Slashdot Mirror
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."
keep telling me that size doesn't matter!?!
Just another day in Paradise
we don't ask for directions
are 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?
But widescreen will make my butt look bigger!!!
*wail*
Mod early, mod often.
"Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."
Uh... yea. Because Linux and women go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
This is not about 2D desktop navigation, but about orientation in a 3D environemnt such as a computer game or a 3d design program. It appears be that the restricted field of vision with a small screen makes it hard for women to build a mental map of the enviroment and locate themselves within it.
The arcticle speculates that this may be due to evolutionary reasons; men are on average better at spatial-awareness for navigation when hunting, while women wouldn't have needed such skills looking after the home camp.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"Maybe Linux UI people can get a jump on MS by making KDE/Gnome more accessible to more females."
So you are saying, that linux makes your screen bigger? Wow, I quess I'll try it right now! Does this screen largening effect also work if used with VMWare? How big will my 15" screen get when using linux? 17"? Or maybe even 19"? Is widescreen supported yet?
True but let's be more accurate.
men _on_the_average_ have better 3d (and numaric) abilities, while woman are _on_the_average_ better at linguistic abilities.
the standard deviation in each group, however is bigger then the diff in the averages, so it says little about comparing any two individuals.
This has been known for quite a while. IQ tests, for instance, give numarical and linguistic abilities equal value exactly because of this.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
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?
Yeah - because now all of a sudden Linux geeks will have some insight into what women want? If they could do that, they might make themselves presentable to women, not design a UI for them.
On second thought, which is more likely?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
Men's perception of woman: it's all about bigger boob tubes.
Why bother.
To summarize: The article does not state if the larger display helped men or not, but with the larger display, men and women tested equally.
http://psych.unn.ac.uk/users/nick/hormoneslec06.ht m
http://www.neoteny.org/a/lateralization3.html
The scientists are missing the whole point of their research.
What would really help would be to enlarge burning buildings and battlefields by 30-70%.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
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
... they can undo those frustrating bra straps.
;)
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
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
therefore they tend to have larger laptops.
Lap-tops, get it? Sheesh!
Maybe they should focus on making it accessible to regular people, and THEN focus on a sub-demographic.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
There is no reason to truly debate the differences between the sexes. When sex is a group variable then differences in spatial reasoning consistently emerge. That said, the two groups necessarily overlap because of native skill and the interaction with other cognitive processes.
A simple minded explanation suggests that by and large males abstract a geometric representation of their environment to create a map, while females make greater use of landmark cues - markers in the environment - to construct a mental map. Again, the use of strategy is not exclusive to one group. What you can infer from the above is that if sufficient landmark cues are present then the sexes should be equivalent in performance. The following two papers quickly covers those issues,
Gron G., Wunderlich, A. P., Spitzer, M., Tomczak, R., & Riepe, M. W. (2000). Brain activation during human navigation: gender-different neural networks as substrate of performance. Nature. 4, 404-408.
Sandstrom, N.J., Kaufman, J., & Huettel, S. A. (1998) Males and females use different distal cues in a virtual environment navigation task. Cognitive Brain Research,6, 351-360.
In my own research there is every indication that the differences in spatial reasoning holds. What's not clear is whether there is a significant relationship with skill at navigating a specific interface - in this case a complex website using the links. In a preliminary study with 47 participants it's not surprising that cognitive skills - those things associated with intelligence - is a stronger predictor of behaviour.
Now, the Microsoft study appears to be aimed at improving actual navigation in 3D environments. If the environment does not include landmark cues then perhaps bigger screens will eliminate the differences. Presumably performance asymptotes for both groups at a specific size. So, doesn't it really depend on the cues present in the virtual environment?
KNS
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...
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 --- >