Study: Women are better at parking than men

I’m a terrible driver, particularly when it comes to parking. So far I’ve managed to avoid major damage, but I’ve had more embarrassing episodes than I care to recount. These include scraping walls when leaving an end spot in a parking garage, scratcing up against and backing into parked vehicles, and once driving over a giant, decorative rock in an outdoor parking lot that left the front of my car dangling in the air and destroyed my car’s underside. I’m not proud of any of this.

Part of this shame—the well-deserved part—comes from the cases in which my careless parking causes an innocent person to spend their weekend on the phone with my insurance handler and taking their car to a body shop. That’s a huge inconvenience, and one that makes me want to hit my head against a wall out of guilt.

But there’s also a secondary shame in knowing that every time I mess up parking in public, even if no one else’s car is involved, I’m giving ammunition to a stupid, unfounded stereotype that women can’t drive. This is totally unfair. I know it’s unfair partly because I know plenty of women who are great drivers, and partly because I just read in the Telegraph about a study produced by the car park firm NCP in Britain, which found that contrary to popular opinion women, on average, are actually better at parking their vehicles than men. The study employed a team of researchers to observe 2,500 drivers across its 700 car parks in Britain over a one-month period. Among their findings, according to the Telegraph, were:

• Women take longer to park, but they do a better job.
• 52 per cent of women park in the middle of each parking bay, compared to 25 percent of men.
• Women are better at finding spaces because they drive more slowly around the parking lots.
• Women are more accurate in lining themselves up before starting each maneuver.
• Women are more likely to adopt instructors’ preferred method of reversing into bays.
• Fewer men reposition their cars once in the bay.
• Men are more skilled at driving forwards into spaces.
• Men are much quicker at parking, taking 16 seconds on average against the 21 seconds women needed to complete the maneuver.

So there you go—a study that punches a hole in the theory that when women park badly it’s because they’re women, rather than people, who, like myself, are shitty, stupid drivers.

According to Neil Beeson, the professional driving instructor who created the study: “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.”

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