  The existence of gender differences in the structure and composition of
social networks is a well established finding in the social and behavioral
sciences, but researchers continue to debate whether structural, dispositional,
or life course factors are the primary driver of these differences. In this
paper we extend work on gender differences in social networks to patterns of
interaction, propinquity, and connectivity captured via a social sensing
platform comprised of an ensemble of individuals' phone calls, text messaging,
face-to-face interactions, and traces of their mobility activities. We attempt
to isolate dispositional from other factors by focusing on a relatively
homogeneous population on a relatively closed setting at the same stage in the
life course. Analysis across three different networks along with mobility data
reveals systematic gender differences in terms of communicative,
distributional, mobility, and spatial proximity tendencies. Most importantly,
some patterns observed in the communication network (e.g. stronger same-gender
preference for women) are found to be reversed in the spatial proximity
context, with men displaying a greater tendency to spend time in a narrower
(and thus more predictable) range of spaces with same-gender peers than women.
These findings provide robust and novel evidence for the powerful effect of
gender in structuring behavior across a wide range of communication and
mobility behaviors, validating and extending recent work pointing to
differences of socio-cultural and evolutionary origin in the styles of
sociability and interaction characteristic of men and women.
