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Gender differences in geographical knowledge

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Abstract

In five experiments involving more than 1800 undergraduate students, males more accurately located places on maps of the United States or its various regions than did females. These gender differences could not be attributed to education, travel history, desire to travel, or in the amount of incidental exposure to several potential sources of geographic information in everyday life. Males performed more accurately than females on measures of egocentric and allocentric spatial orientation, but performance on these tasks was only weakly predictive of accuracy on tests of geographical knowledge. Since males and females learned the locations of places on an unfamiliar map at similar rates, regardless of whether such learning occurred under intentional or incidental instructions, gender differences in geographical knowledge cannot be attributed to differences in capacity to learn place locations on maps. An attentional hypothesis is proposed to account for the more accurate performance of males on tests of geographical knowledge.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, 58105, Fargo, North Dakota

    William W. Beatty & Alexander I. Tröster

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  1. William W. Beatty
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  2. Alexander I. Tröster
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Additional information

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Richard Thompson, Hal Dengerink, Russ Glasgow, Lauren Lyon, James Malott, Hal Bertilson, Carol Barnes, Judith Goggin, Wendy Stock, Lyn Devenport, Shelton Hendricks, Julia Wallace, Rex Bierley, Herbert Pick, Tom Vilberg, Peter Frey, William Greenough, Billy Barrios, Arnold Gerall, Richard Bauer, Paul Ellen, Robert Klepac, Doug Nelson, Richard Fanelli, Jan Juraska, Don Meyer, Dave Riccio, Jan Hastrup, Lynn Hasher, Tony Sclafani, F. Robert Brush, and Jeff Blaustein, who collected data reported in Experiment 1. Brian Gladue made helpful suggestions regarding the conduct of Experiment 4. Harry Whitaker introduced us to the pathfinding test used in Experiment 5.

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Beatty, W.W., Tröster, A.I. Gender differences in geographical knowledge. Sex Roles 16, 565–590 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00300374

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