Its official! Women find parking harder than men

London, March 14 (ANI): Women have been criticised for their poor parking abilities as compared to men.

While it is said that ladies simply cannot master the fine art of steering a car backwards into its proper place, male boasts about motoring skills.

Now, official figures are likely to inflame the parking row, by suggesting that women do, indeed, find parking harder than men.

New data from the Driving Standards Agency, an executive agency of the UK Department for Transport, indicate that women are more likely than men to fail their driving test because of problems parking.

The statistics also confirmed that women are more likely overall to fail their practical test, the Telegraph reported.

The DSA figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that examiners recorded 1,660,206 errors by candidates that were serious enough to mean a failed test - 718,244 by men and 941,962 by women.

The total number of errors exceeds the number of tests taken because many failed candidates made multiple mistakes.

In 2010-11, 50 per cent of male candidates failed and 57 per cent of women, resulting in an overall failure rate of 54 per cent.

The data also revealed the errors that led each candidate to fail, and show a wide disparity between the sexes over parking. While 18,798 male candidates failed for lack of control during the dreaded reverse-park manoeuvre, the female figure was 40,863.

Women were also more likely to fail for inadequate "observation" of road conditions during the parking test: 12,280 men committed that error, compared with 15,945 women.

Estimates suggest that the average woman driver passes her test after 52 hours of teaching, compared with about 36 for men.

The DSA figures also showed that there were some tests that men were more likely to fail.

Many learners have the rubric "mirror-signal-manoeuvre" drummed into them, but some men still fail to get the message: more men than women failed because they did not check their mirrors before signalling, by a margin of 6,899 to 6,223.

The most common cause of failure was observing - or perhaps not observing - junctions, which led to 201,175 people being disappointed.

The rarest cause of failure was lack of knowledge of the Highway Code: a total of 59 candidates would have got their licence if only they had paid more attention to its contents. (ANI)

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