A new study finds that women are more accurate at pounding nails. Women hit the nail on the head more often in lighted conditions in a lab, but in
the dark, men did better. Scientists aren’t sure why, but they have a provocative idea. In hammering out the differences between the sexes, the researchers used a mechanical plate that measured force and accuracy.
They put small and large targets on the plate, to represent small and large nail heads. Then some test subjects pounded away. “We filmed how subjects hammered, and how close the subject hammered to the target was an index of accuracy,” explained study leader Duncan Irschick at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“On average, men were about 25% more accurate than women in the dark, women were about 10% more accurate then men in the light,” Irschick said. Irschick told LiveScience the difference could be that men and women have different hammering strategies: Perhaps men favor force over accuracy, and women the opposite, he said. “However, if this were true, men should always be less accurate than women, which is not what occurs.”
