Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist weighs in on new study revealing men are better navigators than women - The Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin

Are men better at navigating than women?

It’s a common stereotype that men are better at directions than women, but is this actually true?

New research published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that the answer was yes and no!

Previous studies have found that human men slightly outperform women when it comes to spatial navigation tasks and the theory was that it might be evolutionary, as our cavemen ancestors covered large distances to hunt while the cavewomen stayed closer to home.

To look deeper into this and to see if the theory carried across other species, researchers collected data from humans and 20 other species that looked at their spatial navigation skills and how far they travelled away from home.

The expectation was that the sex of animal that travelled furthest from home should have the better navigation skills, however this was not the case. While some of the species studied like the meadow vole and chimpanzee had males that were the main traveller, other species including the devil poison frog and the rusty crayfish had females who were the ones that left home the most. Overall, the difference between navigational ability was negligible no matter which sex of animal left home.

They found that navigational differences are less to do with evolution and more to do with culture. When they looked into adult humans who had been brought up with similar upbringings, they found no difference in navigation skills. The difference came about when they looked into people's childhoods and found examples of where men had been encouraged to do more outside activities as boys than women as girls. In these examples, the men showed better navigation skills than the women overall, but this was due to lifetime experience rather than anything genetic or evolutionary.

So yes, men might be better at navigating than women, but only because their childhood involved more practice – not because there is a biological reason behind it.

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