Letters to the Editor
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Stereotyping sucks
There's no excuse for any kind of stereotyping, ever, period. The question is how to fight it.
I would never argue for deferring to "scientists." As aonymous points out, some are total jerks -- despite the fact that they should know better. (To generalize that, of course, would be stereotyping. You could, of course, conduct a scientific study to find out whether they tend to be jerks...)
But it's very, very bad to attack a scientific study, without first examining how it was conducted, just because the conclusion is annoying or might be miscontrued. That leads to a world in which all science is reduced to opinions and beliefs, which is why we're still arguing about global warming and evolution.
(By the way, I am not a scientist, and I do consider myself a religious person and strongly pro-feminist.)
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Pot, kettle
I'm with Strawberry - I'm often annoyed by the misleading headlines on Salon so I find it kinda funny to see an article here complaining about another site doing the same thing.
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Desigirl, what would the control have been?
Desigirl, my understanding is that this was a study designed to see if there is a difference between two population samples.
The study doesn't seem to make any predictions that there would be a difference, or explain the difference.
It is merely analyzing the populations to see if there is a difference.
There was no independent variable being manipulated in an experiment.
What would the control have been? People that didn't take the test (and so were not measured?)
Having found a difference, the next step might be to hypothesize reasons for that, and design an experiment to test
those hypotheses. That experiment could have control and experimental groups, people that either were not, or were manipulated in some manner, perhaps by having them take a course, or play tetris, or change their gender, or possibly sit next to their partner, or apply makeup, or dye their hair blonde, or paint their nails, or read some blogs on how to properly blame the patriarchy.
You can question if the test is a valid predictor of anything, and you can question how they obtained their sample. I will say a sample of almost 200,000 people appears to be nothing to sneeze at, but I too am leary about internet data collection. They do cite others regarding that method of collection.
If anyone can think how or why this study required a control, I would be grateful. It's been too long since my intro to science courses...
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It is not just the Christian Fundamentalists that don't believe in Evolution
Let's face it, science is not charity. Who cares if some feminist is upset that another study concludes that men have dicks and women don't? I can't give birth and do you see me crying? Get over it honey.
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One must take in speculating
I have been driving for a very long time, am a "career" woman, not known for stifling my emotions or for submissive, but I have absolutely no spatial abilities. I am abysmal at object rotation, but I can read a map if I can turn it to properly reflect the direction I want to go.
My husband is one of those "go to a strange a city and know his way" kind of people. He can read a map by just glancing over at it while driving (not recommended, but still ...).
He is not as good at navigating by street signs as I am and he is not as good as I am at imagining the placement of objects.
Oh, plus I'm completely straight and so is he. Thus we absolutely confirm the survey results, for what's that worth.
I know a lot of "liberated" women who have exactly the same problems I do.
But here's another kink: My father was a clueless navigator, absolutely always lost and seemingly unable to follow a map to save his life. And straight as far as I know.
Explaining this by outdated societal gender stereotypes doesn't hold water.
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To anonymous
You are right, I should not have used the phrase "controlled study" in my post. I did not mean this in the sense of a study with a control group and a test group. What I meant to say was that when you have a huge number of people on the internet, there might be a gazillion control variables that you have not accounted for - maybe not experience with tetris, but what about level of education? Or ability to manipulate the computer? One of the tests have you clicking on lines that form a set of closely-spaced radii of a semicircle - and heck I can't get that right with this touchpad on my laptop that has a mind of its own.
Even otherwise, there are way too many issues with getting your subjects from an anonymous internet population.
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Studies of the aggregate say nothing about the individual
My dad was a great navigator, except when driving in the Bronx. As soon as he crossed into the Bronx, he'd get lost for at least half an hour. This sometimes happens to my husband when he has to drive in New Jersey. (It doesn't help that the road signs in New Jersey, when they actually have them, are completely cryptic.)
As for me, a straight woman, I got lost walking home from the first day of school in a new neighborhood. I just mis-remembered the number of blocks up and across and wandered around for half an hour working myself up into a tearful panic. It was the third grade, and I don't think I've ever been lost since. I am the map navigator on all family excursions.
I've developed a sixth sense of knowing where I am in relation to where I'm going. I don't do it consciously, but it works. I once got to Calais in the middle of the night by train, but knew how to find the ferry across town; I'd been to Calais once before, six years earlier, for a day.
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Headlines
Two things: the headline is totally misleading, and the article itself comes to some conclusions that seem hyperbolic when compared to what the actual research seems to suggest
Also, if someone really wants to know if there are gender differences when it comes to reading maps, why not design a study in which people actually get to read some maps and use the information therein to navigate? The framing of this particular problem seems weird to me.