You know all those traditionally spacial-awarey man things that men are great at? Well, with a little hormonal help, women can be great at them too, science says.
See, researchers at Pennsylvania State University without much better to do got 400 men and women through mental tests. One test was for spatial awareness, the other was for verbal skills.
Some of the women were on the pill, and some were on ‘monophasic’ ones – (they have the same dose throughout the month) and others were on ‘triphasic’ ones (which have different doses for different stages of a menstrual cycle). None of the men (obvs) were on the pill.
As predicted, the men (who’ve probably spent their lives being encouraged to read maps and play with blocks and trains and cars and stuff) were better at the spatial awareness test.
As for the women on the pill? The ones on the monophasic pill tended to do better than the women who were either on the triphasic pill or not on the pill at all. This is believed to be because the monophasic pill suppresses oestrogen, which is said to make people really crap with spatial awareness.
A spokesman for Elsevier, who published the report, told the Daily Mail: ‘Fitting luggage into the car trunk, or getting those last few cups into the dishwasher may be easier for women taking the oral contraceptive pill.’
But we’d loathe to think that this all means that women have got natural hormones in their body that make them shit at packing spaces and reading maps.
First off, there’s the whole social conditioning thing – maybe it’s just that women are never encouraged to be spatially aware like men are and that women who feel liberated enough to go on the pill also feel liberated enough to try their hand at the sort of blokey things that, with practice, you get better at?
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, do you ever get really clumsy before right your period? Some women get super clumsy right before their period. And that’s when oestrogen is at its lowest in a woman! So it really doesn’t add up. At least to the eyes of us, a bunch of women who actually have periods.
Thirdly, what does this even prove to anyone anyway? That men are the best at man things like driving and reading maps and that actually what should happen on a road trip is that a man should do the map reading and the driving because we all know that male cab drivers are so good at reading their sat-nav while driving...
We’re all for looking into side effects of the pill, but while women are still to this day being prescribed the sort of stuff that’ll turn happy functional women into crying wrecks and the stereotype of women being shit at stuff pervades in nearly every single industry that exists…maybe this research is a little bit bullshit.
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Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.