Are women really better than men at furniture assembly (as IKEA claim)?
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
The second sentence is not relevant, if the first is accurate.
I [female] would lose 5% in time over a median guy just by slower screwdriving, never mind cognitive performance. This is why I assemble Ikea furniture with a power screwdriver - it's not easy work if you're not used to it.
In this case though, the Udden trolley [1] is made of steel and uses machine screws, but none of these quarter-turn connectors.
Not pointless, they were testing consistency with past results on differences in gender-based spatial reasoning.
According to Wikipedia, the average US male weighs 88.3kg and the average US female weighs 74.7kg.
The big three (squat/bench/deadlift) 1RM total for an average untrained male is 186kg. For an average novice female, 175kg. This suggests that ordinary exercise is not sufficient to make up for the difference in body size and testosterone levels, and only those rare few females who are serious about strength training will be stronger than the average male.
For its cross-head screws, IKEA generally uses Pozidriv rather than Phillips screws. They're subtly different - but if you use a Phillips driver on a Pozidriv screw (or vice versa) you tend to wreck the screw head. Use the IKEA-sold screwdriver (or get a better Pozidriv set).
However, because the trolley is pretty light (~14 kg) and its fasteners don't require much strength to screw in (vs. the larger screws in wood furniture), it might have mitigated the strength difference between men and women.
> on average, men tend to outperform women on spatial skills, which you'd expect would be relevant to furniture construction.
Could it actually be irrelevant? There's a case to be made there.
Is time of construction, as measured in this study, actually important to IKEA? If the reasons for faster male performance in this study are down to (possibly genetic) advantages in dealing with new spatial problems, or a cultural factor like males having on average more exposure to various kinds of construction, which manifest in them showing a (slight) edge in constructing a brand-new design, well ... due to the manufacturing effect, that advantage should disappear!
With practice, false starts and misunderstandings will go away. At that point, what matters to IKEA? Probably, 'perfect' assembly. It's possible that IKEA found that women showed lower defect rates than men. That would make sense given that they called out that women followed the assembly instructions more closely.
IKEA's claim was simply that 'women are better at assembling flat-pack furniture than men,' and this study wanted to see if the known male edge in understanding spatial problems extended to flat-pack furniture. It apparently does, but that doesn't necessarily mean that women still might not be 'better,' at least from IKEA's point of view.
The women spent more time building and did a worse job, according to this study.
In terms of construction scores (from 1 to 10 where 10 represents a perfectly built trolley), men averaged 8.9 with instructions, 7.6 without; the women averaged 7.5 with, and 5.7 without.
So men without instructions do slightly better than women with instructions, and men with instructions do far better..
But I think it's interesting that it takes around 25 minutes to put a trolley together, and it's hard to get a perfect score for construction quality.
The design of the product has a lot more influence on time/quality than gender. And it looks like the design could be improved.
I always assumed that flat pack furniture was similar to cheap commercial furniture without the construction costs, and with lower shipping costs. But it's assembled using the same standard techniques.
Is it possible to design good furniture with much simpler/quicker assembly techniques? Maybe not. But if it is, perhaps there's a commercial opportunity there.
Flat-pack furniture needs to buildable by just about anyone, using tools that they can be expected to have (screwdriver and hammer only, in practice) or you are willing to include (allen wrench). On top of that, it's usually also designed to be disassembled as well to a degree, since otherwise mistakes and can be permanent and costly. Also, and perhaps most importantly, flat pack furniture almost never uses glue, which is often a very important component of factory assembled furniture.
For instance, a wood steamer, to bend the back of a chair into a curve, followed by a few days of immobilizing and drying the piece. This sort of step is only cost effective when you are building hundreds of chairs.
Or there might be staples from a staple gun, or springs that can only be installed with the help of a power tool.
And, as already mentioned by parent, most factory-assembled wood furniture nowadays uses dowels or wafers and wood glue. The resulting join is much stronger than twistlock connectors in particle board.
But you can fit more flat-pack chairs in one cargo container, which is about the only reason they even exist. If you are confident in your assembly abilities, a bottle of wood glue, clamps, and a framing square will produce better results on particle-board furniture than following the instructions as written. If not, you'll make a mess and ruin your furniture. And honestly, sometimes you just need something that's good enough to do the job, for $20, that you can just discard the next time you move.
I personally wouldn't try using glue on flat-pack furniture, though. For one, the pieces are generally finished there they connect, which means you are gluing to a lacquer on at least one side (possibly both!), and wood glue really wants a porous surface like unfinished wood. Another reason is that much flat-pack furniture (less so Ikea) is super cheap particle board that simply isn't strong enough to support the much weight from its surface like you would force it to with glue.
When used properly, however, wood glue is indeed shockingly strong.
Right, but "quality of first construction by untrained person" does not, due to the manufacturing effect, necessarily mean anything to IKEA.
That said if it has any actual effect on Women varies, females would be in general much less sensitive to androgens to begin with (females have considerably less androgen receptors most of which will be present in the ovarian cells) so the effect on them will not be even close to the effect on males.
Since some few women do have higher testosterone levels than some few men.
Which I assume is why I am being voted down.
IKEA used non-standard parts in most cases they are "easier" to assemble in some cases since they are always designed to be pretty much with only a standard flathead/philips driver but GL getting replacement bolts if they missed one in the packaging or you lost one during assembly or disassembly, so yes I rather have a cheap photocopier paper with the measurements and part part numbers on it than the graphical IKEA instructions because I can just buy missing or broken parts or make them myself when needed rather than chug the entire thing into the garbage 3-4 years down the line.
My grief with IKEA is that these days it's pretty much neither here nor there unless you are in luck and something is on one of their 80-90% discount sales then the cheap stuff will be of horrid quality sometimes being even worse than no-brand crap from Amazon or you nearest big-box while their expensive stuff is in the price range of the big department stores, furniture boutiques and depending on the country even custom made furniture (My parents have had several closets and a study custom made fitted and assembled for cheaper than IKEA's mid and upper range prices and it looked 100 times better). Not to mention that IKEA is just horrible when it comes to shipping and customer support compared to both Amazon and large department stores.
People improve (or degrade) their performance at objectively measured tasks when told they should be better (or worse) at doing them than others.
The magnitude of the above effect differs between men and women.
In other words, repeat the experiment, this time (falsely) telling the test subjects that, according to prior experimental results, female assemblers should be able to complete the task faster and more accurately than males. See what happens.
If tested and confirmed, the effect would be similar to the placebo effect in medical trials.
How would a researcher factor out mental rotation ability after the fact?
I can assemble that trolley in 5 seconds - throw the parts in a pile, Done! Some errors of course.
"In terms of construction scores (from 1 to 10 where 10 represents a perfectly built trolley), men averaged 8.9 with instructions, 7.6 without; the women averaged 7.5 with, and 5.7 without."
Funny the article ends up with some pap about 'men and women can benefit from clear instructions' where the study showed that to be false.
In this specific case I think the research is very informative for the current state of affairs, but maybe not so informative about how male/female sexed individuals differ. That is, it really sounds to me like ppl who would be identified as men have more experience being expected to work w/o instructions, with physical things etc. Vs it sounds like women are often expected to work with instructions etc. -- Nether was faster when they worked with the expected "mode" of operations.
Anyways, this whole subject is flamebait. So I'll leave it at this.
"All other conditions being the same" - a business operated only by women will be very different from one operated only by men. All other conditions will not be the same. There will be different assembly line procedures, different levels of teamwork and communication, different expectations about how much work must be done and how many items must be sold, different customer interactions.
"The female business would be more profitable. Which wouldn't make any sense." This statement is meaningless.
Personal speed makes a lot of difference. For example, if the speed was zero, nothing would be built. It would cost your business more money if you have to pay people for more hours. So having male assemblers would cost more if they are worse at it.
It's probably that one biological gender has an some tiny edge over another here - in statistically significant way - but in practice I think individual differences are likely to be order(s) of magnitude more important. Not like I have any researches to quote, though.
If a furniture assembly business has a giant candidate list (like, millions of applicants) they gender may start having some statistical significance and get useful as a metric. Huh, if they have countless myriads of candidates, then even something as silly as zodiac sign may become useful - if there are statistics about those, of course. But if they have, say, half a hundred applicants, they'd better look at something more relevant, like past experience (huh), individual physical shape or spatial intelligence.