Scientists Debunk Myth That Males Are Better at Navigating

It’s a common stereotype that men are just naturally better at navigating than women. But is it really true?

The myth may have been debunked after a group of multi-institutional researchers found that men may not have naturally evolved this way, after all. Their findings are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The male advantage in navigation has always been the most “widely documented” sex difference, the study reported, and has so far been put down to an evolutionary response to “sex differences in home range size.” Home range size refers to the size of an area in which an animal travels, for its daily activities.

To research this, scientists from the University of Illinois and other organizations compared how the sexes differed in “home range size and spatial ability” across 21 different species, including humans.

Species included the Asian small-clawed otter, chimpanzees, the diablito poison frog, the European rabbit, the rat, humans and more. They discovered that there was little evidence of sex differences correlating with how well each species navigated.

“Over the past half-century, significant resources have gone into testing the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis as an explanation for sex differences in navigation abilities,” the authors wrote in the study. “In a previous meta-analysis, we found the evidence was weak, and in this paper with an expanded dataset, we again find little evidence supporting the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis.”

The study authors suggest that men did not evolve to be better at navigating through evolution and natural selection. Rather, they conclude that men may be better at navigating due to non-evolutionary biological factors, such as life experience. But, the authors stress more research is needed to study this hypothesis further.

“The data that we had to work with are limited in terms of the small number of species for which both home range sex differences and spatial navigation were measured,” the authors wrote. “It is possible with more, higher quality data, a significant positive relationship will appear. To date, the observations, such as they are, do not favour the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis over the alternatives we have described. We conclude that non-adaptive explanations for sex differences in navigation in humans and other animals should be taken more seriously.”

There have been various other studies in this area, all with different hypotheses on why men may appear to be more skilled at finding their way.

A previous study published in Current Biology in 2018 found that men were overwhelmingly better at navigating than women when asked to play a simple game that involved participants controlling the direction of a boat.

The study found that this had a lot to do with discrimination and unequal opportunities around the world, rather than a natural ability, a report from the BBC reported.

Another study published in 2018 in Memory & Cognition also found that men were better at this simply because they were more likely to take shortcuts, whereas women were more likely to wander, according to a USNews report.

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