  Gender differences is a phenomenon around the world actively researched by
social scientists. Traditionally, the data used to support such studies is
manually obtained, often through surveys with volunteers. However, due to their
inherent high costs because of manual steps, such traditional methods do not
quickly scale to large-size studies. We here investigate a particular aspect of
gender differences: preferences for venues. To that end we explore the use of
check-in data collected from Foursquare to estimate cultural gender preferences
for venues in the physical world. For that, we first demonstrate that by
analyzing the check-in data in various regions of the world we can find
significant differences in preferences for specific venues between gender
groups. Some of these significant differences reflect well-known cultural
patterns. Moreover, we also gathered evidence that our methodology offers
useful information about gender preference for venues in a given region in the
real world. This suggests that gender and venue preferences observed may not be
independent. Our results suggests that our proposed methodology could be a
promising tool to support studies on gender preferences for venues at different
spatial granularities around the world, being faster and cheaper than
traditional methods, besides quickly capturing changes in the real world.
