car off hitting someone else at speed.
posted by flameproof at 5:04 AM on January 25, 2005


Hmmmm... So is testosterone responsible for making men crap at remembering where their socks, wallet, carkeys,[insert object here] are? ;)
posted by dabitch at 5:19 AM on January 25, 2005


Damn you metafilter and your double standards
posted by sourbrew at 5:21 AM on January 25, 2005


hey, look at the length of my middle finger!
posted by NationalKato at 5:30 AM on January 25, 2005


Unfortunately for men, the same testosterone that makes them good at reading maps prevents them from ever actually opening one, so really it's a moot point.
posted by Sidthecat at 5:32 AM on January 25, 2005


wait a second, sample size of fourty?? why do they even bother? next.
posted by mek at 5:33 AM on January 25, 2005


If I were king, I'd tie insurance rates to how each person drives.

I'd always envisioned a peer-rating system where other drivers tag your car red, yellow, or green based on their assessment of your driving. This could be done electronically - but it would be far more satisfying if paintball guns were involved.
posted by selfmedicating at 5:44 AM on January 25, 2005


That's funny, because I was pretty sure I saw a couple of studies of (pre-adolescent) children that implied that girls tend to actually have better spatial ability. I know I tested off the charts on that when I took IQ tests as a kid (and, yes, my middle finger is longer than my index finger).
posted by Karmakaze at 6:53 AM on January 25, 2005


Sidthecat wins.
posted by jennaratrix at 6:53 AM on January 25, 2005


in a related story, the crack team of scientists responsible for this discovery have been granted honorary doctorates from Harvard.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:07 AM on January 25, 2005


So what do reading maps and parking really have to do with driving ability? Auto-related fatality rates are higher for men, in part because they engage more often in risky driving practices like drinking and speeding. A lot to plough through here, but the UK Department of Transport just released their Transport Accident and Casualties statistics.

And btw, I'm female and have excellent spatial skills (reading a map is another story).
posted by tidecat at 7:28 AM on January 25, 2005


I'd love to see a study that focused on parking only, and took as its sample not the actions required to park the car, but how the car was left in the spot. The photo caption for this article says "Parked by a man or a woman?" and shows a car that's been parked head-in (rather than parallel). To me it looks more likely a woman parked it, since every time I've seen the actual driver of a car that's parked outside the space (whether just infringing on, or completley obliterating, a second space) it's been a guy.
posted by soyjoy at 7:47 AM on January 25, 2005


If it were me I'd probably kick you in the face.

I wonder if too much testosterone in the womb makes people excessively aggressive and violent later in life?
posted by rushmc at 8:09 AM on January 25, 2005


I would say that would be a psychological need soyjoy. A man's requirement to make his mark on the world could possibly include taking up one or more parking spaces

"Ha-ha! My vehicle/penis is THIS BIG - I am man and I stake my claim to this three-dimensional space. I will now get out of my car and pee all around the area just so you know it's mine."

Especially well endowed men park in two disabled spots.

Diagonally.
posted by longbaugh at 8:14 AM on January 25, 2005


Oh I'm really looking forward to the day when someone looks at my fingers and then announces knowledge of my driving skills, my fertility, and my sexual orientation.

Perhaps next we could have some skull bump readings?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 8:26 AM on January 25, 2005


Especially well endowed men

Meaning, poorly-endowed, since we know the relationship between the two is inverse. But otherwise, yeah.
posted by soyjoy at 9:43 AM on January 25, 2005


Unfortunately for men, the same testosterone that makes them good at reading maps prevents them from ever actually opening one, so really it's a moot point.

First time I laughed out loud today. Thank you.
posted by BlueTrain at 10:23 AM on January 25, 2005


Does anyone know if the study actually tested parking and mapreading? From the writeup, it looks like the researchers administered a battery of abstract 3D-mental-rotation tests, and then someone tacked on parking and mapreading because they thought it'd make a good headline.

Assuming ex ante that one's "spatial ability" is a uniform skill best measured by the ability to mentally rotate objects seems pretty f'in unwarranted. My parking mistakes, in particular, seem to be controlled by rotten depth perception, not my ability to visualize the car moving into the space.

Has anyone actually studied the relationship between spatial ability as demonstrated by this kind of abstract test, and real-world "spatial" skills like parking and mapreading? Or are we all just assuming it exists?
posted by yami_mcmoots at 11:33 AM on January 25, 2005


Forty students? Five drawings?

This is an embarrassment of a study.
posted by sellout at 11:49 AM on January 25, 2005


This is an embarrassment of a study.

you simply can't draw that conclusion from the numbers you give. you need to look at the paper and see what the statistics are. the statistical significance of the results certainly depends on the number of people in the test, but whether or not that number of people is sufficient or not depends on what the measurements were.

systematic problems like yami_mcmoots raises are also likely relevant, but not necesarily related to the number of students.

so it seems that you're attacking the work without any real argument, dressing up your prejudices with pseudo-science for credibility. which annoys me more than the stupid article itself. by all means criticise science you don't agree with. but do so in a way that meets the standards you expect from others. rhetorical stunts with no clear reasoning make you look as bad as - if not worse than - the people you're arguing against.
posted by andrew cooke at 1:58 PM on January 25, 2005


andrew cooke: I'll rephrase my statement, because you may be right.

Perhaps the study itself isn't the embarrassment. Perhaps the reporter is to blame for interpreting the results.

My point is that extrapolating whether women in general have deficiencies in spatial skills based on forty student volunteers is a mistake, regardless of whether the sample size is appropriate for this particular study. I don't know who's to blame, but that sounds like pseudo-science to me.
posted by sellout at 2:27 PM on January 25, 2005


In other news, math is hard. Let's go shopping!
posted by nanojath at 8:57 PM on February 23, 2005


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