By: Blonde One
Women can’t read maps!
This might be a common comment that us girls might be all too familiar with! However, we Blondes have proved time and time again that it’s wrong! Our navigation courses have had a wide range of women all showing that they can indeed navigate really well. We do however commonly hear women say things like: “my husband always has the map”. It would seem to us that some of these women just lack the confidence to take control of the map and compass.
I have recently read some really interesting research suggested that men and women do have different styles of navigation which has been linked to the hunter/gatherer days. Essentially it says that the differences are that men rely more than women on spatial information such as distance and timing whereas women rely more than men on identifying and using landmarks. This goes back to the days when women would be in charge of gathering fruits and berries to eat: using landmarks to navigate to particularly fruitful areas to forage. (Where was that bush with the particularly ripe fruit?) Men would be in charge of hunting food and therefore honed their skills of working out speed and distance of their prey before going in for the kill. (Running long distances over unfamiliar terrain to spear an animal.)
It was a really interesting article which did not say that ‘women can’t read maps’ but that we might just do it differently to men.
