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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."
From the article: "Women who navigate around 3D computer-generated environments for a living - or even for fun - are having their style cramped by ultra-narrow computer displays and graphics software that favours men." This has everything to do with 3D games and nothing to do with the deskstop.
all very well, but don't you think the few women who DO use PCs are in the almost-like-a-man range of spatial abilities?
FWIW, my bf (household alpha geek) can't navigate for s***, whereas I (less geeky, but maybe some modding up on /. will help) have great visuospatial abilities. Yesterday we went to the park to fly our kite and by the time we were leaving, he was completely disoriented ... heh.
Mod early, mod often.
I score very bad on spatial ability, and I am a man. My father does the same. Incidentally we're both computer consultants.
Wouldn't it be smarter to say that people with low spatial ability need bigger screens for the same performance? Why the gender thing? Battle of the sexes?
Maybe currently, but Microsoft is known to be working on including 3D elements on the desktop.
So in the future it may be useful to allow for a gender related setting.
I am posting this anonymously because I don't really want everyone to know my medical history, but in 1999 I had a right temporal lobectomy (my brain's right temporal lobe removed) to try and cure me of epilepsy.
The right temporal lobe is the part of the brain that controls spatial ability, so after it was excised, I completely lost my ability to orient myself, and have huge problems with getting home from the bus stop and things like that. Nonetheless, it has not stopped me being able to navigate a computer desktop at all.
I am not sure why this is, but I would be interested to know if people like myself were included in this study at all.
There could be other factors at play here.
I work as a CAD systems administrator, and it's true that when women see some of the wide screens that are available, they immediately want one. Guys tend to think they're cool, too, and they may want one, but women almost seem to demand them.
:)
Of course the number of women as opposed to men who are in the automotive design and engineering fields is disproportionately low, and this may actually be one of the reasons. Interesting...
My journal has hot
This is one of the things discussed in a book called "The First Sex." The thesis is that men and women are different, because of evolutionary pressures. The author also argues that the areas where women excel over men (e.g. social coordination, as mentioned in the Counter Strike example) are the very skills that are going to be most needed in the near future, so women will continue to play a larger and larger role in the work force.
An interesting read.
How am I to break this to you?
This situation, this conversation is a very good example of a classical conflict in our society.
I understand humor because I'm good at it. I really am. And I also almost became a research psychologist. I studied at depth the differences between men and women and humor is one of the few readily tested differences between men and women. So this is interesting to me in many ways.
A assure you, my post about the joke you missed was entirely sincere. There are some experiences the other sex can only just get brief glimpses of. The majority of men only get a peripheral view of the true richness of emotions women experience. Women cannot comprehend that humor can be a big, big, place. It really is like looking into an aquarium from the outside in both examples.
You can cite examples to the contrary but they will will be outliers.
I have read elsewhere that women do better at remembering where things are in relation to other things than men are: they use landmarks more than men do. It has been theorized that in hunter-gatherer societies (men) who did most of the hunting had only to find their way home quickly and directly after chasing down game, while the gatherers (women) had to remember where they saw that berry bush that should have ripe berries on it by now.
If this is the case, it is easy to understand how someone who relies on landmarks might have more trouble navigating if she were denied a wide view of the world, as in the case of a narrow display, as she moves through real or virtual space.
The problem is, humans have a history of using these differences for the greater bad, or creating differences out of their imagination for the oppression of one sex or another (i.e.women unable to vote).
That's why gender is a better explanation than it is a justification, if you get my drift.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
My fiance, a soon-to-be radiologist, and also a woman :), just told me that one reason why there are few women in radiology is that they generally have a harder time taking 2D images (i.e., x-rays) and visualizing them in 3D to see the spatial relationships between the things in the 2D image. Of course there are probably many other reasons for the last of women in the field of radiology: lack of patient interaction and historical general roles in medicine that are still somewhat in place are a couple.
The article was a bit short... I'll bet even most Slashdotters read it.
It's interesting the researchers would conclude woman are 20% less effecient than men at spacially processing information.
Assuming this is true (not taking a position), I'm a bit surprised no one tried breaking down the group of women to isolate the cause.
Everyone jumped to the same "genetic" conclusion (women make lousy hunters). It could be as simple as physical and chemical changes after having children (sometimes derridingly called 'placenta brain'): perhaps women's brains go into a rapid form of job-specialization (rearing) which translates into other disadvantages.
I don't have a position on any of this since it's a one pager (and New Scientist), but it would be interesting to see if the causes were genetic, as the article simply assumed.
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Women in Linux HOWTO
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Association for Women in Computing
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LinuxChix
There are many other organizations out there.Maybe I've just had bad experiences, but whenever I've heard statements like this before, they turned out to be just as true for both sexes after the proper testing. I know that when I switched from one desktop to virtual desktops, I had an easier time navigating, and the same thing happened when switching from one monitor to two monitors. And later in the article, they mention how women "need" smoother frame rates to keep from getting disoriented. It sounds to me like the women just hadn't gotten used to the computers yet. I bet when they do the control experiments, men will get even better when they have a widescreen monitor and smooth framerate, and then they find out that the guys spent all their time playing Counterstrike on laggy servers, with 15-inch monitors. Oh, incidentally, I'm astounded that more people haven't pointed out the irony of a Microsoft-funded study suggesting that all female computer users buy high-end graphics cards, and monitors which are fully two times larger than their current ones! Maybe their next study will suggest that women buy intellimice since they have trouble double-clicking.
I noticed it when other girls would play too.
What's interesting about this observation and what I would like answered is this:
Why was the Gameboy version the easiest to me? Monochrome?
Why was the regular, original Nintendo the best version?
Why was the arcade version so hard?
Why is the computer version boring?
Why does it make a difference with how the pieces are colored or how they look?
I do agree with the find too. Girls see no "gadget, cool" factor in a small TV. I once took a Casio TV on a camping trip with the same girl so she could watch 90210. We ended up having to go out of our way and watch it on a "normal" TV.
I think the real answer here is that women like consistency and normalcy. I find they hate big screen TV's as much as they hate Casio handhelds. All they want is content! (Something that can also be inferred and suggested)
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Of course, the underlying problem with this thesis is the presumption that men hunted while women foraged. While this seems to make sense to us, seeing as we've been dealing with the male breadwinner stereotype for at least the past thousand years, the archeological record does not necessarily agree with it. While there is evidence that men hunted, there is no evidence that they did not assist in the foraging and domestic chores, and in fact fingerprints in pottery seem to indicate that both men and women shared in these.
Keep in mind that hunting was a difficult enterprise, physically strenuous and dangerous. You couldn't just nick off to Wal-mart and buy a 22 -- you had a sharpened stick and some obsidian flakes and that's about it. So it makes evolutionary sense that cultures that kept their women away from the hunt would prosper -- fewer dead or injured women that way. That doesn't mean that men did nothing else -- there's a lot of evidence that foraging was the primary source of food. Anybody who thinks women were just going to shut up and let the ment lounge around while they toiled hasn't been nagged to clean the garage.
Yeah, I think there's an evolutionary benefit to nagging.
My Intro to Archeology professor was a feminist (ostensibly because he had an open marriage and wanted to tag some college tail, not happening the guy was sleazy and still wore tight jeans from the 1970s) and loved to bring up the dichotomy between the classic "Man as Hunter/Scholar" and post modern "Woman as Gatherer/Nurturer" theories of human evolution, as well as what was supported by the meager evidence. In essence, it seemed to prove that neither sex "had it easy" and he went on to tie this into the historical record and a nice long lecture about how modern gender roles are thrusting women into the workplace without removing their previous roles in the home and how this is changing faster than men's roles and how men should clean the the house more, blah blah. I kinda slept through most of that.
My wife, however, took excellent notes, which she is referring to to this day.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
As an example, let's look at the controversial SAT exam. This test has been, and may still be, written for, by, and of privately east coast educated white people. For example, when the ETS evaluats the suitability of questions, at least in the near past, the questions that make it onto the real test were those that upper class east-coast white people did best on. This not some because of some explicit prejudice, but merely because the conventional wisdom said upper class east coast white people, as a group, were better educated and smarted, and question that they did best with were in fact the best questions. The corollary is that minority off coast people were less educated, and if they did well on a question, it was obviously a bad question.
Which is to say that history is written by the victors, and critical usability and evaluation points are chosen by the managers and designers. In this case, the computer programs and usability tests may be biased to a male population. Perhaps the issue is not so much screen size, but rather the assumption that a certain pattern of use, or a certain problem solving method, is going to be primary for all users. This is an especially good possibility for 3D technology as it is not yet in wide use, and would be particularly susceptible to these aberrations.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
my girlfriend has just recently been researching spatial memory within men and women. Here is some text from her debriefing sheet:
most literature on sex differences in cognitive abilities has indicated that on average :
verbal tasks are performed better by women and,
spatial tasks are performed better by man.
However, Silverman & Eals(1992) carried out a simple experiment in which they found that women performed better than men in spatial memory. In their experiments, participants were presented with a range of objects and asked to remember as much as possible about those objects. They were then shown a second presentation, in which some pairs of objects had exchanged locations. When asked to identify those objects that had moved, women on average score higher than men.
In a similar experiment, James and Kimura(1997) a team to the same results as Silverman and Eals when they exchanged location of the objects in the second presentation of objects. However when they presented a second array of the objects in which some objects had moved to previously empty locations, no sex difference was noted in the ability of for two spins to identify objects which had moved.
James & Kimura,D. (1997) sex differences in remembering objects in an array: location shifts versus location exchanges. Evolution and human behavior, 18, 155-163
Silverman,I. & Eals, M. (1992) sex differences in spatial abilities: evolutionary theory and data. In Barkow, J.H, Cosmides,L. & Tooby,J. The Adapted Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press
While you are right the summary is completly wrong, you should blame the person that got it wrong. Mac of Macistan, the article submitter and summary writer, is the person that got it wrong.
If you are going to bitch about the summary at least bitch about the person that made the mistake. Or be more specific that the person approving this article should have appended the summary with a correct description of the article.
Get it right.
"Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."
How about making the KDE/Gnome destop more accessible to EVERYONE! Clean them up, make them easy for everyone to use and I bet more people, not just women, will want to use them.
The problem with research like this is that solid evidence -- the fact that women have weaker spatial skills -- leads to random speculation -- that this weakness is somehow inherent/evolutionary. To tell the truth, we are still suffering from a society that has been dominated for thousands of years by men. A lot of western tradition, particularly in Britain and the US, makes the situation even worse than it is elsewhere (relatively, when you take into account that non-western countries are far less industrialized). To this day, I see huge social disparities everywhere I look. It's better in some places, worse in others, but nowhere is it very good. Now, it very well may be that these social factors cannot explain everything and that girls are inherently more limited in certain skills, and more proficient in others, than guys. However, until we analyze exactly what effects society still has on females (or better yet remove those social factors entirely) we cannot reliably speculate on the origin of perceived differences.
PS> The words "male" and "female" are traditionally not applied to human beings. It would be like saying "two people mated" rather than "they had sex."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Two reason that reseachers and now the D.O.D. make the statement that women are in some ways better suited to be fighter pilots are:
A) Women, for a myriad of reasons, are better able to cope in both a high negative and positve "G" (read gravity) environment and are less likely to experience red and/or black outs under high G conditions.
B) Though, current theory based on a substantial amount of research over the years does give some credibility to the postulate related to how women process visual information in regards to spatial and distance discernent, the other factor that women have is the belief that they have a far higher degree of color differentiation then their male counterparts. This is significant in terms of target/craft recognition. In otherwords, at 30,000 feet, through the haze women are more often able to spot a target (often a mere speck in anyones visual field) before their male counterparts do.
I aerial combat see first, shoot first is often the only thing that seperates those that fly home and those that auger in.