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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2267 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I'm sure you all are tired of evo-psych stuff, but why do women like to travel so much? I think traveling to a different country would be kinda cool but I'm really not as crazy about it as most women seem to be. To me, there's other higher priority things that don't cost so much and don't require a ton of planning.

It is a trope in fiction to meet an attractive man while traveling, and women appear to enjoy narrative-driven sexual fantasies while men enjoy visual-driven fantasies. But as for why women enjoy narrative-driven fantasies, I don’t know.

For young and older people I'm not sure women travel more than men but I've noticed a specific demographic of female travellers that doesn't really have a male counterpart. It's 25-40yo women who (usually) have some kind of higher education but are either unemployed or underemployed and spend a lot of time traveling, which is financed by their fathers, either directly through monthly stipends or indirectly by buying them a house/apartment with no strings attached.

This doesn't really have a corresponding demo for men because their families won't finance nominally successful men to have a layabout lifestyle, but they will do so for women and spending their time traveling is higher status than being a regular neet, so it isn't a black mark against the parents.

Men are more risk tolerant, novelty-seeking, and higher-earning, so it might sound counterintuitive to some that women travel more than men. Indeed, at least one article reports that 64% of worldwide travelers are women. The article mentions the male privilege of dying earlier as a possible source for the greater pool of female travelers.

Perhaps women have more free time from taking more time off between jobs, or having better work-life balance jobs where they can take long stretches of time off. Women also retire earlier, if they were working at all in the first place.

Women might also care less about splurging on travel from a lifetime of not needing money to attract/entertain men, and might have a reverse-endowment effect if they're spending money they didn't fully earn themselves. This would be consistent with women being the primary drivers of consumer spending.

There are further key differences in the female vs. male traveling experience, especially for young women and young men. Women's sexual market value is automatic and portable through their looks; men's not so much as male status is more situational and contextual. Women can just show-up and have FUN things happen to them.

  • Traveling for women means having excuses to take thotty photos in exotic locations for social media; getting introduced to, invited out, taken out to cool places by local and tourist men; having a limitless selection of tour guides, monkey-dancers, and court-jesters from online dating upon arrival, the option to ride the carousel with local and/or tourist men to their heart's content. Language barriers are less of an issue because local and tourist men will make the effort to communicate with them, whether it be in the women's native language or patiently in the local language.

  • Traveling for men means having to research any place you might want to go; having to figure out where the cool spots are; competing with both local and tourist men for the limited number of tourist women; figuring out how/where to meet local women and having to grind out approaches yourself; grinding hard for weeks on social media and online dating prior to the trip to hopefully have a non-zero number of dates. Language barriers are more of an issue because local and tourist women will usually not take the initiative to attempt communication in the men's native language, and have less patience for tourist men fumbling around in the local language.

having better work-life balance jobs where they can take long stretches of time off.

One of my brothers had a long, long time in the wilderness of dating apps (he's a high earner in a not-great location) and basically came to the conclusion, now popular in some internet corners, that some white-collar jobs are daycare for adult women. He lost count of the women he met who traveled internationally 2-6 times per year for 2+ weeks per trip (with the unspoken but sometimes spoken expectation that serious dating would involve joining all the trips and eventually paying for all of it). Somehow, their workplaces got along just fine without them during their long absences. Whatever jobs they had, they certainly had more generous leave policies than any of his private sector jobs or my public sector jobs. Apparently there's a secret third sector neither of us have found yet.

Women might also care less about splurging on travel from a lifetime of not needing money to attract/entertain men

Again, per my brother, many women he met had $100k+ email jobs, zero savings, and plenty of debt. Most of them perceived saving and being financially prepared for having a family as the man's job, and some were forthright enough to say it out loud. Anyone with that attitude would not have trouble spending money to travel frequently.

Apparently there's a secret third sector neither of us have found yet.

People in healthcare related professions (like nurses) can often get a lot of time off as compensation for overtime and night shifts as long as they don't spend it during the holidays. They are usually incentiviced to do this rather than taking cash compensation.

Doesn’t match my experience either. I’d like to see some stats before trying to read the tea leaves.

It surprises me that there were two of you who didn't get this impression. But here you go. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2024/02/22/women-love-to-travel-men-not-so-much/

Interesting. Probably it's my academic background, which is already very female-biased and pretty much requires one to be comfortable with travelling, including outright living in other countries. It seems I don't really register 64% women as an imbalance (even though it obviously logically is), since that's in line with my daily experiences (arguably, it's on the low end; When I started my degree, we were around 10 guys for 30 women, which after the first-year crash of nearly 50% reduced to around 4 guys for a little less than 20 women. Even now, I work almost exclusively in collaborations with women [which is intentional, since it opens up a lot of funding for me indirectly that I otherwise do not have access to]).

I guess it makes sense in that if I think back to my hometown, it wasn't very uncommon for older men to consider travelling a frivolous waste of money, while the older women seemed more accepting of the idea (though they still didn't travel without their husbands). Norms change, and the same kind of men still considers it a waste of money, but the women then just go travel anyway, I suppose?

It doesn't really fit with the school friends I kept in touch with, but those unsurprisingly were also pre-filtered for more open-minded personalities.

Now that I've read this article, I find this comment at the end funny:

But you can’t blame the travel companies for focusing on the millions of women eager to explore. Men will just have to find a way to break the chains that stop them from seeing the world.

This is like, the exact opposite sentiment you'd get if it was men traveling and women staying at home.

Actually, yes, travel companies should focus more on women. Women only don't travel because of historical oppression. We need equality in frivolous traveling.

If some subset of men don't travel, it's due to toxic masculinity, them being lazy, stingy tightwads who lack interest in other cultures and curiosity about the world.

If some subset of women don't travel, it's due to toxic masculinity, the men in their lives trying to control them, them being too burdened by the physical and emotional labor of keeping households and workplaces afloat to have time and energy to travel.

Huh. I guess so.

It’s a status symbol thats hard to fake. Your Instagram photos are geolocated- while it takes at least some domain specific knowledge to tell if designer goods are fake.

It’s also a vacation, and people in general like those- you probably notice this more with women because they talk more.

I don't get this impression, at least not strongly. If anything, the people I know who have actually lived and/or spend multiple months in exotic countries are almost exclusively men. Maybe women do go a bit more often, but usually to more generic, touristy spots.

My experience matches Arjin's, in that travelling is just generically high status behaviour at the moment, and women tend to be much more receptive to signalling status behaviour. Also, everyone enjoys not having to work, and women tend to have less pressure on that front, so they can have a bit more leeway in how often and when they can go on trips.

Evo-psych makes a bad turn when it tries to explain behaviors this specific. It's a sign of status, simple as (which can flip valance depending on the time period and conditions, like being tanned vs. being pale). The costs and the planning are a part of the point, as they gatekeep those that can't afford it.

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