I can concur with their findings wholeheartedly. I turned 35 on tuesday and frequently have absolutely no clue what I'm doing. I'm sure I did once, but cant remember when...

Ah .. "verbal dexterity". That's when you take 3 minutes and a couple of hundred words to communicate what could be said in 30 seconds if you kept to the subject of the discussion....

This is all about living up to stereotypes. You may as well publish a story that says gay men are better at flower arranging.

Strange...

Around here it's exactly the other way round: My wife is much better at reading maps than I am whereas I am much better than her at finding car keys - and most anything else that has been mislaid.

The only reason I can never find stuff, is because my other half has this infuriating habit of moving things to random and illogical locations which she sees as being 'tidier' than where I put them, and never thinks to tell me she's moved the item.

I've lost count of the the number of times I've been stomping around the house in a state of John Cleese apoplexy unable to find something, thinking - "I'm *sure* I put it there" - only to find she had since moved it behind a flower pot on the top bookshelf...

You what? If findings reinforce a stereotype that doesn't make them invalid or uninteresting.

What a load of bollocks; now wheres me car keys.

I know for definate my wife is better than finding things than I am, because she moves, say my car keys from on top of the table where I know I have put them, to where she thinks they will be safe and of course not making the place look a mess.

So I have to then guess which safe and out of the way place she has put them, give up after 30 seconds and ask.

As for flower arranging I'm sure gay men are better at flower arranging than myself as I just chuck the flowers in a vase and go 'Arranged'.

"That's when you take 3 minutes and a couple of hundred words to communicate what could be said in 30 seconds if you kept to the subject of the discussion."

No, that's not it. Verbal dexterity is where all the blame mysteriously ends up with the other after about that timespan.

If men were better at remembering where things were, they wouldn't need

to know how to read a map.

"This is a novel finding. Only gender has an effect on rate of ageing, not sexual orientation."

Before the "study", did anyone actually believe that sexual orientation had an effect on ageing? Perhaps they were mistaking gay men's relatively higher use of moisturiser over straight men as evidence that being gay gives you less wrinkles.

Next from the University Research lot: "Only ethnic origin has an effect on skin colour, not consumption of coffee. Who knew?"

'Ah .. "verbal dexterity". That's when you take 3 minutes and a couple of hundred words to communicate what could be said in 30 seconds if you kept to the subject of the discussion....'

Pretty much all most folks "know" about gender-specific speech differences probably stems from the same pseudo-science. Brizendine has been pretty thouroughly debunked by folks who do actual research.

On that sort of anecdotal level, when was the last time you heard a group of women start off talking about a camping trip and wind up in a discussion of whether or not they knew enough to raise steam on a tourist-line locomotive, in the event that the zombies attacked?

"On that sort of anecdotal level, when was the last time you heard a group of women start off talking about a camping trip and wind up in a discussion of whether or not they knew enough to raise steam on a tourist-line locomotive, in the event that the zombies attacked?"

Now that's just forward planning... another thing us blokes are better at!

Perhaps the scientists objected to what they like to call "anecdotal nature of evidence", but I don't see why a couple hundred thousand years of homo sapiens history and prehistory wasn't sufficient to clarify the matter of verbal dexterity.

Surely every straight bloke has encountered this first-hand (and repeatedly!): whenever you're wrong and she's right, you're wrong; and whenever she's wrong and you're right, you're wrong. Now, that's verbal dexterity! Myself, I've never ceased being amazed by it.

"Straight blokes are best at reading maps, but if you want to know where you left the car keys, you'd best ask a woman, a new study has revealed."

Odd. My car keys will be either in my pants pocket, or hanging on the key hook near the front door. It never takes me more than 15 seconds to find them.

My wife's will be wherever she put them down last time she came in the house. It rarely takes her more than 30 minutes to find them.

The study is spot-on regarding map-reading, however. I print the maps, commit as much as possible to memory, and pull off the road to consult them when I must. It saves hours of wandering around looking for non-existent roads in the wrong county (usually caused by holding the map upside-down or sideways, and then assuming that whichever side is at the top is the direction we are currently going).

straight men are better at reading maps than gay men but, when doing so, are properly oriented.

What a load of bollocks. Now where did I leave my wife...?

What a load of bollocks. Now where did I leave my wife...?

Sounds like,

"Head I win, tails you lose!"

My ex-wife used it, or variations thereof, for over twenty five years!

But I could always find my keys AND read maps!

I made the beds too! Hospital corners are best learned in one's youth!

Nomad