Gendered division of labor shaped the human spatial behavior
- The necessity for food has driven daily navigation and movement across the landscape for the majority of human history. Additionally, our species constantly divides this effort along gender lines, unlike other primates.
- Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University, and Brian Wood, the lead author of a new study published in Nature Human Behaviour, contend that over the past 2.5 million years, the gendered division of labour in human societies has significantly altered how our species uses space and perhaps even how we think about it.
- These conclusions are supported by a vast and comprehensive body of travel information that reveals striking variations between men and women’s usage of space among the nomadic Hadza people of Tanzania. The Hadza, a modern hunter-gatherer group, offer a glimpse into a highly nomadic way of life that predated the widespread adoption of agriculture and was the standard for our species.
- Jones, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), explained that they are “taking gender differences as a given in this particular cultural setting, and then asking what consequences they have downstream.”
- Understanding this relationship better may provide hints as to why men and women appear to approach space differently. Men and women perform various kinds of spatial tasks better than women, according to research across numerous human populations. Men typically do better on two fundamental tests of movement-related spatial cognition: reliably pointing to distant locations and mental rotation of objects. Women typically perform better on tasks requiring spatial memory.
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