The journal Royal Society Open Science published research that debunks the myth that men naturally evolved to have a certain trait.
According to a study, the male gender has always had an advantage in navigation, and this difference has been widely documented. It is believed that this advantage is due to an evolutionary response to differences in the size of an animal’s home range. Home range size refers to the area in which an animal travels for its daily activities.
To compare differences in “home range size and spatial ability” between sexes, scientists from the University of Illinois and other organizations studied 21 different species, including humans. Various species were tested, including the Asian small-clawed otter, chimpanzees, the diablito poison frog, the European rabbit, the rat, and humans. The study found little correlation between sex and navigation ability.
New Research Challenges the Gender Gap in Navigation Skills
According to the study’s authors, considerable efforts have been made in the last 50 years to test the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis as a potential cause of the differences in navigation skills between genders.
However, their previous meta-analysis found the evidence to be weak, and their latest research, which includes a more extensive dataset, supports their previous findings by again revealing little to no evidence that supports the sex-specific adaptation hypothesis.
The researchers propose that men’s superior navigation skills are not due to evolutionary advantages, but rather, non-evolutionary biological factors such as life experience. However, the authors emphasize that further research is necessary to investigate this hypothesis in greater detail.
Several studies have explored why men may have better navigation skills and have presented varying hypotheses.
A 2018 study published in Current Biology found that in a simple game involving boat navigation, men outperformed women. According to a BBC report, the study discovered that this was due more to discrimination and unequal opportunities around the world than to a natural ability.
Another study published in 2018 in Memory & Cognition discovered 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.
