Women worse at parking

It's official

According to statistics released by the Driving Standards Agency in the UK, almost a third of all women who failed their driving test last year, came unstuck due to parallel parking.
While a total 170,000 women could not pass their driving test in 2010 for various mistakes, 55,000 failed on parking, the Daily Mail reported.

And if the figures are not enough to ensure a victory for men in the battle of the sexes, then they have the support of science as well. In a recent study, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany asked 65 volunteers to park a 23,000-pound Audi and found that women took up to 20 seconds longer than men.

Another study by researcher at the University of Michigan found that female drivers get in more accidents despite driving less often than men do. It also found that women have tough time negotiating crossroads, T-junctions and slip roads.

The new British figures back up another stereotype -- the boy racer. It found that when young men get behind the wheel the testosterone goes into overdrive. It helps to explain why almost 40,000 men were failed last year for moving off too fast, while another 30,500 fell foul of their examiner for jumping the lights.

The agency has listed the top five faults by gender for those who failed. The most frequent -- forgetting to check right, left and then right again at junctions -- was common to both sexes.

About 1.5 million people take a driving test each year in UK. "So far this year the pass rate is 50.7 per cent for men and 44.1 per cent for women," an agency spokesman said.