We told you all along: bigger IS better
It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems that men’s much-debated ability to navigate slightly better than women applies in virtual environments as well as the real world. […] Microsoft has found that women tend to be about 20 per cent slower than men when working out where they are in a computer-generated world. So led by Desney Tan from Carnegie Mellon, Czerwinski and her Microsoft colleague George Robertson ran tests on volunteers to see if they could improve this. They found that women were just as good as men at virtual navigation when they had a large computer display. […] Female architects, designers, trainee pilots and even computer gamers should be given much wider computer screens, a team of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Microsoft’s research lab in Redmond, Washington, told a computer usability conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last week.
From NewScientist.com (linked via Wired News)