Motor affordance or gender-stereotyped nature of physical activity – what is more important for the mental rotation performance of female athletes?

ABSTRACT

The main goal of this study is to examine the relationship between mental rotation performance of female athletes and sports that are gender stereotyped and show different motor demand profiles. 94 female athletes (handball, combat sport, sport students) participated in an egocentric and object-based mental rotation task using figures of human body stimuli presented in front or back view. Rather male-stereotyped combat sports include many body rotations with changing motion patterns, female sport students learn many new exercises in different types of sport (female stereotyped), handball training (non-stereotyped) contains mainly cardiovascular and tactical challenges. The main result was that a long-term specific sporting expertise is more important for mental rotation performance than the gender-stereotyped sport classification even if gender-role differences are included as covariate. This indicates, that for women specific motor components seem to be more important for the development of mental rotation ability than gender-stereotype aspects.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental rotation
• gender-role
• gender stereotype
• sports
• visual-spatial abilities

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Nadine Grünauer, Magdalena Schneider and Dr Sandra Reitmeier for helping to collect the data. Stefanie Pietsch: conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, methodology, visualization, writing: original draft. Petra Jansen: conceptualisation, formal analysis, methodology, supervision, writing: review and editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in figshare at http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13042118.

Notes

1 To investigate if combat sport, handball and PE activity are really gender stereotyped 183 physical activity students (96 female and 87 male) who did not took part in this study and were of the same mean age (M = 20.27, SD = 2.013) as the female athletes were asked to range the three physical activities on a Likert scale from 1 (male stereotype) to 7 (female stereotype). The mean ranks for handball players (M = 3.86, SD = 1.82) differed significantly from that of combat sports athletes (M = 2.49, SD = 1.143), (z = −10.08, p < .001, N = 183) and the one of female sport students (M = 5.00, SD = 1.15), (z = −8.001, p < .001, N = 183). There was also a significant difference between combat athletes and sport students, (z = −11.28, p < .001, N = 183). Females from combat sport were described more male stereotyped, female sport students were described more female stereotyped.