Who is better at building Ikea furniture - men or women? All is revealed!
It pains us to admit it ladies, but we have found something men are faster at...

Ikea boss Petra Hesser once declared that women are better than men at putting together flat pack furniture - because they are more likely to read the instructions beforehand.
However, she's been proven wrong!
With regret we have to inform you that according to a recent study carried out by the University of Tromso in Norway, men are in fact faster than women at assembling furniture.
During the study, 40 men and 40 women were put to work and asked to construct an Ikea flat pack kitchen trolley.
Half of each sex were given instructions whilst the other half went at it blind.
Unfortunately ladies, numbers speak a thousand words!
With the help of a manual (as much as it pained them to look at it) men took on average 22.48 minutes to construct the build whilst women took 1 minute and 17 seconds longer!
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Without the manual, men still beat women (dammit) with females taking 4.5 times longer than the women who were given instructions.
Men were a minute quicker with instructions than those without them (at least we can brag about that part!).

Heather Young has been Ideal Home’s Editor since late 2020, and Editor-In-Chief since 2023. She is an interiors journalist and editor who’s been working for some of the UK’s leading interiors magazines for over 20 years, both in-house and as a freelancer.
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