What Stereotype? Women Are Better Than Men at Parking, Study Finds

Men might be able to zip into a parking space more quickly, but when it comes to accuracy, women win.

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A U.K. study has shown that while men are more confident drivers and take less time to park into a perpendicular space, women end up with their cars closer to the center of the space and are better at parking overall.

Driving instructor Neil Beeson came up with the experiment, which examines how the different sexes perform using parking-lot surveillance. A team of researchers observed 2,500 drivers across 700 parking lots. The project is reportedly one of the most comprehensive studies ever that looks at gender differences in driving.

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Researchers found that women were better at finding spaces, because men drove too quickly and missed free spots. Female drivers were also in more accurate positions before starting each maneuver and were more likely to reverse into the spaces, which is encouraged by instructors in the U.K. When using this parking method, women were more likely to cleanly execute reversing into a space than men. But men were more adept at driving forward into spaces, while fewer chose to reposition their cars after pulling into a space.

Based on scores for seven components, women averaged 13.4 points out of 20, compared to the men’s score of 12.3 points.

Beeson told the Telegraph that the findings might imply that women retain information better. “They results also appear to dispel the myth that men have better spatial awareness than women,” he said. NewsFeed assumes that if “asking for directions” was a scoring component, women would have scored even higher.

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