This piece is inspired by Mr. Abiodun Musa Aibinu, responding to my article in The News Chronicles on Monday, 6th July, 2026 titled “Is it true that men don’t really know colors.” In that piece I admitted, with some embarrassment, that I had lived most of my life unaware that men are, on average, more prone to color vision deficiency. I only woke up to it after watching a media personality test a man on basic colors and he missed them, convincingly. That moment unsettled me because it suggested I had been wrong all along. What made it more fascinating was discovering that the science behind it is not new. Studies going back many decades had already documented it. It was not rumor or groupthink. It was data.
Mr. Aibinu’s reply was generous and thoughtful. “Nice article. Very interesting, and I believe you have answered my questions quite convincingly,” he wrote. Then came the pivot: “However, are you also aware of the argument that women generally struggle more with reading maps? There are quite a number of books and studies on this topic as well. In fact, there is a popular book that discusses why men often have difficulty distinguishing colors while women are said to be less adept at reading maps. I find your explanation based on the hunter-gatherer economy particularly compelling.” He ended by asking to share the article. I thanked him, and I also confessed: I was hearing the map claim for the first time too.
That confession took me back to secondary school geography, a subject most of us approached with dread, not because map work was impossible, but because it felt like something even our teachers hurried past. Yet map enlargement and reduction, the very thing that terrified students before WASC, NECO and SSCE practicals, turned out to be disarmingly simple. Enlarge a map and you divide the scale by two. Reduce it and you multiply by two. That was it. But map reading is never only about scale. It is about reading contour lines, identifying features, estimating distance, and turning paper into terrain. So when I heard that women are supposedly poor at this, it struck me as curious. Because unlike color blindness, which has a clean genetic explanation, the story of maps and gender is layered, contested, and far more human.
From the perspective of cognitive psychology, spatial ability is not one thing. It is a family of skills: mentally rotating objects, estimating distances, holding landmarks in memory, finding shortcuts, and translating a two-dimensional sheet into a three-dimensional world. The classic meta-analysis by Voyer, Voyer and Bryden in 1995, which reviewed 286 studies, found small average differences. Men tended to score slightly higher on mental rotation and abstract wayfinding. Women tended to score slightly higher on remembering the location of objects and landmarks. The crucial word is average. The overlap between men and women is enormous, so large that you can find female surveyors, pilots, architects and orienteers who outperform most men, and men who get lost with a phone and GPS.
What explains the pattern? One influential framework comes from evolutionary psychology. The argument, popularized in books like, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, is that ancestral men traveled farther for hunting and needed Euclidean strategies, north, south, distance, overall layout, while women foraged closer to home and needed to remember resource-rich landmarks. It is an elegant story. But scholars like Gina Rippon in The Gendered Brain and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender caution against treating it as destiny. Rippon’s central idea is neuroplasticity: the brain wires itself to what it practices. If boys grow up with compasses, bikes, construction toys and video games that demand spatial rotation, they accumulate thousands of hours of practice. If girls are taught directions as “turn left at the mosque, right at the blue building,” they become exceptional at landmark memory. A 2008 study in Developmental Science showed that just ten hours of spatial video game training closed the mental rotation gap in girls. That is not biology speaking. That is experience.
Culture amplifies this. Cross-cultural research finds that in societies where girls have equal access to sports, technical education and independent exploration, the gender gap in spatial tasks shrinks dramatically. Stereotype threat matters too. A 2007 study in Sex Roles found that when women were told “men are better at this map test,” their performance dropped. When told there was no difference, it rose. Confidence, in other words, is part of the map.
Neuroscience adds another layer without settling the debate. fMRI studies from the 2000s show that men and women sometimes recruit different brain networks for the same navigation task. Men show more activity in the hippocampus, the seat of cognitive maps. Women show more activity in parahippocampal and language areas tied to landmarks and verbal routes. Different hardware, same destination. Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist who studies London taxi drivers, found something even more telling. After years of memorizing 25,000 streets, those drivers developed measurable changes in the hippocampus. Expertise, not sex, predicted the change. The brain, it turns out, remodels itself around practice.
History is full of counter-narratives that make the stereotype look thin. Grace O’Malley, the 16th century Irish “Pirate Queen,” navigated the Atlantic coast by stars and coastal charts. During World War II, the Women Airforce Service Pilots ferried aircraft across the United States using sectional aeronautical maps, with error rates comparable to their male counterparts. Among the Hadza of Tanzania and Inuit women in the Arctic, women routinely navigate vast terrain by remembering hundreds of foraging locations without any paper map at all. And in 2019, analysis of millions of Uber and Google Maps trips found virtually no difference between men and women in missed turns or recalculations. The difference was in preference: women were slightly more likely to choose familiar, well-lit routes even if they were two minutes longer.
So where does that leave us? Not with a verdict that women are bad at maps, but with a picture of two different toolkits. Men, on average, lean toward abstract geometric strategies. “Drive two kilometers north, then east.” Women, on average, lean toward landmark and route strategies. “Turn left at the hospital, right after the supermarket.” Neither is superior. In a dense market, landmarks win. In an open forest with only a compass and coordinates, the geometric model helps. In emergencies, the people who combine both tend to do best.
The research is clear on one more point: spatial skill is trainable. Action video games improve mental rotation and spatial memory, and women often improve just as much as men, sometimes more. Educational interventions in fourth grade classrooms by researchers like Nora Newcombe and David Uttal have shown that twelve weeks of map and block play can erase early gaps. The lesson from the London cabbies applies to all of us. Practice literally reshapes the brain.
I went back to my own memory of geography class. We feared maps not because they were hard, but because we were never taught to love them. Map reading is not a gendered gift. It is a habit. And habits can be built.
In the end, the stereotype that “women can’t read maps” collapses under the weight of evidence. There are small average tendencies, yes. But they are dwarfed by individual variation, by culture, by training, and by confidence. The richer truth is this: men and women navigate differently, and both can become superb at it. The map does not care who is holding it. Only whether they have learned how to read it.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
