Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [66]
“Your son seems pretty calm,” I tell Aileen. “We say he’s a cucumber!” she agrees, presumably in the “cool-as-a” sense, unless this is some Singaporean vegetable metaphor of which I’m unaware.
“Are you all nervous about the finals?” I ask Aileen.
She shakes her head. “He says, ‘Mom, I don’t have to be a winner. Winning is a blessing.’ “
As I make my way to my seat, I’m stopped by another proud finalist parent, Lorena Golimlim, whose son Kenji was the four-foot-nothing basketball player I’d watched the night before. “Kenji! Can you recite the first two hundred digits of pi for Ken?” He does, with relish.
Apart from Nicholas Farnsworth of Arizona and Kennen Sparks of Utah, all today’s finalists are Asian American, mostly of South Asian descent. This isn’t unexpected; Indian American culture so values this kind of educational success that a nonprofit called the North South Foundation has organized an elaborate farm system for Indian bee nerds, holding mock spelling bees, geography bees, and math Olympiads through its seventy-odd chapters nationwide. A more troublesome demographic challenge for National Geographic is the fact that all ten finalists—and fifty-three of the fifty-five national contestants this year—are boys. Only Alaska and Wyoming, the two least populous states in the last census, are represented by girls.
At the picnic, I asked Wyoming’s Kirsi Anselmi-Stith about the disparity, which she chalked up to the social pressures of her age. She shrugged. “The girls are in makeup by now,” she said. “It’s not cool to be a geographer.”
“Is it hard being one of the only girls?”
She grinned. “No, it’s more entertaining. When we walk in the room, everyone gets quiet.” An athletic seventh grader with long blond hair, Kirsi certainly seemed to be getting her share of attention at the picnic. All night she was orbited by five or six boys a head shorter than her, a nervous jumble of orthodontia and Adam’s apples.
The “map gap” between men and women is, of course, a staple of gender debate in our culture, the focus of countless unfunny stand-up routines and syndicated columns about men who refuse to ask for directions or women who can’t find the right highway on the road atlas.* But in recent years the issue has moved from the Ray Romano/Erma Bombeck sphere into the laboratories of cognitive psychology, with real scrutiny being given to the question of whether (and why) women and men navigate and read maps differently.
In 1995, after boys had won six of the first seven geography bees, National Geographic commissioned two Penn State professors, Lynn Liben and Roger Downs, to study the reasons girls were under-performing. They hoped to find the usual anodyne reasons for a performance gap of this kind: that boys were more competitive or girls more anxious or the questions somehow biased. Instead, the results were a little more troubling.
“Boys as a group do have a little more knowledge about geography than girls as a group,” admits Liben. She hastens to add that a field of fifty-three boys and just two girls does not mean that boys are twenty-six times better than girls—just that “very tiny” differences tend to get magnified by the bee format of slicing off the top finisher at each of several tiers.
My immediate assumption is that the root of the achievement gap is spatial ability. Tests on gender and navigation have found that women tend to navigate via landmarks (“I turn left when I get to the gas station”) whereas men use dead reckoning (“I still need to be north and maybe a little west of here”), which ties in nicely with the evolutionary perspective: early men went out on hunting expeditions in all directions and always needed to be good at finding their way back to the cave, developing their “kinesic memory,” while women foraged for edibles closer to home, developing “object location memory.” Simply put, men got better at finding places, while women got better at finding things. Fast forward twenty thousand years, and I exasperate my wife by not being able to see my car keys even when they’re sitting