Talk about a letdown. For months, the women of America have been anticipating the results of a study that promised to answer THE question of the looming summer travel season: Who's better with driving directions, us or them?

As one of my friends put it: "It's up there in importance with whether the weight you lose on Atkins stays off."

My friend is married to a wonderful man. He listens and learns and cries, but he has one tiny yet enormous flaw: an apparently physical inability to pull the car into a gas station, roll down his window, and utter the following words: "Excuse me, I'm lost. Can you tell me how to find. . ."

So when word leaked out that Canadian researchers were hard at work trying to figure out just who should be listening to whom in the front seat - ahem - we gals couldn't wait for the results.

And then, late last week, just when we should have been taking our victory lap - and not getting lost - came the shocking news: Men and women, it seems, are equally good navigators.

I'm not saying I doubt the veracity of the study, but if men are so good at finding things, why can't they see a bag of cherry tomatoes in the fridge?

It turns out that the differences in opinion about how to get to the wedding in Upstate New York, or the colleague's house for a dinner party, come because men and women use different methods to get where we're going, or trying to go, as the case may be.

Let's look at the two styles.

Ours: Hmmm. I think I may be lost. I'll stop and ask someone for directions before wasting any more time circling around, especially because I'm already late, and while I'm at it, I'll get a diet Coke and a snack at the little Mobil mart, even though I shouldn't because I'm sure there will be plenty of food where I'm going and I feel fat as it is.

Theirs: I'm not lost, and if I am, I better speed up and turn up the sound on the radio.

Well, that's the layman's description, at least.

The professionals described the two different styles as "survey representation" (men) and "route representation" (women).

After conducting hours and hours of experiments on the campus of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the social scientists reported that men would look quickly at landmarks and head off in what they estimated was the right direction, while the women would try to picture the whole route in precise detail and then follow the path in their heads.

Meanwhile, the study makes no mention of what will be an increasingly important issue as more and more cars come with navigational systems: Whose side is the GPS likely to be on?