These fundamental problems include the lack of empiricism within the discipline (OK, fancy way of saying you’re making it up) which then feeds into implicit universal assumptions about human behaviour.

The problem with the lack of empiricism in psychology has been approached by Boon and Gozna in an article in The Psychologist which is a broad take on the subject and compares the disciple to other sciences.

Actually, the article in The Psychologist is arguing the opposite: psychology research is too empiricist (as in too naive realist). Psychology has no unifying theories, because psychologists typically collect data first (no matter how trivial or irrelevant) and try to make up a theory/hypothesis after. This is actually not how good science works, because you should make up the theory/hypothesis first and then test it empirically. Most psychologists go through the motions of what they think science consists of (empiricism, data collecting), and the theoretical part of it is vastly underdeveloped.

You’re making a whole load of inferences without back-up. My answer to your questions as with all the posts on here – I think you’ll find its a bit more complicated than that.

And no I don’t think gender-stereotyping only happens to women, so no need to feel left out.

Not only that, map reading – orienteering – is a *learned skill* that is typically taught to males by other males in such organized setups as Boy Scouts. This does not generally go on in Girl Scouts, in my experience, which does FAR less hiking and outdoorsy stuff in the US.

So if you are a woman who wants to learn how to read maps, you will probably have to teach yourself. As I had to do when traveling, because nobody, XX or XY, is good at giving directions.

Then I had to learn how to ignore the map, and drive by the seat of my pants like a barnstormer, as a courier, because so many maps are inadequate whether through mistakes or roadwork, in my area.

There are also a LOT of men who never learned how to read a map correctly, let alone developed a compass-sense nor the ability to “wing it” when the map is insufficient. They do NOT, I can attest from repeated experience, have any innately masculine “instinct” that allows them to learn how to rotate the lines on the map in their head around a vertical axis, let alone a further 90 degrees and then apply 3-point perspective to them to match the landscape.

This can make for amusing “road trip” or “squad on manoeuvers” stories, but usually only loooooong after the fact. (For added fun, have arguments via the local guide vs the GPS, which being a manmade machine full of maps, is of *course* infallible…right up until you hit the unmarked one-way street and the ongoing sewer project!)

For the most part I agree with you, pop psychology is bullshit.

But if you think agendas, ideologies and bad research make things more difficult for women and women only, then you should go and reread your article