Playing with toys aimed at boys helps children develop spatial skills better than ones designed for girls and can give them an advantage if they pursue a STEM education, a seven-year Hong Kong study has found.

Professor Ivy Wong Wang, director of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s gender studies programme, said boy-typical play, involving toy cars or assembling models for example, generally encouraged spatial skills, while toys for girls, such as tea sets or baby dolls, rarely required the skills and focused on nurturing.

Her research found that children, regardless of their sex, who played more with boy-typical toys had better mental transformation skills, and boys outperformed girls in that ability as predicted.

Mental transformation is a spatial skill that involves imagining how objects look when they are transformed, rotated or moved.

“Our study proposes that we can narrow the gender gaps in development through narrowing the gender gaps in play, in particular to intervene during childhood,” Wong said.

She said spatial skills could be applied in reading maps, driving and sports, while past research showed they were crucial to performance and career development in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).