Battle of the Sexes Won

Bring it on, it's finally been proven, no need to hide away, make excuses and hang your head in shame because you're a bloke. Slowly it seems women and the media have been grinding away at our masculinity and claiming we are not worthy to rule the world. Well, BBC Radio 4 has shown that men rock.

Multitasking
It's long been know that women multi-task and men cannot, well, we may not be able to, but our approach is faster and less error prone.

Our experiment and countless others have shown that it is better to do one task after another. Stephen Monsell, a professor of cognitive psychology at Exeter University, says this is because switching between tasks increases the overall time to get the tasks done by about a third.

Score 1 for the lads.

Map Reading
The belief is true, women can't read maps to save their lives.

The test was simple: to navigate from A to B while driving in Milton Keynes. The only variable was the driver, and it took Vivienne twice as long to reach her destination.

That's typical, says psycho-biologist Qazi Rahman, of the University of East London. "Overall, men are better map readers, and by quite a big margin." Even with practice, most women can only improve their performance slightly.

Score 2 for the lads.

Gossip
A tie.

Both Vivienne and Quentin had gossiped for 60% of the total chat time, and about much the same things. For gossip is not confined to tittle-tattle about acquaintances' personal lives.

Score 3 for the lads.

Empathy
In this test it was a draw. Overall though:

"Women are generally more empathic than men, but the gap is closing."

Women are socialised from an early age to identify feelings and to talk about them, whereas men are conditioned to look out for number one. But ours is a society that increasingly values the emotionally literate, and men can learn to be more empathetic, especially if they take on a caring role such as looking after children.

So we can learn empathy, women can't learn map reading.

Score 4 and a full house for the lads.

So be made to feel guilty no longer, all those 'assets' women have can be learnt, and we are learning them, some male skills simply can't be learnt by women. Next time she's whining about you being a useless waste of space who doesn't understand her, ask if she can find her own way to the kitchen or if she needs help (just don't draw her a map).