Women are better at parking than men

Driving force

It’s a research which is likely to reignite the cliched battle of the sexes — women are much better at parking a car than men.

The research, which clearly contradicts the notion that women cannot park a car, has found female drivers are better at finding spaces and also more adept than men at manoeuvring a vehicle into a space — though they may take longer to park.

Women were ranked first with a total score of 13.4 out of 20, compared to 12.3 points achieved by men in the study based on an experiment which took into account seven key components of parking styles, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Neil Beeson, a professional driving instructor who devised the experiment, described the results as “surprising”.

“In my experience men have always been the best learners and usually performed better in lessons. However it’s possible that women have retained the information better.
“The results also appear to dispel the myth that men have better spatial awareness than women. It shows that us men need to give our partners more respect when it comes to parking. The facts don’t lie.”

The research was in fact produced by car park firm NCP, which employed a team of researchers to observe 2,500 drivers across its 700 car parks in Britain over a one-month period. Each aspect of a person’s parking was marked and added to a final tally to produce a “parking coefficient” for two sexes.

More than three quarters of women were found to excel in their so-called “pre-parking pose”, setting themselves up to pull into a space, compared to just over half of men observed. Thirtynine per cent female drivers cleanly executed reversing into spaces, compared to only 28 per cent of men.

However, the findings revealed that men were much quicker at parking, taking 16 seconds on average against the 21 seconds women needed to complete the manoeuvre.
From the figures, the study concluded that, as the average motorist parks a car 1,004 times in their lifetime, women spend 12 days of their lives parking compared to nine days for men.