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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1745 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

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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.

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.

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