Abstract
The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of settings, the majority of studies focus on a single data stream in isolation. Here we use a dataset of high resolution data collected using mobile phones, as well as detailed questionnaires, to study gender differences in a large cohort. We consider mobility behavior and individual personality traits among a group of more than 800 university students. We also investigate interactions among them expressed via person-to-person contacts, interactions on online social networks, and telecommunication. Thus, we are able to study the differences between male and female behavior captured through a multitude of channels for a single cohort. We find that while the two genders are similar in a number of aspects, there are robust deviations that include multiple facets of social interactions, suggesting the existence of inherent behavioral differences. Finally, we quantify how aspects of an individual’s characteristics and social behavior reveals their gender by posing it as a classification problem. We ask: How well can we distinguish between male and female study participants based on behavior alone? Which behavioral features are most predictive?
Highlights
For many decades, gender differentiation has been studied as an interdisciplinary topic and within a variety of fields including psychology, social science, anthropology, history, and biology
Each histogram represents the distribution of the difference in means normalized by the pooled standard deviation, and the mean in a subsample of females is subtracted from the mean in a subsample of males (for details on the effect size, see Eq (1))
We find that that a tendency towards gender homophily in the social networks is the most important behavioral feature; this is true for all three types of interactions that we consider
Summary
Gender differentiation has been studied as an interdisciplinary topic and within a variety of fields including psychology, social science, anthropology, history, and biology. How to interpret the observed deviation between women and men is subject to debate among scholars It is, universally accepted that behavioral differences are rooted in the different biological roles, and are reinforced by a society’s values and cultural beliefs. Previous research has shown that gender-specific inequalities might originate from biological predispositions (e.g. hormones [1], brain structure [2]), as well as the organization of the hunter-gatherer societies in which humans initially evolved [3].
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