【B1】 【B4】

Women are, on the whole, more verbal than men. They are good at language and at reasoning, while men tend to be better at tasks demanding visual-spatial abilities. Words are tools for communicating with other people and they are mainly verbal tools. Visual and spatial abilities are tools for imagining and manipulating objects and helping communicating information about them. Are these abilities programmed into the brain? It has been suggested that when it comes to the brain, males are specialists while women are generalists. But no one knows that, if anything, this means in terms of the abilities of the two sexes. Engineering is both visual and spatial, and it’s true that there are relatively fewer women engineers. But women become just as skilled as men at shooting a rifle or driving a car, tasks that involve visual-spatial skills. They also do equally well at programming a computer, which is neither visual nor spatial. Women do, however, seem less likely to fall in love with the objects themselves. We all know men for whom machines seem to be extensions of their identity. A woman is more likely to see her car, rifle or computer as a useful tool, but not in itself fascinating.