RECKONING - Maphead - page 100

formance gap of this kind: that boys were more competitive or girls more anxious or the
questions somehow biased. Instead, the results were a little more troubling.
“Boys as a group do have a little more knowledge about geography than girls as a
group,” admits Liben. She hastens to add that a field of fifty-three boys and just two girls
does not mean that boys are twenty-six times better than girls—just that “very tiny” dif-
ferences tend to get magnified by the bee format of slicing off the top finisher at each of
several tiers.
My immediate assumption is that the root of the achievement gap is spatial ability. Tests
on gender and navigation have found that women tend to navigate via landmarks (“I turn
left when I get to the gas station”) whereas men use dead reckoning (“I still need to be
northandmaybealittle westofhere”),whichties innicely withtheevolutionary perspect-
ive: early men went out on hunting expeditions in all directions and always needed to be
good at finding their way back to the cave, developing their “kinesic memory,” while wo-
men foraged for edibles closer to home, developing “object location memory.” Simply put,
men got better at finding places, while women got better at finding things. Fast forward
twenty thousand years, andIexasperate mywife bynotbeing able tosee mycar keyseven
when they're sitting on the dresser right in front of me. Meanwhile, I laugh at her tenden-
cy to turn a map upside down if it's not facing the “right” way. “Mindy, turning the map
doesn't actually rearrange the symbols on it in any way,” I will say, rolling my eyes, while
sheignoresmeandsilentlyponderswhatadivorcesettlement wouldlooklikenowthatwe
live in a community-property state. But many, many other people are map-turner-upside-
downers just like she is. In 1998, John and Ashley Sims invented an upside-down map that
would make southward travel easier for non-mental rotators like Mindy. A series of male
map executives turned the idea down before a woman heard about it, immediately saw the
appeal, and signed on. Three hundred thousand upside-down maps have since been sold. *
I wonder if the same factors account for the sudden omnipresence of GPS navigation in
cars and smart phones: finally, ladies, a map that will turn itself upside down automatically
while you turn! I tend to switch our GPS to the other map view—you know, the one where
northactuallystaysnorthwhileyoudrive—whichannoysmywifewhenshenexthopsinto
the car. It's the cartographic equivalent of leaving the toilet seat up.
The biological gap “is not huge, but it's there,” Liben confirms. “It's maybe the only re-
maining cognitive difference between boys and girls.” But she cautions that any number
of societal factors could be causing those small differences to snowball. “We know that
boy babies are tossed around more than girl babies. Boys are allowed to ride their bicycles
farther than girls are—we know they explore more. These are the kinds of things that are
goingtoincreaseyourenvironmentalknowledge,thechancethatyoucanlookatamapand
figure out how to get somewhere.” These little environmental nudges can last all through
life.Libenpointsoutthateveninanagewhentwoworkingspousesareoftenequalpartners