How, you may be asking yourself, is a good sense of direction like a bad case of acne?

Over many decades, psychologists have measured the minds of men and women, looking for similarities and differences. Reliable results are  notoriously hard to come by, because it can be very easy to find differences where none really exist. If you decided in 1970 to look at the fraction of scientific and medical Ph.D. awarded to women–under 5 percent–you might conclude that women’s brains just weren’t suited to the task. Today, that figure has reached about 50 percent. Women’s brains haven’t evolved over the past 40 years. Their social environment has.

Yet a few differences between the sexes do seem to hold up to