Safe Speed Forums

Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'
By Sarah Radford and agencies
Last Updated: 2:25am GMT 04/01/2008

Women and gay men are likely to be the worst drivers, a new study has shown.

Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Both tend to rely on local landmarks to get around, and are also slower to take in spatial information.

The computer-based tests were carried out on 140 volunteers, and demonstrated that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in a similar way, sharing the same weaknesses.

The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.

Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.

The research team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.

In one, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .

Dr Rahman said: "Men are good at using distal, or geometrical cues, to decide if they’re going north or south, for instance. They have a better basic sense of direction, but they can use local land marks as well.

"Driving in a novel environment which is poor in cues is where these differences are likely to show up most.

"Women are going to take a lot longer to reach their destination, making more errors, taking wrong turns etc. They need more rich local landmarks."

Dr Rahman added that a similar performance between gay and straight men in the radial arms test showed that the divisions between sexual groups were not straightforward.

"Gay people appear to show a ‘mosaic’ of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of which are female-like," he said.

Note: the word gay has changed to spam. I assume it is a spam filter on the safespeed site.

This provides an amusing take on the "shopping" and waypoint based "Navigation" issue.

Edit: I've sort of fixed it by changing "gay men" to "g@y men". It seems to be that phrase that is rejected rather than just the word "gay".

I've now removed "gay men" from the word filter - all the rest stays, though.

Judging by the news today, that nervous lady (who in my view shouldn't have a licence) doing 10 mph on the Motorway and only got banned a mere week, was infinately more dangerous than the competant driver doing 100 mph!

She SHOULD have had her licence revoked, and ordered to retake it!... She is clearly NOT competant!

Nah, no matelot can read a proper map!

You deckies have silly names for everything!

I have a friend who is a former Royal Marine. He has NO sense of direction when driving, yet who can use star navigation, charts, GPS, whatever, to take his yacht round the world!