5 ms·

Are women really better than men at furniture assembly (as IKEA claim)?

19 points by nkurz 11y ago

xyzzy4 11y ago
There's no way that women are better. The implication of that would be if you have a furniture assembly business of female employees versus male employees, all other conditions being the same, the female business would be more profitable. Which wouldn't make any sense.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  Personally I see it similar to how I see technologies. Each has had purposeful evolutionary pressures. I'm not talking gender-normative roles here, but traits like Men tending to hold more muscle mass than women. 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.
- qntty 11y ago
  That doesn't follow. Things don't always scale like one would expect them to.
  - xyzzy4 11y ago
    If women were better, you could have less workers for the same amount of productivity, and it would increase your profit margin.
    - qntty 11y ago
      What I mean is that women might be better at assembling furniture that they're not familiar with, compared to men. But if you have an assembly line operation, and familiarizing yourself with the instructions isn't a bottleneck, men might be faster then women. There is no reason to say one way or another based on a study of university students who weren't trained to assemble the furniture.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Right. And further, two months into the job the woman is still showing up on time, sober and ready to work. So there are lots of variables to consider.
- Kluny 11y ago
  Nothing about that statement makes sense. For one thing, furniture assembly is normally paid for by piecework. Each assembler's personal speed level makes no difference. If furniture isn't getting built fast enough, more assemblers are hired or existing assemblers work more hours. "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.
  - xyzzy4 11y ago
    Each assembler's personal speed level makes no difference. If furniture isn't getting built fast enough, more assemblers are hired or existing assemblers work more hours. 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.
    - Kluny 11y ago
      See the part re: piecework. Furniture assemblers are not paid by the hour. They are paid by the number of items they build to an acceptable standard. Assemblers whose assembly speed is zero don't get paid. Unless your furniture shop exists only in a hypothetical math universe at the extreme end of a graph, there will be assemblers available who can build furniture adequately fast for the company to stay in business.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  Such business would likely fail. Filtering by less significant factor is meaningless, when there are other factors that are way more important. 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.
frossie 11y ago
In terms of time taken, the men took 22.48 minutes with instructions, on average, [...] compared with the women taking 23.65 minutes with instructions, on average, 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.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Don't they use those screw-slot devices that you just turn a quarter turn and they lock? So maybe no difference there.
  - alricb 11y ago
    Yes, but these connectors also include a stud you need to screw into a hole. In this case though, the Udden trolley [1] is made of steel and uses machine screws, but none of these quarter-turn connectors. [1]: http://www.ikea.com/aa/en/catalog/products/10176471/ http://www.ikea.com/aa/en/catalog/products/10176471/
  - qq66 11y ago
    Those take a considerable amount of strength to "lock in"... I always do them when my wife and I assemble furniture. We are quite slow because we apply wood glue to every joint.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  interesting observation, so you'd claim the difference could be entirely due to strength? That'd be an interesting follow up study -- w/ and w/o powertools
- Retric 11y ago
  Note a single piece of furniture and a tiny sample size used. A more complex piece could have very different results. Also, including time without instructions is almost pointless in the real world as Ikea ships instructions.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
The 'fitness function' they used was time only. Doesn't consider/weigh the cost of bad assembly (trolley falls on your kid spilling boiling tea everywhere) etc. I can assemble that trolley in 5 seconds - throw the parts in a pile, Done! Some errors of course.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  You gotta read the article, they rate the quality of construction.
- andyl 11y ago
  The study did look at build quality. "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."
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Ah. I skimmed too quickly. So, a clear advantage to the men. 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.
    - danielsamuels 11y ago
      But it didn't show that to be false. The comment you replied to proves it.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        But men gained only a few percent improvement with instructions...
jazzyk 11y ago
IKEA's furniture comes with quirky instructions (no words, just graphical "sign" language, to avoid translating into tens of different languages). Women may be a bit more patient with figuring out what it means (more empathy, less testosterone)
- wavefunction 11y ago
  Empathy and testosterone have no defined relationship. Also, I don't know how anyone can argue that women have "less testosterone" than men, on average.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Females produce considerably (orders of magnitude) less testosterone (as well as other androgens) than males why is this surprising? http://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/testosterone-levels-by-age#Prenatal2 http://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/testostero... 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.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      I had meant to say "I don't know how anyone can argue that women DON'T have less testosterone naturally than men, on average." Since some few women do have higher testosterone levels than some few men. Which I assume is why I am being voted down.
- krisroadruck 11y ago
  given that even with instructions the build quality of the womens furniture was still worse than the build quality of mens furniture without reading the instructions at all... I'd find it pretty hard to correlate patience and understanding to the women. The more likely conclusion is the construction already was pretty obvious to the men and the instructions clarified little extra information vs the women who barely understood how to construct the furniture and the instructions allowed them to get up to an almost passable construction after careful consideration.
stenl 11y ago
Published in a shitty journal (Impact Factor: 1.3) with n = 10 per group. Also relevant: most psychology research published in high-ranking journals cannot be reproduced (http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716).
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Published in a shitty journal (Impact Factor: 1.3) with n = 10 per group. Also relevant: most psychology research published in high-ranking journals cannot be reproduced The second sentence is not relevant, if the first is accurate.
- MollyR 11y ago
  Where do you get impact factors for psychology journals ?
  - dietrichepp 11y ago
    They're calculated every year. It is merely the average number of times an article in the journal will be cited.
bonobo3000 11y ago
Glad to see this! Women often tell me i "finish screwing way too fast". I now understand they are simply jealous of my potential as a furniture assembly man.
alricb 11y ago
One thing to note is that the trolley they assembled is made of steel and assembled with machine screws and a funny stud/"nut" combination. People's experience with your typical dowel/screw/quarter-turn connector wooden furniture might not have helped them that much. 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.
bewaretheirs 11y ago
One thing that significantly improved my IKEA-assembly skills: 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).
- basaah 11y ago
  That is golden advice! Also, be careful with power screwdrivers, they offer speed and the illusion of power, but much less control and feeling, increasing the chance of wrecking the screw head and/or screwing too tight or not tight enough.
- mjevans 11y ago
  Why. Why does this even exist? It's bad enough that we aren't using hex-head but to have two different ones that look so similar an average person can't tell them apart without instructions, AND which not only fit in each other's sockets but wreck them?
mr_luc 11y ago
The IKEA person may have stated the claim in a broad way, but as a thought experiment, is it possible that they're correct despite this study? > 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.
- carleverett 11y ago
  > 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. The women spent more time building and did a worse job, according to this study.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the angle you are coming from given the following: 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..
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  The results showed that men were rated higher for construction quality. 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.
hockeybias 11y ago
Not at our house...
larrik 11y ago
"When mental rotation ability was factored out of the analysis, there was still a sex difference in time taken to construct the furniture, but the sex difference in the accuracy of the construction disappeared, which certainly suggests that one reason the male participants may have outperformed their female peers is because they tended to have superior mental rotation abilities, likely making them less dependent on the visuals in the instructions." How would a researcher factor out mental rotation ability after the fact?
logfromblammo 11y ago
I might also test these hypotheses: 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.

19 points by nkurz 11y ago

There's no way that women are better. The implication of that would be if you have a furniture assembly business of female employees versus male employees, all other conditions being the same, the female business would be more profitable. Which wouldn't make any sense.

maerF0x0 11y ago
Personally I see it similar to how I see technologies. Each has had purposeful evolutionary pressures. I'm not talking gender-normative roles here, but traits like Men tending to hold more muscle mass than women. 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.
qntty 11y ago
That doesn't follow. Things don't always scale like one would expect them to.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  If women were better, you could have less workers for the same amount of productivity, and it would increase your profit margin.
  - qntty 11y ago
    What I mean is that women might be better at assembling furniture that they're not familiar with, compared to men. But if you have an assembly line operation, and familiarizing yourself with the instructions isn't a bottleneck, men might be faster then women. There is no reason to say one way or another based on a study of university students who weren't trained to assemble the furniture.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Right. And further, two months into the job the woman is still showing up on time, sober and ready to work. So there are lots of variables to consider.
Kluny 11y ago
Nothing about that statement makes sense. For one thing, furniture assembly is normally paid for by piecework. Each assembler's personal speed level makes no difference. If furniture isn't getting built fast enough, more assemblers are hired or existing assemblers work more hours. "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.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Each assembler's personal speed level makes no difference. If furniture isn't getting built fast enough, more assemblers are hired or existing assemblers work more hours. 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.
  - Kluny 11y ago
    See the part re: piecework. Furniture assemblers are not paid by the hour. They are paid by the number of items they build to an acceptable standard. Assemblers whose assembly speed is zero don't get paid. Unless your furniture shop exists only in a hypothetical math universe at the extreme end of a graph, there will be assemblers available who can build furniture adequately fast for the company to stay in business.
drdaeman 11y ago
Such business would likely fail. Filtering by less significant factor is meaningless, when there are other factors that are way more important. 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.

frossie 11y ago

In terms of time taken, the men took 22.48 minutes with instructions, on average, [...] compared with the women taking 23.65 minutes with instructions, on average, 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.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Don't they use those screw-slot devices that you just turn a quarter turn and they lock? So maybe no difference there.
- alricb 11y ago
  Yes, but these connectors also include a stud you need to screw into a hole. In this case though, the Udden trolley [1] is made of steel and uses machine screws, but none of these quarter-turn connectors. [1]: http://www.ikea.com/aa/en/catalog/products/10176471/ http://www.ikea.com/aa/en/catalog/products/10176471/
- qq66 11y ago
  Those take a considerable amount of strength to "lock in"... I always do them when my wife and I assemble furniture. We are quite slow because we apply wood glue to every joint.
maerF0x0 11y ago
interesting observation, so you'd claim the difference could be entirely due to strength? That'd be an interesting follow up study -- w/ and w/o powertools
Retric 11y ago
Note a single piece of furniture and a tiny sample size used. A more complex piece could have very different results. Also, including time without instructions is almost pointless in the real world as Ikea ships instructions.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

The 'fitness function' they used was time only. Doesn't consider/weigh the cost of bad assembly (trolley falls on your kid spilling boiling tea everywhere) etc. I can assemble that trolley in 5 seconds - throw the parts in a pile, Done! Some errors of course.

maerF0x0 11y ago
You gotta read the article, they rate the quality of construction.
andyl 11y ago
The study did look at build quality. "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."
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Ah. I skimmed too quickly. So, a clear advantage to the men. 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.
  - danielsamuels 11y ago
    But it didn't show that to be false. The comment you replied to proves it.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      But men gained only a few percent improvement with instructions...

jazzyk 11y ago

IKEA's furniture comes with quirky instructions (no words, just graphical "sign" language, to avoid translating into tens of different languages). Women may be a bit more patient with figuring out what it means (more empathy, less testosterone)

wavefunction 11y ago
Empathy and testosterone have no defined relationship. Also, I don't know how anyone can argue that women have "less testosterone" than men, on average.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Females produce considerably (orders of magnitude) less testosterone (as well as other androgens) than males why is this surprising? http://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/testosterone-levels-by-age#Prenatal2 http://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/testostero... 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.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    I had meant to say "I don't know how anyone can argue that women DON'T have less testosterone naturally than men, on average." Since some few women do have higher testosterone levels than some few men. Which I assume is why I am being voted down.
krisroadruck 11y ago
given that even with instructions the build quality of the womens furniture was still worse than the build quality of mens furniture without reading the instructions at all... I'd find it pretty hard to correlate patience and understanding to the women. The more likely conclusion is the construction already was pretty obvious to the men and the instructions clarified little extra information vs the women who barely understood how to construct the furniture and the instructions allowed them to get up to an almost passable construction after careful consideration.

stenl 11y ago

Published in a shitty journal (Impact Factor: 1.3) with n = 10 per group. Also relevant: most psychology research published in high-ranking journals cannot be reproduced (http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716).

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Published in a shitty journal (Impact Factor: 1.3) with n = 10 per group. Also relevant: most psychology research published in high-ranking journals cannot be reproduced The second sentence is not relevant, if the first is accurate.
MollyR 11y ago
Where do you get impact factors for psychology journals ?
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  They're calculated every year. It is merely the average number of times an article in the journal will be cited.

bonobo3000 11y ago

Glad to see this! Women often tell me i "finish screwing way too fast". I now understand they are simply jealous of my potential as a furniture assembly man.

alricb 11y ago

One thing to note is that the trolley they assembled is made of steel and assembled with machine screws and a funny stud/"nut" combination. People's experience with your typical dowel/screw/quarter-turn connector wooden furniture might not have helped them that much. 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.

bewaretheirs 11y ago

One thing that significantly improved my IKEA-assembly skills: 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).

basaah 11y ago
That is golden advice! Also, be careful with power screwdrivers, they offer speed and the illusion of power, but much less control and feeling, increasing the chance of wrecking the screw head and/or screwing too tight or not tight enough.
mjevans 11y ago
Why. Why does this even exist? It's bad enough that we aren't using hex-head but to have two different ones that look so similar an average person can't tell them apart without instructions, AND which not only fit in each other's sockets but wreck them?

mr_luc 11y ago

The IKEA person may have stated the claim in a broad way, but as a thought experiment, is it possible that they're correct despite this study? > 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.

carleverett 11y ago
> 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. The women spent more time building and did a worse job, according to this study.
RyanZAG 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand the angle you are coming from given the following: 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..
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
The results showed that men were rated higher for construction quality. 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.

hockeybias 11y ago

Not at our house...

larrik 11y ago

"When mental rotation ability was factored out of the analysis, there was still a sex difference in time taken to construct the furniture, but the sex difference in the accuracy of the construction disappeared, which certainly suggests that one reason the male participants may have outperformed their female peers is because they tended to have superior mental rotation abilities, likely making them less dependent on the visuals in the instructions." How would a researcher factor out mental rotation ability after the fact?

logfromblammo 11y ago

I might also test these hypotheses: 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.