Do Gender Differences Matter?

Do Gender Differences Matter in Amazing Race Road Blocks? by Roxanne McDonald

Do gender differences help or hinder or matter at all for Amazing Race challenges?

The Road Block, appearing on every leg of the tour, requires one of the two teammates to perform a skill-specific task—eating a massive plate of tough and chewy meat; building; doing a verbal clue puzzle; selling flowers or fish or something; seeking and finding flags; or finding one’s way through a maze in the dark, for example.

The way the road block question is phrased and the way the teams decide who will do the task is what I find interesting, especially since so much has been studied about male and female abilities, which differ according to skills required for certain tasks, and since teams on The Amazing Race are a mix of two females, two males, or a male and a female—making for the question of an imbalance or balance of skills.

Hypotheses maintain that men are better at spatial tests and most often strength tasks, while women are better at verbal tasks or those which require detail. So when a Road Block asks who is better at detail, for example, Joyce and Mary told teammates Uchenna and David they would do better.

Then, there are wayfinding approaches that are based on what Sigrid Schitz and others determine as route knowledge and configurational knowledge—route

knowledge including “important landmarks in the environment, the routes connecting them and the order of route turns (relational directions such as right, left, straight ahead)” and configurational knowledge including having a “more global representation of the environment according to an Euclidean reference system, cardinal directions and metric distances serv[ing] as coordinates to map spatial relationships among distinctive locations within a network of routes.”
In male/female teams, you usually see the man driving—or the woman driving and the man bitching about it the whole while. But in teams composed of two females, you might see some additional struggle. Watch how Carla and Myrna, who do well on several tasks requiring adventure, detail-orientation, or even eating, but flounder madly when having to navigate a map and drive to a distant location.

There has yet to be a female/female team to win “The Amazing Race,” the winners thus far as follows: in season 1, Rob and Brennan (two males); season 2, Chris and Alex (two males); season 3, Flo and Zach (female and male); season 4, Reichen and Chip (two males); season 5, Chip and Kim (male and female); season 6, Kendra and Freddy (female and male); season 7, Uchenna and Joyce (male and female); season 9, B.J. and Tyler (male/male); and in season 10, Tyler and James (males).

Sigrid Schitz’s study investigating gender differences in preferred strategies on wayfinding and the acquisition of environmental knowledge found in mapping tasks, females outperform males in the recall of more landmarks in route descriptions, while males outperform females in route learning from a novel map. In configuring, females have a better inert-building distance accuracy, while males have better positioning/arranging skills.

In a John Stossel Report (years ago), females could be led into a room, left for five minutes, then led out while all the items are stripped from the room, then led back in where they could recount almost every item and its placement almost every time—while males could remember maybe one or two items. In the same report, women and men were blindfolded, spun around, walked through a maze, and then asked to find their way out—which men did with better timing and more ease than women did.
Yet in another study by the Psychology Department at Loyola University in New Orleans, tests of multitasking abilities with mazes and word searches (spatial and verbal) and another simultaneously performed task: “verbal and spatial abilities were measured by completion of mazes and word searches while listening for a keyword in a story.” The results showed how there “was no difference in the ability of either males or females to complete tasks simultaneously.”

So when it comes to specific skills of multitasking, detail determining, or wayfinding, will Charla and Myrna or the beauty queens be any better off than Bill and Joe or Oswald and Danny? Will male/female teams fare better—as Rob and Amber have thus far, three times in a row, done? Will a maze-managing Road Block be any more impacting than a flag-finding and placement Road Block? Does it matter?
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