Hmm...well if you compare it to shopping, i guess because most women know how to find a good bargain at sales, and know how to side-step those vicious trolley weilding, bargain hunting pentioners.

My wife tells me that she is more gifted at playing minesweeper because of her experience at sweeping the kitchen floor. that does not compute!

This is one of those questions, one of many, where the correct response is to step back a pace and inquire whether the assumed premise is true. Is there a scrap of anything like real evidence that women are or are not better at playing Minesweeper? Note that I'm asking whether there's evidence, not whether it's a fact, because I empatically do NOT want to start one of those idiotic, seemingly endless left brain v. right brain, logic v. intuition, math v. visualisation threads.

We read the instructions.

I'm not ... my husband far surpasses me.

I am a man and I excell at minesweeper. Don't really know why but I'm good at it. End of story.

hm I think the question is assuming the wrong thing. Every woman I've ever played against in minesweeper I beat. In the first video a man is playing minesweeper. In the second video a woman is playing minesweeper. Click on both of the videos at once to have some head to head action! =)

Women think....we think of allllll the possibilities and consequences, while men will have one possible solution and think of no consequences. All my ex-boyfriends were like this.

I hate that game I don't get it but maybe because women have more patience.

I never noticed that there are any differences. I rock at minesweeper but I also think that it has nothing to do with my gender. I can do the expert under 1.5 minutes. I have done the beginner at 3 seconds and the intermediate in about 46 seconds.

I find the opposite, every woman i played minesweep against lost, they dont think logicaly ( in the game i mean) LOL

There is a very small amount of empirical evidence supporting the idea that women, on the whole, do seem to have a small edge in fine motor skills, which is the other half of the minesweeper speed equation (the first half being the visual logic). I'm not sure where I heard/read that, but I'm a psych major, so it was probably a somewhat reputable source. The evolutionary psych perspective explains the small gender dif. in terms of the distribution of labor in early hunter-gatherer societies, with men leaving camp for long periods to track and hunt game and women staying close to home to tend children and gather local vegitation (requiring finer motor dexterity). Also, the theory assumes that it would have been the women who used their greater amounts of time in camp to produce physical objects like baskets and clothing. Later argricultural societies would have seen similar dynamics, with men out in the fields and women in and around the house preparing meals and producing domestic crafts for trade. Anyway, if the assumption that girls are faster minesweepers is in fact true to any extent (which I would say lacks any but the most anecdotal evidence), I'd guess it has more to do with the manual dexterity aspect of the game and not the game logic side. And if that's the case, the above is the best explaination I'd have to give for the presence of that small advantage. But then again, evolutionary psychology kind of sucks a fat one as far as I'm concerned, so I wouldn't put to much stock in the above retro-explainative conjectural theory. -emily

They aren't. Any differences that may exist aren't "natural"- they are socially constructed.

Everyones got these long drawn out answers its ok ladies just say it WERE SMARTER!!