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Women Need Larger Screens for Desktop Navigation?
Mac of Macistan writes "In a recent
article in the New Scientist, Microsoft's R&D claims that women have a harder time navigating the desktop because their spatial abilities are roughly 20% lower than men's abilities. Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."
Well, that would explain why most men don't stop and ask for directions, eh?
Wider screens and more realistic 3D animations, they say, will boost women's spatial orientation and 3D map-reading skills to match those of their male counterparts.
Heck, this'll boost anyone's spatial orientation.
Women, they found, find it easier to get their bearings when this animation is smooth and realistic, rather than jerky.
Just about everyone does.
Is it possible that with more intensive training, this spatial perception inequality might be eliminated?
(Hint: Use this as an excuse to get more UT2K3 playing in!!!)
... This one will really make the sh*t hit the fan in terms of gender equality. To make a blanket statement about the abilities of either gender is bound to form harsh criticism from many fronts.
.. that women possess lower spatial abilities, and it tends
I mean perhaps the "spatial ability" of the different genders is tuned to a different form of interface. Perhaps the symptom we should be addressing is that current user interfaces are designed for use from the male aspect, and therefore the generic woman (whatever that is) functions in such an environment.
In my psychology days we looked at many examples of studies that were swayed in a particular direction to to flaws in the testing procedures.
Not to say that this article in new scientist really backs up its claims - statements such as it seems
But that's aside from the point - I can accept that men and women interact with a user interface in differing ways. But to suggest that taking a "male" user interface, and making it bigger - to adapt it more to the "generic woman" (see above) - I find ludicrous, and a vast underestimation of the task at hand.
I'm just stirring, but I think it's really something to think about in the next decade as we move away from windowing environments to whatever is next - be it 3D interfaces on a 2D display, virtual immersion - or whatever... We need to think about things more than "lets make it bigger".
I work in this field of psychology and believe it or not, this is one of the few areas of human performance where genuine sex differences are observed - repeatedly and reliably.
You can see this principally in the visuo-spatial section of IQ tests. Some authors (e.g. Kimura) argue that this is because IQ tests tap a particular aspect of visuo-spatial awareness and that men are naturally superior in this regard, but that women excel in other visuo-spatial tests which tap different facets of the skill.
If you go back forty years, IQ tests used to "show" that ethnic minorities were less clever - now it is known that those early tests were highly culturally-specific ("If you give the maid twenty items of clothing to press but she already has another thirty-two from your Ma and Pa, what time can you arrive at your tennis lesson?") - I think in a couple of decades we'll be seeing IQ tests that are a whole lot less gender-biased.
Mod early, mod often.
don't you think the few women who DO use PCs are in the almost-like-a-man range of spatial abilities?
Maybe I've been trolled, but I'll bite anyway. More than 'a few women' use PCs. Every office worker these days has a PC. A large proportion of these office workers are women. Sure, maybe there are less female programmers out there (that's another topic altogether), but not only programmers use PCs, you know.
Heh. News flash, the genders aren't equal. One of them can bear children, the other can't. Other differences exist.
Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Exactly. People whine and complain about how the DMCA shuts down research, yet don't seem to understand that you also can't do genuine research without an open mind. I think some people would be stunned at the number of genuine scientific areas of study that have more or less stopped because a bunch of liberals told them they were being sexist, racist, or homophobic.
Women are worse at spatial orientation. Who cares? I'm quite sure there's something they're also _better_ at than men. Doesn't make one gender or the other "better", it just illustrates that certain genders are better at certain things. Saying this is "sexist" is not only stupid, but impedes real scientific research.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I'll remember next time I'm implementing a server rollout or configuring a RAID that I'm just "using the mouse".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That these gender traits are statistics: that means there is a mean and a standard deviation (with probable overlap between men and women). There is no solid demarkation line in biology or psychology that says "No Men/Women Beyond this Point".
What this does say is that there is generally significant difference between the two groups... so why not use it?
In the future the key is to ask "Would you like a larger desktop?" instead of "Are you a woman?" Allow personalization without mandating bias.
Otherwise its like only making jeans in 32"I 32"W and saying to everyone "You better fit into these because this is all you're going to get."
What is music when you despise all sound?
I *am* a research psychologist. Heh.
/. territory, perhaps, where we're clearly not talking about Joe and Josephine Average.
:-)
I think that there are *many* outliers providing examples to the contrary. Particularly in
I should add that I'm no humour slouch either - apologies if I'm coming across like some dry, humourless old stick, but I think that applying such broad brush-strokes to say that men's and women's experiences and understanding of humour is fundamentally different, could be dangerous (I'm not being politically correct here, just aware that my own experiences have been quite, quite different from the trend you suggest).
Go back into psych! This is a terrific area of research
Mod early, mod often.
There are people who do use their cycles.... mp3 rippin' fiends, the divx encoding type, researches, gammers and graphic artists (especially if you count in the video card's work). But for the lonely programmer the CPU is very much like a politician, doing little work most of the time.
___________________
not fact or fiction
Sentence one vividly associates 'they' with
"Czerwinski and her Microsoft colleague George Robertson"
Sentence two immediately references they.
how much clearer do you require it to be?
To make a difference between men and women WRT 3D user interface design is completely idiotic. It is much smarter to make a difference between people with high spatial ability and low.
In your post, you keep confusing the term "Politically correct" with "smarter". Please avoid this error in the future.
Seriously, though... Would you also say "To make a difference between men and women WRT child-bearing is completely idiotic. It is much smarter to make a difference between people with wombs and without"?
Sometimes, the overlap between your two groups, and the two genders, (regardless of how you phrase things), just comes out too high to ignore. In such cases, it seems *more* unethical to pretend no gender difference exists, than to admit "gee, men and women *don't* perform 100% identically on all possible tasks".
When society realizes that males and females each have their own strengths, we'll start advancing noticeably faster. Until then, we'll keep having suboptimal role-fillings because everyone wants to pretend no differences exist.
Is there any science to this article at all? I see references to numbers, but no ways that they obtained them other than asking MS.
This seems like a lot of BS to me. Women just don't seem interested in 3d games like most men. Therefore, I would suggest that we men develop more skill in the 3d world of computers than women at an earlier age. Most 3d games are about violence which is undeniably a greater part of male human mentality than female.
I happen to know women that will destroy you in counter-strike, and I'm sure most of you do too. If a girl played as much video games as men, then I bet you wouldn't notice a difference. Also, women using computers more slowly than men can be attributed to the fact that men are also generally more interested in technology at a younger age.
I don't think interest in technology is genetic though. I think it's a product of society. Girls are encouraged to imagine the perfect guy and starve themselves until they are married it seems. Boys are taught to protect siblings, themselves, women, and property with violence or by violence from a child that learned that violence is a solution to problems from fighting parents. (or even television like The 3 Ninjas, TMNT, etc.)
I dare them to try children with equal experience with computers. If it had been a reputable "discovery" I think that is where the research would have began. Or try men from third world countries where technology isn't available.
I think the trend will change the more technology is required to live and the more games are made for women (The Sims, Sim Park, etc.) or at least genderless (snood et al).
Karma Clown
I do wonder if the spacial thing might be why one of my female friends prefers to print out her programs to work on.
I'm a guy and I like to print out my programs sometimes when I'm debugging them. Sometimes it helps just to see the source code on a different medium when you're looking for bugs, especially when you're frustrated with a particularly annoying one. It think it's more a psychological thing than a spatial thing.
My journal has hot
I want to reply to this comment because I want to have my comment as close to the top as possible.
Slashdot SERIOUSLY messed this article summary up. Women do NOT have "problems nagivating the desktop". According to this article, women have less spacial cognizance when it comes to 3D environments such as FPS, MMORPG or games like Myst. 3D virtual worlds, NOT THE DESKTOP.
What I DON'T want to see is a bunch of jerks spouting "women have a harder time navigating the desktop" than men, because Slashdot farked up their summary of the article. I mean, SERIOUSLY FSCKED it up. Desktop = 2D. Get it straight, boys... A lot of your readers only read the summary snippets and don't bother with the articles.
For this kind of readership, you may just have spawned a whole new inaccurate generalization about women.
Thanks, we needed this new kind of misinformation.
I have no problem with the article, but I have a BIG problem with the summary snippet.
Get it right.
Perhaps women will play a larger role in the work force, but as long as more men are interested in fringe/cutting edge areas, more men will continue to be the leaders, pioneers and earthshakers.
You get more guys doing weird/silly stuff (case-mods, lego, etc) despite lots of other people saying discouraging things. Same for hobbies/sports/tech/finance etc.
In contrast one keeps seeing calls to encourage women to get into XYZ, requests for people not to discourage them etc. Personally I think most just aren't as interested in those areas - different priorities.
And when you think about it: all that power, all that money, all the enemies, only a few friends, and in the end you die, what's the point? e.g. Saddam, Ariel Sharon etc.
It doesn't matter -- Slashdot still deserves the blame. By being a part of the media, it has a journalistic responsibility to report things with integrity. It has to do due diligence when reporting things and has to verify that the summary accurately reflects the contents of the article. In this case, the summary clearly does not accurately reflect the article cited. Slashdot has editors who carry this responsibility and ensuring that submissions that are picked and branded as "News for Nerds" is actually news, not just what sounds like news. Otherwise, Slashdot needs to rebrand itself as a rumor mill and let the expectation be set that way. I realize that Slashdot isn't the New York Times, but it simply cannot post inaccurate/inflammatory/biased information and summaries and not expect people to react to it.
One of the sad things is that people take studies like this and then leap to conclusions.
From a biological viewpoint, race, for example, is just genetic noise. The "difference" between men and women, when screened for education and general health (food and water supply) is much less than the difference between any single person and another person.
In other words, while the study group may have a 20 percent spatial visualization difference, the reality is that women make better fighter pilots than men do, as those people who self-select to become fighter pilots already have higher spatial relations abilities.
So, to make a long story short, this has no real difference in practice in terms of screen size requirement between men and women, as people who lack the ability to use such devices will self-select out of the final user population and will also become screened out during standard testing while attempting to use such skills.
> --- All Of The Above --- >
"For this kind of readership, you may just have spawned a whole new inaccurate generalization about women."
Have you seen the dudes that visit Slashdot? Trust me when I say this generalization is safely contained.
"Derp de derp."
OK, the misunderstanding here is in your recently-clarified use of the term "liable." A word like that is a can of worms and in a legal sense if we were to hold editors liable for posts then they would necesarily be liable for everything else on the site because ultimately -- even if it is against the supposed rules -- they do have technically feasible control over anything that gets posted here.
;)
I respect the work the editors do, but I think critisism is a good thing in these cases.
I do too. Your comment was not in response to the article. Your comment was made in response to the poster who pointed out that the submittor of the article was at fault and not the editor in question. I still agree with that viewpoint because this is a community site, and if we hold submittors accountable it would seem to me that better submissions would result, leading to fewer inaccuracies -- or as you put it, a *good* site. To expect the editors -- who I can only assume are dealing with a torrent of submissions that I suspect would be too much to individually verify -- to do it is not much of a solution when we already know that mistakes are going to happen on their end. Again, that is from the perspective of someone who does not want to see his favorite website suddenly dragged down by *liability.* Of course the problem could have been caught at any point in the process, but the error was made by the submittor, while the post was made by the editor in (mistakenly) good faith. Yeah, it was a screw up, and by all means grill away, but please let's not talk about liability while we let the real source of the error off the hook.
are you advocating that the editors be less vigilant?
No, I'm advocating that they be about as vigilant as they are and that we as a community appreciate the free service they provide rather than turning it into a thankless magnet for criticism.
I repeat: what is the editors job?
Why, to post articles that Slashdotters are interested in reading and having spirited discussions about -- bearing in mind that they have to cull that out of a huge amount of noise. In this case, I have to say that the editor(s) have done a fine job of at least that much. In fact, I'm having a spirited discussion right now
Seriously, your comments are thoughtful and we can both agree that this was not a well-done post. I just had to jump in and defend the guy who said that those of us who submit articles have a responsibility to be careful about our summaries because the editors are not going to catch our every mistake for us. The fact is that they will screw up now and then just as you and I might occasionally at our jobs, and until I start getting a monthly bill from Slashdot I'm not very interested in fixing blame and holding anybody *liable*.
* Please do not read my signature.