Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Course
Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University, was used to getting A’s. For as long as she could remember, she found academics a breeze. She excelled in math and science in particular, but “I never thought there was a subject I couldn’t do,” she says matter-of-factly.
So when she started engineering school, she was surprised to struggle in a course most of her counterparts considered easy: Engineering graphics. It’s a first-year course that sounds a bit like a glorified drawing class to a non-engineer.
The hardest part is orthogonal projection, a fundamental engineering task. Given a top, front, and side view of an object, engineers must be able to mentally synthesize two-dimensional representations into a three-dimensional object. It’s easy—if you’re good at what psychologists call mental rotation.
Sorby wasn’t. To her surprise and confusion, she found herself overwhelmed. “It was the first time I wasn’t able to do something in a classroom,” she says. “I didn’t realize I had poor spatial skills.”
Sorby was far from alone. After decades of research, spatial cognition has emerged as one of the few areas where women do not perform as well as men on tasks like mental rotation or “wayfinding,” orienting oneself in physical space. Controversially, that difference has been used to explain a gender imbalance in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Nationwide, 1 in 3 university professors in the United States are
