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on the dresser right in front of me. Meanwhile, I laugh at her tendency to turn a map upside down if it’s not facing the “right” way. “Mindy, turning the map doesn’t actually rearrange the symbols on it in any way,” I will say, rolling my eyes, while she ignores me and silently ponders what a divorce settlement would look like now that we live in a community-property state. But many, many other people are map-turner-upside-downers just like she is. In 1998, John and Ashley Sims invented an upside-down map that would make southward travel easier for non–mental rotators like Mindy. A series of male map executives turned the idea down before a woman heard about it, immediately saw the appeal, and signed on. Three hundred thousand upside-down maps have since been sold.* I wonder if the same factors account for the sudden omnipresence of GPS navigation in cars and smart phones: finally, ladies, a map that will turn itself upside down automatically while you turn! I tend to switch our GPS to the other map view—you know, the one where north actually stays north while you drive—which annoys my wife when she next hops into the car. It’s the cartographic equivalent of leaving the toilet seat up.

The biological gap “is not huge, but it’s there,” Liben confirms. “It’s maybe the only remaining cognitive difference between boys and girls.” But she cautions that any number of societal factors could be causing those small differences to snowball. “We know that boy babies are tossed around more than girl babies. Boys are allowed to ride their bicycles farther than girls are—we know they explore more. These are the kinds of things that are going to increase your environmental knowledge, the chance that you can look at a map and figure out how to get somewhere.” These little environmental nudges can last all through life. Liben points out that even in an age when two working spouses are often equal partners in cooking, shopping, and housekeeping, the family car is the last bastion of 1950s gender roles: men nearly always drive. This isn’t true in our car—when we go someplace together, Mindy often ends up behind the wheel. Of course, that’s only because she’d rather be the driver than the one stuck with reading the map, so I haven’t exactly disproved Liben’s point.

For her part, Mary Lee Elden thinks the aptitude gap is small enough that it can be closed with outreach. “It’s a matter of interest level,” she says. “How can we get more girls interested?” She points to the campaign, twenty years ago, to attract women to medicine. “Fifty-one percent of medical school students are now women. The big push was ‘Girls, you can do it.’ Well, I think the same thing for geography. We just need to tell the girls they can win it too.”

The ten finalists, now all dressed in matching blue shirts with a National Geographic Bee logo, are seated in two tiers at the left side of the auditorium stage, which has been decorated for the occasion with a dramatically lit map of the seven continents set against a grid of blue translucent squares reminiscent of the Jeopardy! set. Out strides Alex Trebek to complete the game-show illusion. “These ten finalists,” says the forty-year quiz veteran, “are about to dazzle everyone with their knowledge of the Earth and everything on it and in it.” Besides the $25,000 giant check, this year’s champion will also win a cruise—not the fun, frivolous Wheel of Fortune kind of cruise, of course, but a soberly educational filmstrip of a cruise: a visit to the Galápagos Islands with Alex Trebek himself aboard! But National Geographic has judged its target demographic correctly: the ten finalists bounce excitedly in their seats at this announcement.

After the first round, Alex takes a minute to chat with each of the contestants in turn. The mini-interviews on Jeopardy! are so cringe-inducing that many viewers TiVo right through them, but these ten kids are charming and genuine. Alex, a father of two himself, seems perfectly at ease and much warmer than usual as he chats with them. There are some signs of nerves—Vansh Jain’s little