Women Top Men in Parking Skills, UK Study Asserts
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Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock(LONDON) — Stereotyped views on driving have been shaken after new research found women to be more efficient parkers than men.
The experiment, conducted by U.K.’s National Car Parks, showed that women’s spatial awareness has been underrated, or perhaps that males’ spatial awareness has been overrated.
Rated by technique, accuracy and time taken, women got an overall score of 13.4 out of 20, beating the mens’ score of 12.3 out of 20. The women took longer to park on average at 21 seconds, compared with men at 16 seconds.
But women scored higher in finding a space, positioning the car centrally and choosing to reverse into the space, which is a preferred method with driving instructors. The study found that men often overlooked open parking spaces, although they were found to be more confident in driving and better at driving forward into spaces.
Men were happier with the position of the cars once in the space, as opposed to women who spent a little longer repositioning the car to centralize and perfect the positioning. Statistically half of the women in the study parked on center in the space, with only a quarter of men parking centrally.
The study, which is one of the most comprehensive ever done on the differences of gender in driving, was conducted by looking at CCTV footage of 453 drivers parking across the country, and further research carried out with 2,000 drivers. Every aspect of the individuals’ parking was graded and added to a finalized tally chart, creating a parking score for the two sexes.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio